Re: mail-to-news fun

[Andy Dustman <andy@CCMSD.chem.uga.edu>]

On Wed, 5 Feb 1997 stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:

> Alt.anonymous.messages is an interesting alternative, but one of the 
> ideals of posting news from a remailer is to allow people to 
> broadcast politically incorrect speech anonymously, avoiding censorship
> and retribution as much as possible.  This means letting people
> call Lee Kwan Yew a fascist, complain that OJ's a space alien,
> identify the person Hillary paid to off Vince Foster,
> or proclaim that Hubbard's Ahmaddiyya Witnesses are the One True 
> Religion -- Or post the One Page RSA+RC4 to the China newsgroups.

Hey, I agree. I allowed unlimited USENET posting from dustbin back in
October. I almost had to shut the whole remailer down and the only reason
I didn't was that I was able to hide it as a middleman. That's partly
because dickwads were (for example) posting spams about Tim May on
cypherpunks, and some people were complaining to my ISP.

> On several other hands, though, even if you limit news posting,
> trolls can abuse a remailer by sending email to large mailing lists.
> It'd certainly never happen to Cypherpunks :-), but some other
> mailing lists might attract trolls, and it's not easy to
> identify them in advance (though I suppose adding a disclaimer
> and cutmarks any time you post to something other than a 
> known remailer is a partial solution.)

I'm working (slowly, as I have time) on some new remailer software which
blocks by default and notifies the recipient that he can claim his
anonymous mail as soon as he "signs" the usage agreement (magic cookie
exchange).

--
Andy Dustman / Computational Center for Molecular Structure and Design / UGA
You can have my PGP public key by sending mail with subject "send file key".
You can have my PGP secret key when you pry it out of my cold, dead neurons.
http://charon.chem.uga.edu/~andy    mailto:andy@CCMSD.chem.uga.edu    <}+++<