From: tribble@memex.com (E. Dean Tribble)
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 93 00:38:23 PST
To: julf@penet.FI
Subject: anon.penet.fi bites the dust
In-Reply-To: <9303232122.aa19890@penet.penet.FI>
Message-ID: <9303252216.AA03597@memexis.memex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


	 ways to stop something as controversial as an anon service. In this case, a
	 very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality managed to
	 contact exactly the right people to create a situation where it is
	 politically impossible for me to continue running the service.

I would really like to know who the person is or why I can't be told.
Did they put pressure on you to keep it quiet?  Did they hold a gun to
your head?

	 a minuscule minority of anon users. The latest statistics from the service
	 show 18203 registered users, 3500 messages per day on the average, and

This is impressive.

	 In retrospect I realize that I have been guilty to keeping a far too low
	 profile on the network, prefering to deal with the abuse cases privately
...I apologize to the
	 whole net community.

Let me rephrase: You took a long step towards providing true privacy
on the net and it worked so well that people wanted to stop you.
You've shut down, but come out of it with lots of experience with
running such a service, lots of good publicity (and some bad stuff),
lots of new uses to which people put that sort of anonymity to, and
some really good ideas for how to make these systems succeed
politically (the being very visible thing).  Though the outcome isn't
optimal, it sure sounds like an impressive success to me.
Congratulations.

Now I hope you will follow up this experiment with a write-up to
document the things you learned (positive and negative), and your
recommendations on how to do the next one.

dean

PS and if you can't tell us about the politics of the shutdown, I'm
sure there's someone else in the know that can publish it anonymously
so you won't have to :-)