Re: Standard Headers for Anonymous Remailers

[cman@IO.COM (Douglas Barnes)]

Stanton:

Actually, I think you're missing Loyd's point here. Basically, we 
really wanted to set up an anonymous remailer here at Illuminati
Online. We encountered opposition from a certain individual on the
grounds that "anonymous posts can destroy civil conversation" and
individuals, groups and lists "should have the right to easily 
filter out posts from anonymous remailers."

Although this is highly debatable (and I myself am opposed to it),
it has nothing to do with inflicting moderation where none 
exists now, and is rather a call for a voluntary standard for
tagging of posts that have been anonymized so that they can be 
filtered out wholesale. (Rather than the retail filtering that
I'm sure goes on already in some quarters.)

The advantage of this is that if a group or list or individual
decides they want nothing to do with anonymous postings in general,
they need not see them. The chief disadvantage in my mind is that
it poisons the infrastructure against the strong pseudonymous 
entities that I think will be key to an underground digital economy.
Other defects will be left as an exercise to the reader. :-)

Doug

> 
> says Loyd Blankenship:
> 
> > 	We've been kicking around the pros and cons of anonymous remailers
> > here at io.com. One of the big problems is anonymous bombardment of a 
> > helpless newsgroup. This (and the problem of auto-screening anonymous
> [...]
> > 	Words such as "anon" and "anonymous" might occur naturally in
> > the headers. I'd propose something like "ANONYPOST" or "ANONPOST" that 
> > isn't likely to occur in nature.
> > 	Voluntary adoption of this type of standard by remailers would
> > take away some of the ammo that the anti-anon frothers are shooting,
> > and would go a long way toward improving the image of remailers in 
> > general.
> > 
> > 	Comments?
> 
> Sorry to respond to such an old post, but I can't let this one slip by.
> Why not encourage people to be responsible for their OWN mail/news?
> Relying on moderators to wipe noses and spank boodies is not going to 
> help anyone in the long run.  FidoNet has had a great deal of difficulty
> with moderators, and there is no need to spread this problem to UseNet.
> 
> The responsibility for you reading or not reading anon posts lies on YOUR
> head.  If you do not like them, then learn to use the filtering
> capabilities of your software.  If you don't have a news reader that will
> do elaborate filters, try strn. 
> 
> At any rate, it is my firm opinion that moderation belongs in academic and
> hard-science conferences, and those that require a very firmly focussed
> range of topics to be of use.  The encouragement of more moderation, and
> more moderator "jobs" like filtering out anonymous postings is a very bad
> idea, and in particular, the inclusion of special headers for this purpose
> will simply suggest to moderators that they filter all such mail by
> default, and not even bother to try to determine relative merits.  It's
> counterproductive to the entire idea of anonymous posting. 
> 
> -- 
> DISCLAIMER: This message represents only my OWN opinion, not that of EFF.
> Stanton McCandlish    Electronic Frontier Foundation Online Activist
> mech@eff.org          NitV-DataCenter BBS SysOp
> Fido: <tba>           IndraNet: 369:111/1
> 

-- 
----------------                                             /\ 
Douglas Barnes            cman@illuminati.io.com            /  \ 
Chief Wizard         (512) 448-8950 (d), 447-7866 (v)      / () \
Illuminati Online          metaverse.io.com 7777          /______\