Re: Remailer Operator Liability?

>	Now that the CDA decision has been made, I was wondering how this
>would affect the liability status of the various remailer operators? In
>the past several remailers have opted to discontinue service due to
>legal/political pressure. Will this CDA decision help to decrease remailer
>operator liability?

Unlikely. The use of anonymous remailers was given as a reason for why it
was impossible to effectively determine if indecent material was being
distributed to a minor who was using a nym. I think pressure on anonymous
remailers is going to increase as various groups complain that the paw
innocent widdle kiddies are "vulnerable to corruption"(or some bullshit like
that) because their age can be hidden. Read the decision. The CDA _may_ be
declared constitutional if there was an effective and reliable way of
preventing minors from accessing "indecent" material - which anonymous
remailers make harder to do.

On another front, anonymous remailers were brought up in the latest hearing
of the Church of Scientology's court case against Dennis Erlich. Judge Whyte
expressed concern that trade secret status could be destroyed simply by
posting information through an anonymous remailer. Of course, the Church
dearly wants those concerns to be considered valid in law. I expect Whyte to
set a precedent concerning anonymous remailers sometime soon, and it is
unlikely to be a good one.
  Zed(hendersn@zeta.org.au)
"Don't hate the media, become the media" - Jello Biafra
  PGP key on request

Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 15-Jun-96 Re: Remailer Operator
Liabi.. by Zed@zeta.org.au 
> distributed to a minor who was using a nym. I think pressure on anonymous
> remailers is going to increase as various groups complain that the paw
> innocent widdle kiddies are "vulnerable to corruption"(or some bullshit like
> that) because their age can be hidden. Read the decision. The CDA _may_ be

This is true. Yesterday evening I interviewed the director of
enforcement for a TLA here in DC. He expressed his concern about
anonymous remailers and anonymity online. (More on this later.)

The word here in DC is "accountability."

-Declan

Hej!

I've finally got the time to read "Cyphernomicon", and in chapter 5 
(Cryptology) and 17 (The Future) I found this, which I think looks 
interesting, since I'm interested in computational topology.

    5.5.9. Miscellaneous Abstract Ideas
             [...stuff deleted...]
             - links to knot theory

    17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves
             unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled. 
             ("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics
             (work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect
             there are some links between knot theory and crypto.)
 
Has any work been done along those lines?

I did some searches with AltaVista, but I only found Cyphernomicon...

   /Krister

Krister Walfridsson writes:
>     17.10.3. Ciphers are somewhat like knots...the right sequence of moves
>              unties them, the wrong sequence only makes them more tangled. 
>              ("Knot theory" is becoming a hot topic in math and physics
>              (work of Vaughn Jones, string theory, etc.) and I suspect
>              there are some links between knot theory and crypto.)
>  
> Has any work been done along those lines?
> 
> I did some searches with AltaVista, but I only found Cyphernomicon...

I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get,
since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully
solved, and after that things got boring...

Perry

On Sat, 15 Jun 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get,
> since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully
> solved, and after that things got boring...

Well...  I think the theory has become much more interesting after 
the classification, because we know that our problem _can_ be solved,
and our only problem is to do it faster and to get a better understanding
for the subject (there are lots of conjectures which seems simple, but 
whose state is unknown.)
 
I agree that it doesn't look good (since most of our invariants are NP-hard)
but the vassiliev invariants might be used to approximate the other
invariants... (I do not know what has been done in such approximation
theory the last couple of years.)

   /Krister