Re: Economic assumptions

[hfinney@shell.portal.com]

From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)
> I point out this doesn't help if you don't know where the first
> remailer is.  What I was specifically referring to was public
> education.  Were remailers ubiquitous, there would be a chapter on
> them in each of the latest rage of 'how to use the internet' books.
> They could be a well-used service, like archie.  
> 
> In fact, they are not.  There are numerous reasons for this, some of
> which are self-referential (as in, there aren't a lot of remailers
> yet) and some of which are not.  For example, there's no FAQ for
> comp.mail.remailer, because there's no such group.  Why shouldn't
> there be?

There is alt.privacy.anon-server.  BTW, while reading some postings in that
group just now I noticed that yesterday was the first birthday of the jarthur
remailer's key.  Happy Birthday!

Actually, I don't think most people are interested in remailers yet.  Most
people can't even use encryption.  I view encryption as being a first step
towards privacy, with remailers being a second step, protecting the destina-
tion of a message like encryption protects its contents.  Also, without
encryption the protection provided by a remailer is not very great.

OTOH, I could see someone arguing that remailer use, even without
encryption, is an important privacy technology in its own right, as we
have seen with anon.penet.fi.  The privacy provided by that system may
not be defensible against a powerful agency which can tap network
links, or even for hackers who can forge mail, but it is enough for
most people, most of the time.

Eric spoke of transaction costs in using the remailers, but to me the biggest
problem is obvious: there is no system that I know of that allows me to
send or post a message pseudonymously, such that no one person knows the
mapping of my pseudonym to my true name.  I know that a lot of people have
been talking about new systems lately, so maybe I am wrong about this.  Ray's
proposal would allow it, with his virtual encrypted addresses, but that is
not running yet.  I think this is the biggest barrier to using pseudonymous
communications.

Another thing worth noting is that pseudonymity has a terrible reputation on
the net.  Look at the complaint we saw here from Stewart Brand a few days ago.
And unfortunately, it does seem that most anonymous postings are of very low
quality, at least in the groups I read.  Perhaps we need a concerted effort to
make high-quality anonymous/pseudonymous postings in order to improve the
reputation of this technology.  Maybe then the books will start writing about
it.  (The recent newspaper article posted here was as favorable a treat-
ment of the topic that I have seen.)

Hal