Re: Misunderstanding of Remail Headers

At 2:13 AM 12/12/94, L. McCarthy wrote:
>Hal writes:
>> There was also a misperception that my remailer was an official effort
>> endorsed by Portal (again, despite the disclaimers).  Note that it was
>> they who were contacted, not me (yet).  This might suggest that it will
>> not be possible to cleanly separate the remailer operators and service
>> providers when problems like this arise.  Both may end up being hassled
>> (time will tell whether I am).
>
>This is all too familiar to me. Although I still haven't heard the official
>line on the shutdown of Underdog following the Scythe spam, at least some
>people locally (including, crucially, my advisor) received the impression that
>I had forged (and authored !) the offending news articles in spite of the
>disclaimer headers.

Maybe the remailers should put bogus "From:" lines in, to avoid this?  Make
it "From: nobody", or "From: Anonymous", or even something odd like "From:
AnonUser!hfinney@shell.portal.com".  Put in some other lines telling the
actual address of the remailer, as well as a complaints-to: address. Maybe
"Sender: hfinney@shell.portal.com", or "Remailer:hfinney@shell.portal.com".


The "From:" line seems to be confusing people.  The author of the article
quoted from the Globe & Mail appearantly didn't even understand the
disclaimer. The article was worded in such a way to make it seem the
disclaimer was saying that Bob Rae didn't really write the message, as
opposed to saying that Hal Finney didn't really write the message!
Something needs to be done so that even the most internet clueless will
understand that the message _isn't_ from Finney or McCarthy or Joe Random
RemailerOp, which appearantly isn't clear to many people currently.

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jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind) writes:

>quoted from the Globe & Mail appearantly didn't even understand the
>disclaimer. The article was worded in such a way to make it seem the
>disclaimer was saying that Bob Rae didn't really write the message, as
>opposed to saying that Hal Finney didn't really write the message!
>Something needs to be done so that even the most internet clueless will
>understand that the message _isn't_ from Finney or McCarthy or Joe Random
>RemailerOp, which appearantly isn't clear to many people currently.

There was some discussion here last week about remailers which don't let
users put in "From:" lines.  This case shows a good reason not to allow
them.  "Reply-To:" should be used to force a reply to some anonymous return
address if you have one.  So perhaps filtering "From:" is a good idea.

Hal

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