Subject: Re: Sending messages anonymously 
Distribution: world
Organization: Extropy Institute
Reply-To: whitaker@eternity.demon.co.uk
X-Mailer: Simple NEWS 1.90 (ka9q DIS 1.18)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 00:19:27 +0000


In article <1992Dec30.174738.10305@dartvax.dartmouth.edu> Virginia.A.Reed@dartmouth.edu writes:

>I seem to remember that there is a mail address which will bounce any
>messages you send it to wherever you want, and will make them
>anonymous. Could anyone tell me what this address is?
>

I just found this on another list...


              The anon.penet.fi Anonymous Server
              ==================================

Yes, another anonymous server. Why?  Well, several well-known servers have
bitten the dust recently. And most of them have served only a very limited
subset of newsgroups, and mail only to "registered", anonymous users. One
quite successful attempt at solving this problem was the server running at
godiva.nectar.cs.cmu.edu, written and operated by Karl Kleinpaste
<Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu>. Karl's software has been posted to alt.sources.

Due to reasons too complicated to mention here I wanted to set up an
anonymous server for the scandinavian user community. I contacted Karl, and
got a pre-release copy of his software. As the version I got relied heavily
on the advanced features of MMDFII, I had to modify it quite a bit. While
hacking around, I removed the restriction of only supporting selected
newsgroups. Within a week of startup, the server had been discovered by
transatlantic users, and more recent stats show european users are definitely
a minority.

So what does the anon server really do? Well, it provides a front for
sending mail messages and posting news items anonymously. As you send your
very first message to the server, it automatically allocates you an id of
the form anNNN, and sends you a message containing the allocated id. This id
is used in all your subsequent anon posts/mails. Any mail messages sent to
your-id@anon.penet.fi gets redirected to your original, real address. Any
reply is of course anonymized in the same way, so the server provides a
double-blind. You will not know the true identity of any user, unless she
chooses to reveal her identity explicitly.

In the anonymization process all headers indicating the true originator are
removed, and an attempt is made to remove any automatically-included
signatures, by looking for a line starting with two dashes (--), and zapping
everything from there on. But if your signature starts with anything else,
it's your own responsibility to remove it from your messages.

There are two basic ways to use the system. The easiest way is by sending a
message to recipient@anon.penet.fi:

	To: alt.sex.bestiality@anon.penet.fi

	To: an9999@anon.penet.fi

	To: help@anon.penet.fi

Of course, in the case of mailing to a known user, you have to use addresses of
the form user%host.domain@anon.penet.fi, or the pretty obscure source addressing
construct of @anon.penet.fi:user@host.domain. These constructs are not
necessarily handled properly by all mail systems, so I strongly recommend the
"X-Anon-To:" approach in these cases. This works by you sending a message to
"anon@anon.penet.fi", including a X-Anon-To: header line containing the desired
recipient. But this really has to be a field in the message header, before the
first empty line in the message. So:

	To: anon@anon.penet.fi
	X-Anon-To: alt.sex.needlework,rec.masturbation

	To: anon@anon.penet.fi
	X-Anon-To: jack@host.bar.edu

Valid recipients in both cases are fully qualified user addresses in RFC-822
format (user@host.domain), anon user id's (anNNN), newsgroup names
(alt.sex.paperclips) or one of the "special" user names of ping, nick, help,
admin and stat.

Sending to "ping" causes a short reply to be sent confirming (and
allocating, if needed) your anon id. "nick" takes the contents of the
Subject: header and installs it as your nickname. If you have a nickname, it
appears in the From: header in the anonymized message along with your anon
id. "help" returns this text, and stat gives some statistics about the
system. Mail to "anon" goes directly to me unanonymized, and can be used to
report problems. If you want to send mail to me anonymously, you can use
"an0".

When crossposting to several newsgroups, you can list several newsgroups
separated by commas (no whitespace) as recipients, but this only works using
the X-Anon-To: header. References: headers do work, so they can (and should)
be used to maintain reply threads.

Ah yes, please remember that the posting takes place at my local site, so you
can only post to groups that are received at penet.fi. I get all "worldwide"
groups, but various exotic local groups don't make it here. I have gotten
a couple of comments about permitting anonymous postings to technical groups.
I can only answer that I believe very firmly that it's not for me to dictate
how other people ought to behave. Somebody might have a valid reason for
posting anonymously to a group I might consider "technical". But remember
anonymous postings are a privilege, and use them accordingly. I believe adult
human beings can behave responsibly. Please don't let me down.

