From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 21:41:08 -0800 (PST)
To: lcs Remailer Administrator <mix-admin@nym.alias.net>
Subject: Re: mail-to-news fun
Message-ID: <199702060541.VAA13772@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 02:18 AM 2/6/97 -0000, you wrote:
>Unfortunately, you don't really have a choice about what kind of
>speech you are supporting if you run a remailer.  Don't fall into the
>trap of saying, "I want to give people complete freedom of anonymous
>speech... EXCEPT...."  As abhorrent as we may find the homophobic
>hatemongers from the "freedom-knights" list, I guarantee a lot of
>politicians would object more strongly to the "Help, I might be gay
>and my parents will kill me" post.  Once you set up a system for
>content-based censorship, don't think you can stay in control of it.

The problem isn't homophobic hatemongers who use their own names or nyms
or no name, or even get my remailer's name associated with that -
I can reply to complaints or file them in the handy bit bucket.
The problem is forgers signing _other_ people's names to their hatemonger
postings, causing the innocent third party to catch all the
flames that the forger was trying to generate. 

Stewart wrote:
>> On the other hand, I don't want to support postings titled
>> "ALL FAGS MUST DIE" with a forged signature and email at the bottom,
>> and I especially don't want to post that from my remailer without
>> indicating that anything posted by a remailer might be forged.
>> That's why I shut down my previous remailer - the forger only
>> posted one forged message; the person whose name got forged
>> got flamed severely by dozens of people who objected to "her" posts.
>> Blocking the gay newsgroups cuts down on that kind of trolling,
>> but also cuts out the "Help, I might be gay and my parents will kill me"
>> traffic that remailers are supposed to help with.

Guess I should have been more clear....

>As for forgery, I do add
>  X-Warning: Sender address is unverified and may not be authentic.
>to every article that goest through my mail2news gateway.

Does anybody read X-Warning: headers?  Not all newsreaders even show
all the headers.  It's a good start, and that's clearly the place
in the system to insert it.

>Additionally, I have a fast source-blocking system set up, so anyone
>in whose name articles are being forged can immediately stop it by
>mailing <srcblk-request@nym.alias.net>.  (This doesn't source-block
>them from the remailers, just the non-anonymizing mail2news gateway.)

That helps, at least if the spammer is doing a lot of it (or if the
spam is from a broken gateway program or whatever.)  But for the
troll that killed my remailer, one message was enough.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)