Re: [RePol] Bill Stewart kills babies after he molests them. Honest! / Re: Pasting in From:

[Charlie Comsec <comsec@nym.alias.net>]

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TruthMonger <tm@dev.null> wrote:
   
> >  So what's the problem? Has everyone forgotten how to use their
> >delete key?   Does nobody have anything better to do with their time
> > >and resources than to waste them being offended by people who are
> > >trying to offend them?
> >
> > Well TruthMonger (if that is your real name,) I think you are missing the
> > point.  For purposes of the discussion, no one cares about the content of
> > the messages, who or why they are being sent, nor is anyone bothered by
> > anything concerning the message itself.  What's being discussed is scarce
> > resources of remailer operators.
> 
>   I was responding to Bill and Lance's comments in regard to forgery
> victims being set up as targets of retribution. I think references to
> "deplorable content" indicate some measure of judgement in regard to
> defining what is considered 'abuse' of a remailer.

You start to tread on dangerous ground when you concern yourself with the
content (body) of a post.  If, for example, you start to filter on content,
then you're implicitly approving anything that you do allow to pass through.  
That sets a precedent that's hard to contain and exercising editorial control 
over the contents increases the remailer operator's legal liability for 
material posted.

>   However, you are right about the thread basically dealing with the
> reprecussions to the remailer operators and their resources as an end
> result of the particular modes of remailer use. At the risk of actually
> being on-topic in a thread, I should point out that I have always been
> of the opinion that it is up to the individual remailer operators to
> judge what level and types of use they are able to provide as a service
> with their given time and resources.

Agreed.  My main concern is that those policies should be explicitly
disclosed in advance.  If certain keywords are forbidden in the Subject:
line or body of a message, or if it is forbidden to post to certain NGs
or to cross-post to certain combinations of NGs, those restrictions should
be explained in the remailer's help file.

I don't know whether remailers are currently engaging in content-based
filtering or not (none are currently flying the "filter" flag in Raph's
remailer list), but there seems to be a strong suspicion among certain
posters to the alt.privacy.anon-server NG (probably from newbies) that
this is indeed occuring.  The usual scenario is that the person tries to
make a bunch of posts, none of them show up, and it is assumed that they
were blocked by the remailer operator based on their content.  My guess
is that in most cases the person screwed something up, like sending a
message to a mail2news gateway with a malformed or missing Newsgroups: line,
but it's rather rare that the poster is reassured by someone in a position
to know what might have happened.

It would be great if these people were told "we have no restrictions on
content other than the length of the message" or at least, "it has become
necessary to block certain types of posts, but those cases are spelled out
in our help file".

> > Most remailers are operated with donated time and resources.  Problems with
> > the remailer, especially artificially generated ones, are just simply not
> > desired.                              
>      
>   True, but I doubt that the artificially generated attacks on a
> remailer are possible to fully deter, no matter what convolutions
> one puts themselves through in order to stop it.

It's important that such attacks not succeed, lest they encourage even more
such attacks.  They succeed, or course, when they convince the remailer
operator to do what the attacker wishes done.  Often what is required is a
bit of creative damage control.  For example, when an attacker starts making
posts with pasted From: headers in an attempt to get remailer operators to
disable this feature, offering him source blocking instead.

- ---
Finger <comsec@nym.alias.net> for PGP public key (Key ID=19BE8B0D)

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