From: nobody@soda.berkeley.eduhfinney@shell.portal.com
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 93 20:22:05 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Problems of anonymous posts
Message-ID: <9310180321.AA29436@soda.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From: "Robert J. Woodhead" <trebor@foretune.co.jp>
> Possible low-tech solution: mail-list software where the moderator has
> the ability to screen messages from particular sites and/or accounts.

I think the problem here is the amount of time which would be taken
by the moderator.  If you were going to go this route, you might as
well have a completely moderated list.  This slows down list turnaround
and is a lot of work for somebody.

> Question: how easy is it to use public information (ie: out of the
> phone book), PGP and an anon-remailer to create a "Fake ID"

I'm not sure what you mean here.  Perhaps you are talking about someone
who posts saying, "Hi, this is Bill Gates, I just joined your list, and
here's my PGP key, I'll just be posting through these anonymous remailers
for now.  Oh, and to prove it's really me, my annual salary is such-and-
such, which you can confirm by reading the most recent annual report from
Microsoft."  This wouldn't fool anyone for an instant.

Or, someone posts and says, "My name is Deadbeat, here is my PGP key, and
I'll just be posting through anon remailers," then he does so for months
on end.  This also doesn't "fool" anybody, but does represent an ID which
can get established and become as legitimate as other ID's on the net -
in a sense, a "Fake ID"; this is what we call a digital pseudonym.

Hal Finney