I want to add to John Gilmore's point about the practical difficulty of controlling anonymous postings and mailings if you are going to allow them at all. Johan is taking a very principled position by promising not to reveal true identities behind the pseudonyms. Instead, he offers to warn abusers, and if problems continue, to block their access to the service. Unfortunately, as more remailer sites develop, this tactic may become ineffective. It will be possible to chain remailers together in different ways, so that the effect is that you can post through Johan's system from many different addresses. With multiple remailers and chaining there is no way for the final remailer in the chain to know when two messages are coming from the same person. This will mean that it will not, in practice, be possible to block access for a given user. We discussed this earlier in the context of anonymous email. I had received a complaint from a young lady about receiving some offensive anonymous mail through my remailer. (This story was resolved surprisingly, BTW: it turned out that it was a joke message sent by a good friend of hers, someone who knew one of the Cypherpunks and who knew about the remailers. So she is no longer upset about the message at all. But I didn't know this at the time.) Realizing that it would not be practical to do source blocking, my suggestion was to implement destination blocking: no mail from my remailer would go to this person. Eric Messick expanded upon this idea recently so that only people who had actually requested anonymous mail would receive it. (A variation would be to first send a note to a person saying, "I have some anonymous mail for you; please reply within 48 hours if you'd like to receive it, otherwise it will be deleted.") Other variations upon this approach could help to keep anonymous remailers politically acceptable. But the idea doesn't generalize well to anonymous posting, except to do as Johan has done and forbid posting to certain newsgroups (sci.*, news.*, I'm not sure what else). This throws out the good postings along with the bad, though. I think the bottom line is that it will be difficult to provide anonymous/pseudonymous postings in a way which won't elicit the kinds of strong objections Johan has been facing. His controls are OK for now, but in the long run I think they won't work. What would happen if Johan just started ignoring the objectors? What if he stopped reading his mail for a while and left the service operating? Would his newsfeed eventually get cut off by Finnish authorities goaded into action by email complaints? Are there ANY sites in the world which would be immune to such pressures? I read that at the Hacker's Conference, the owner of Portal offered to run a remailer. Would he be able to stand up to these pressures? How about John Gilmore's machine? He made a powerful argument recently that he was not subject to various restrictions. Would it be possible to run a remailer there, perhaps based on Johan's code, which simply ignored complaints and allowed anonymous postings to all groups? Hal Finney