Re: An alternative to remailer shutdowns

[loki@infonex.com (Lance Cottrell)]

Might Rot13 be enough? It would prevent accidental viewing.

        -Lance

At 12:39 PM 5/21/96, Ben Holiday wrote:
>After pondering a bit it seems to me that the "knock knock" remailer
>approach (only send anon-mail if the recipient agrees to receive it) could
>be made feasable pretty easily.
>
>Rather than hold the mail while waiting for a consent to release, you
>could simply encrypt the peice of mail with a symetric algorythm on its
>final hop, and send the encrypted mail to the recipient.
>
>At this point there are 2 options, which I havnt examined closely: The
>first is that you require them to send a request for their "consent-code"
>which can be used to decrypt the mail. Under this arrangment you could
>possibly provide for a user to specify a specific consent code, so that 2
>party's who had previously agreed to communicate could avoid "knocking".
>If you strip the subject, then it would be all but impossible for a person
>to include the consent code in the actual peice of mail.
>
>The second is to simply include the
>consent-code along with the encrypted peice of mail and a legal notice
>stating that decryption of the mail constitutes your consent to receive
>the mail, as well as your agreement to hold the remailer-operator harmless
>should the mail be found to be in some way offensive. Further, the
>recipient would agree to be solely liable for the contents of the mail,
>etc etc.. I leave the actual agreement to the net.lawyers to figure out.
>
>As far as I can tell an agreement of this form would be at least as valid
>as the software licenses ("NOTICE: Opening this envelope constitutes your
>agreement to the terms.. blah blah blah") that are commonly used today.
>Also would seem to be a similar concept to "Opening the case of this
>device void's your warranty" stickers on appliances.
>
>Under this approach persons would receive mail whether they'd consented or
>not (unless they requested to be blocked). But it would be difficult for
>anyone to raise any serious legal issues about something they havnt read,
>and impossible for them to make noise about what they read, after the
>implied consent they gave when decrypting.
>
>Under both approaches it would be wise to have a list of addresses who've
>already consented, which would contain all of the known remailers..
>whether or not an operator chose to have names besides remailers in the
>list would be at his/her discretion.
>
>Ben..

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Lance Cottrell   loki@obscura.com
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"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly
it flips over, pinning you underneath.  At night the ice
weasels come."
                        --Nietzsche
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