Re: Secrecy: My life as a nym. (Was: nym blown?)

At 05:22 PM 11/13/96 GMT, Adam Back wrote:
...
>Nym sues nym.  I think not.  An alternate view of slander law suits is
>as a way to encourage the use of Nyms.  Certainly the dissenters of
>the unnamed pseudo religious have learnt the value of nyms, remailers
>and so forth.  There are distinct advantages to nyms.
...
They learned the value all right.  Right up to the time that one of the
founding remailers disclosed thier return addresses to save the rest of the
hard drive.  There are definate advantages to TRULY anonymous remailers too.
Ones where the return address is not stored.  For mailing lists and
newsgroups, where you are going to get conformation on your post when its
relayed to you, why do you need the return address anyway?  Someone inside
the group uses a remailer, just post your comments to the list, that person
will most likely see it there.  I assume that these already exist somewhere.

Sean Roach <roach_s@alph.swosu.edu> writes:
> At 05:22 PM 11/13/96 GMT, Adam Back wrote:
> ...
> >Nym sues nym.  I think not.  An alternate view of slander law suits is
> >as a way to encourage the use of Nyms.  Certainly the dissenters of
> >the unnamed pseudo religious have learnt the value of nyms, remailers
> >and so forth.  There are distinct advantages to nyms.
> ...
> They learned the value all right.  Right up to the time that one of the
> founding remailers disclosed thier return addresses to save the rest of the
> hard drive.  There are definate advantages to TRULY anonymous remailers too.
> Ones where the return address is not stored.  

Yep.  Some people even voiced the opinion that it was a good thing
that penet closed down, because now people would have to use better
remailers.  At the time the first address was released from penet
their was discussion of the cypherpunks type I remailers.  The ease of
use isn't there though.  Alpha and newnym remailers are provide
replyable email addresses and are much better than penet, though also
not perfect.

Ease of use seems to be a huge requirement for many people, which is
presumably what lead to penets success.  Programs like private Idaho
mean that there is little excuse for not using real remailers.

> For mailing lists and newsgroups, where you are going to get
> conformation on your post when its relayed to you, why do you need
> the return address anyway?  Someone inside the group uses a
> remailer, just post your comments to the list, that person will most
> likely see it there.  I assume that these already exist somewhere.

People have done this (even with messages encrypted to the recipient
only) eg Pr0duct Cypher <cypherpunks@toad.com>, Henry Hastur
<alt.security.pgp>.  This is also the purpose, I believe, of the
alt.anonymous.messages newsgroup.

A good remailer reference is Galactus:

	http://www.stack.urc.tue.nl/~galactus/remailers/

Adam
--
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