WB: alt.whistleblower

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

This is an open letter to L. Detweiler.

You've been hot to trot, eager to go, and ready for action.  What you
have interpreted as silence from others has in some case been work.
As you may recall, we were getting ready to go online two months ago,
with Julf's machine as the server.  Right after that, the penet
controversy started and things were put on the back burner for a
time.

Let me review some of the arguments about the mechanisms of the
alt.whistleblower newsgroup:

1.  We want all postings to be anonymous.
2.  That every posting be anonymous requires software intervention.
3.  The software has to sit on some machine or machines, because it
    cannot easily be put into every posting client.
4.  Someone will own these machines.
5.  Whoever owns them must agree with the political goals of the service
    and be willing to take some heat for it.
6.  This excludes most machines.
7.  Whatever mechanism the servers use to connect with the net must
    also be reasonably proof against pressure.
8.  The link between the newsgroup posting and the anonymity server
    was to be the group moderator's address, which in this case maps
    to a piece of software ratherthan a person.
9.  A further desideratum is that multiple machines be able to perform
    the service, given the  constraints of the deployed base of
    news software, which require (to my knowledge) a single address.
10. In order to have multiple machines be able to map to a single address,
    you need to involve DNS, Domain Name Service.
11. In order to use DNS, you need a primary server and some secondaries and
    someone with access to the primary DNS server to do maintenance.

Now, I'll tell you what I've been doing.  I've put a machine on the
Internet in the last two months.  Never having been a Unix
system-level weenie before, I can say that I've learned a lot the
details of batty software.  This machine, because of the details of
its connectivity, is not suitable as a worldwide server, but it would
be suitable as a server for alt.whistleblower.ba, a Bay Area
distribution version of the same.  I've also gotten up to speed on
DNS, and in fact, am running name service on said machine.  (For all
of you who want to know what this machine is, I'm not telling.  There
are still too many half configured things, like sendmail.  I hate
sendmail.)

I would recommend that if you are interested in newsgroup creation
that you read RFC 1036, which is the format for Usenet news messages.
(RFC's are available from nic.ddn.mil via anon-ftp.)  That plus
knowing that anybody can create an alt group, and you'll be set.  I
hope you have your server system set up correctly before you proceed.

The internet world has been without a whistleblower's newsgroup for
many years; a delay of a few months will not matter much.

Eric