Re: Many Important Items in the News

I agree. It's time to take mail anonymity into the mainstream. There
are plenty of legitimate reasons for anonymity, as the Caller ID
debate shows.

I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide
policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving
it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could
sell to the Internet as a whole. We shouldn't have to treat this as a
confrontational either-or issue when there's a third way out that
balances everybody's interests.

Phil

Phil Karn writes:
> I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide
> policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving
> it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could
> sell to the Internet as a whole.

You know, what we might to do is figure out a first cut position, and
then set up a mock debate.  Have some members 'role-play' vociforous
opponents of nyms.  That way we might be able to work out in
advance good counter arguments for the nastiest objections any of us can
think of.  I'm sure the /real/ ojectors will come up with stuff we
don't, but at least it would give us a leg up.  I think I'd recommend
setting this up as a formal 'game', with all participants adopting nyms
to keep the argumentation distinct from normal discourse.  Even if it
was done on a separate mailing list.  See, another good use for nyms
<grin>.

-- 
david			david@staff.udc.upenn.edu

>I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide
>policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving
>it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could
>sell to the Internet as a whole. 

It would help if there existed some filter software that automatically
installed itself in a user's .forward and filter out anonymous posts
(and nothing else).  Such a tool should be written in nothing more
than shell scripts and grep, for the absolute widest in portability.
(Not even perl, which, believe it or not, is not yet universally
available.)

Were such a utility posted to alt.sources, and if all a user had to do
was ftp it from an archive, unpack it, and run it once, we would be in
a much better position politically, (even if the utility received very
little use).

It is difficult to install mail filters.  Our argument for user
filtering would be much stronger if installation were simple.

A similar argument holds for anonymous posting filters in a global
KILL file.

Eric