From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.medford.ma.us>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 93 21:28:49 PST
To: hughes@soda.berkeley.edu
Subject: dispatches from the front lines of anonymity
In-Reply-To: <9302240246.AA03185@soda.berkeley.edu>
Message-ID: <9302240423.AA00434@orchard.medford.ma.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

   Date: Tue, 23 Feb 93 18:46:17 -0800
   From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>

   >Eric Hughes suggests an alt.whistleblower with localized anonymizing. I
   >like this, but I don't see how NNTP provides it. Wouldn't every server
   >have to be modified or upgraded to support anonymizing?

   In an already supported sense, yes.  As I understand it, when a
   moderated group is created, an email address for the moderator is
   propagated with it.  So every time a moderated group is created, every
   server already is "modified".

That's how it *should* work, not how it *does* work.  In real life,
moderator addresses are distributed "out of band" to a relatively
small number of "backbone" sites; all the rest of the sites merely
forward the mail to a "backbone" site.

Making a newsgroup moderated in the absence of a moderation address is
an easy way to make it "read-only"; I think the folks who run the fj.*
groups do this instead of sending rmgroups (which are generally
ignored).

					- Bill

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.1

iQCWAgUBK4r4H69wjZexL7jBAQGBagQBAbrZ42usqd/JhdWqtMNbS6PmXHfSCcA7
5qvi34i/vSe0lKc4t5JFys4S7+4OCkR8URniwOhcDGMXoXMTfeonbqNakselMJn3
m3l0Zz/vmA8ZcY0eS0F27AVwydooIVSdRiI5TFVFOLrnOzSpmyBxYzgzavnG0jRm
T8vecJTtYqXf
=VFG/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----