Re: anonymous web pages (Was: SurfWatch)

[Nelson Minar <nelson@santafe.edu>]

cp@proust.suba.com (Alex Strasheim) writes:
>Has anyone ever considered setting up anonymous web sites on top of usenet?

I proposed this a couple of months ago, there should be a bit of
discussion left over in the archives. My idea was to have an account
keyed to a password - if you emailed the server with the right
password, it would take the text of your email and put it in the
specified URL. Then you can use remailers to preserve anonymity with
the server. It's sort of like the alias.c2.org accounts.

It seems like a workable, not-too-difficult idea. Not much interest in
it, though. Sameer pointed out that a full c2.org account, if used
properly, allows anonymous web pages.

>Right now a news administrator isn't held responsible of there's some
>"bad" information in his news spool -- copyright violations, obscenity,
>etc.  If the link between physically hosting a web page and being
>responsible for its contents could somehow be broken, then anonymous web
>pages would be possible.

In trying to shape the policy at various places where I've installed
web servers, I urge them to think of allowing users to post web pages
to be the same as allowing them to send email or post to Usenet.
They're all (potentially) media with lots of exposure and instiutional
identification, so why treat them differently? The argument seems to
work, and users are allowed to have their own web pages.

The problem, of course, is that people do tend to associate the
opinions in web pages to the company that owns the web server more
than they do with Usenet posts or email. Furthermore, WWW is a
permanent medium, where as email and Usenet are commonly perceived to
be transitory (this is changing).

I decided that if I were to set up an anonymous web server, I as
administrator would have to retain absolute control of what is on the
server, just to protect whomever my ISP is. The aim would be to weed
out any and all potentially illegal text: draconian, but probably
necessary to keep the remailer safe. I'd also filter out all CGI and
images over some small (icon) size. These days, I'd prevent Java and
JavaScript, too.


I'm interested in discussing implementation issues in more detail with
someone if they think this would be a fun project. I might yet get to
it myself in the next few months.