Re: Labeling Usenet articles.

[Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com>]

On Mon, 1 Aug 1994, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> How is crypto involved? You want to have everything arrive at your site
> encrypted, and only be able to decrypt the stuff that you are permitted
> by the censor to read? Why bother, why not just only send stuff to your site
> that the censor permits you to read? If you don't want your entire site censored, but just want particular readers at your site to be censored, then the
> sysadmin should just set something up so users are only allowed to read
> what the censor has allowed that user to read. I dont' see how crypto
> comes into it at all.

No, I think he's essentially talking about a 'secure' moderated newsgroup.
That is, the moderator(s) would sign each 'authorised' message with a
special key, and the newsreader would verify that it was signed by a
moderator before allowing you to read it. The current moderation system is
supposed to ignore unmoderated articles, but without crypto it's easy to
get round. 

> I think you are going to have a lot of trouble getting any help with this
> plan from this list. For one thing, it doesn't seem to require crypto
> to implement, and for another, very few people on this list are going to
> be interested in developing a censorship system. 

I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not, but it seems to me that I'd
rather be able to say to people 'Ok, you want to create your own secure
moderated groups safe for kids/fundamentalists/chthulhu-worshippers, or
whatever, here's the software to do so' than have them (try to) make it
compulsory for everyone, everywhere. 

I'd suggest using PGP now that it's legal, rather than creating some new
system. I've got C-source for Unix that will call PGP to verify
signatures, if the original poster wants to hack it into trn or something
- the code was written for 2.3a though, so it may need a few changes for
2.6 (or those who aren't worried about legalities can link it with PGP
Tools instead). It would, of course, have the side effect of helping to
spread PGP further before SKE comes along. 

		Mark