From: Alex Strasheim <cp@proust.suba.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 17:32:45 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: anonymous web pages (Was: SurfWatch)
In-Reply-To: <01I25AB1E1DIAKTUGH@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
Message-ID: <199603100222.UAA03114@proust.suba.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


E. Allen Smith said,

> ... until someone comes up with anonymous-location web pages...

Has anyone ever considered setting up anonymous web sites on top of
usenet?  People could post pages anonymously to usenet, and the web sites
could grab them and put them up automatically.  The pages could expire
just like usenet.  And just as there are many nntp servers that contain
more or less the same informaton, there could be many of these anonweb
servers with essentially the same information.

Right now a news administrator isn't held responsible of there's some
"bad" information in his news spool -- copyright violations, obscenity,
etc.  If the link between physically hosting a web page and being
responsible for its contents could somehow be broken, then anonymous web
pages would be possible.  If an anonweb server was just a robot that 
reads usenet, maybe anonweb operators could slide in under the usenet 
tradition.

The distributed nature of the usenet model would also solve another
problem with anonymous web pages, namely that it costs money to serve
them, and there's no way to tell how popular an anonymous web page will be
until you put it out there.  Individual ISPs would host anonweb servers
for the benefit of their customers (web page readers) rather than the
anonymous publishers.  If someone puts up an anonweb page that gets
100,000 hits a day, an ISP with 2,000 customers will only have to shoulder
a small part of that burden.

--
alex