At 2:24 PM -0500 4/28/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
>Reading the IMC gag order, Henson, the latest anonymous poster stuff, and
>Tim et. al. beating my head in pavement....
>
>Since many forums don't allow for 'nymity, (or people just don't), what
>about a protected/offshore self-destruct quicktopic-like service:
>http://www.quicktopic.com/7/H/Kf6X7D9whDPx
>
>I use a quicktopic link in hyperlinked forums and email lists to avoid snoop
>bots, archival, and to disassociate the conversation to someplace that
>allows people to slip into a nym jacket. (I even have "Aimee's Fightin'
>Rooster Pit" for flame warrin' lawyers.)
>
>I'm sure this is a stunningly stupid idea... but it would seem to put people
>in (more) control of their content, instead of depending on the web site or
>service to adopt a solution for them.
You're conflating many diverse issues, and, yes, picking a "weak"
approach as a cure-all. (Note that I didn't even choose to heed your
"Kick me!" sign by agreeing with you that it is a "stunningly stupid
idea." It's not stunningly stupid to use Hotmail, MyDeja (before it
went away), etc. Many on this list have been doing so for years.)
The conflation comes as follows:
* Keith Henson chose to post under his own name, to appear in person
at COS offices and recruiting centers, to picket, and so on. He was
not trying to be anonymous or pseudonymous, so your proposal above
would be pointless in his case. Likewise, I choose to post under my
own name for most of my posts.
(And, BTW, as you are new, Keith was on our list for a while. I've
known Keith since 1976, and he's in the same Bay Area circles that
overlap so often.)
* Lots of ways exist to disassociate articles and comments from True
Names. Remailers, nym servers, Hotmail, MyDeja, throwaway accounts,
Web-to-mail, etc. Not having looked at the "quicktopic" thing you
recommend, I can't say whether it's better or worse than most of
these other methods.
* Many posters on Cypherpunks are already using such methods...or did
you think "Lucky Green" and "Eric Cordian" are government-sanctioned
meatspace names?
* Interestingly, most of the recent publicity over courts being asked
to force names to be revealed has involved services like Silicon
Investor, Raging Bull, and Yahoo fora, which DO support pseudonyms.
In some cases the services have refused to reveal the true names
associated with nyms on their boards.
None of the non-cryptographic methods are very resistant to legal,
technical, sniffing, and black bag attacks. And only multiply-chained
encrypted-at-each-stage messages, a la remailers, are adequate for
high-value messages.
If you plan to stay on this list, I think it's long past time that
you spend several hours reviewing past developments in these areas.
(You see, the "quick review" process is much better than the method
you suggested re: economics, that people read the main textbooks.
People don't need to spend several months wading through cryptography
textbooks to come up to a level that is sufficient to understand the
real issues.)
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
