Re: Detweiler Remailer filtering

[qwerty@netcom.com (-=Xenon=-)]

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Hal told the oral history of my remailer as...

>I suggest, then, that you run a remailer (it only costs $20 a month on the
>system I use), and publicize the fact that Detweiler can use yours with
>impunity.  Set up a mail-to-news gateway that other remailer operators can
>use so that they don't have to worry about the consequences of abuse.
>It's easy to talk about sacred ideas, but perhaps not so easy to keep an
>unpopular and misunderstood remailing infrastructure in place.  "Xenon"
>also accused us of hypocrisy, started up a remailer, and stopped it in just
>a couple of days faced with these kinds of problems.

However, I experienced *no* abuse of my remailer, I being at the time on
fairly good terms with Mr. Detweiler. (I had a single amusing "abuse" in
which the person told someone in personal anonymous mail that their
continued us of their IP number was a copyright violation and would be
procecuted. Guy just didn't have a sense of humour.)

I did not accuse anyone of hypocrisy. All I said was that a simple quick fix
solution of blocking his known address would ONLY MAKE THINGS WORSE, since
then he would forge mail instead. Besides, fight him and he'll fight back
with renewed energy, I reasoned. I also thought it was sort of funny to see
all the propellor-beenie types yelling at the top of their lungs about some
inappropriate posting in their oh so precious newsgroups, and said that
his posts could be called performance art. I said we needed an *abuse*
filter not a Detweiler filter. This of course got me flamed :-).

I shut down qwerty-remailer, after perhaps a month of operation, due to two
reasons. I felt moderated remailers were necessary (until Usenet is "fixed"
to catch such abuses in some open moderation scheme) and did not have the
*time* to moderate qwerty. The major reason however was the public threats
of other remailer operators sending *their* abusive user's mail through
qwerty-remailer when I refused to block Detweiler's address! That threw me
for a loop. Wow. Nasty situation that was, and an isolated remailer is not
an effective one. I also was not at all effective at trying to gather FULL
information about the existing remailers, and my "Full Discosure Remailer
List" is still incomplete, as well as now outdated.

 -=Xenon=-

P.S. If anyone is interested in a few radical essays on remailer/internet
security from an output larger than the internet, see the Rant Series on
ftp.netcom.com in /pub/qwerty/Writings.
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