dispatches from the front lines of anonymity

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.medford.ma.us>]

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   Date: Tue, 23 Feb 93 18:46:17 -0800
   From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>

   >Eric Hughes suggests an alt.whistleblower with localized anonymizing. I
   >like this, but I don't see how NNTP provides it. Wouldn't every server
   >have to be modified or upgraded to support anonymizing?

   In an already supported sense, yes.  As I understand it, when a
   moderated group is created, an email address for the moderator is
   propagated with it.  So every time a moderated group is created, every
   server already is "modified".

That's how it *should* work, not how it *does* work.  In real life,
moderator addresses are distributed "out of band" to a relatively
small number of "backbone" sites; all the rest of the sites merely
forward the mail to a "backbone" site.

Making a newsgroup moderated in the absence of a moderation address is
an easy way to make it "read-only"; I think the folks who run the fj.*
groups do this instead of sending rmgroups (which are generally
ignored).

					- Bill

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