As the server was originally intended to be used by scandinavians, it
includes support for various languages. The system makes an educated guess
about your local language based on your top level domain. But it can
misfire. Fortunately the server doesn't (yet) support urdu, swahili or
basque... Ah, by the way, if you find it doesn't support your local
language, and you want to volunteer to translate the message files, get in
touch...

The user-id database is based on RFC822-ized forms of your originating
address. This may cause problems for some users, either because their site
is not properly registered in the name servers, resulting in
non-deterministic addresses, or because their mail router doesn't hide the
identity of individual workstations, resulting in different originating
addresses depending on which workstation you mail from. Talk to your
administrator. If that doesn't help, let me know, and I will make a manual
re-mapping.

You might wonder about the sense of using a server out somewhere, as the
song goes, "so close to Russia, so far from Japan". Well, the polar bears
don't mind, and the ice on the cables don't bother too much :-)
Well, in fact, as we live in a wonderfully networked world, the major delay
is not going over the atlantic, but my local connection to the Finnish EUnet
backbone, fuug.fi. Once you reach a well, connected host, such as
uunet.uu.net, there's a direct SMTP connection to fuug.fi. My connection to
fuug.fi is currently a polled connection over ISDN, soon to be upgraded to
on-demand-SMTP/NNTP. But for now, expect a turn-around delay of 2-4 hours for
trans-atlantic traffic.

Oh yes, then there's the question of confidentiality/security. The service
runs on one of the 386 boxes in my back room at home, and the machine is not
directly accessible from the internet. So the only one who can get to the
database is myself. Well, if the police or the local Secret Service comes
knocking at my door, with a court order to hand over the database, I might
comply. But then I might, of course, accidentally delete the file instead of
copying it... And maybe possibly there could be cases where, if somebody could
come up with really hard evidence of activities such as blackmail, I could be
persuaded...

Anyway, short of having everyone run a public-key cryptosystem such as PGP,
there is no way to protect users from malicious administrators. You have to
trust my personal integrity. Worse, you have to trust the administrators on
every mail routing machine on the way, as the message only becomes anonymous
once it reaches my machine. Malicious sysadmins and/or crackers could spy on
SMTP mail channels, sendmail queues and mail logs. But as there are more
than 350 messages being anonymized every day, you have to be pretty perverted
to scan everything...

Another thing is mail failures. I've had cases of mail routers doing the wrong
thing with % addresses, "shortcutting" the path to the destination site.
This could cause your mail to go to the final destination without ever
touching my server (and thus without getting anonymized). This can be avoided
by using the X-Anon-To: method.

And if your return address bounces for some reason (nameservers down,
temporary configuration failures etc.), the original sender and/or
postmasters on the way might get error messages showing your true
identity, and maybe even the full message.

And crackers are just too clever. Undoubtedly somebody is going to come
up with some novel method....  Not much I can do about that...

If you intend to mail/post something that might cost you your job or
marriage or inheritance, _please_ send a test message first. The software
has been pretty well tested, but some mailers on the way (and out of my
control) screw things up. And if you happen to find a problem, _please_ for
the sake of all the other users, _let me know asap_.

And _please_ use the appropriate test newsgroups, such as alt.test or
misc.test. Yes, _you_ might get excited by reading 2000 "This is a test.."
messages on alt.sex, but I warn you that most psychologists consider this
rather aberrant...

And remember this is a service that some people (in groups such as
alt.sexual.abuse.recovery) _need_. Please don't do anything stupid that
would force me to close down the service. As I am running my own company,
there is very little political pressure anyone can put on me, but if
somebody starts using the system for criminal activities, the authorities
might be able to order me to shut down the service. I don't particularly
want to find out, however...

If you think these instructions are unclear and confusing, you are right. If
you come up with suggestions for improving this text, please mail me! Remember
English is my third language...

Safe postings!

	Julf

- - - ------------------------------------------------------------------- - - -
Johan Helsingius     Kuusikallionkuja 3 B 25   02210  Espoo  Finland     Yourp
net: julf@penet.fi   bellophone: int. +358 0400 2605  fax: int. +358 013900166




-- 

Russell Earl Whitaker                   whitaker@eternity.demon.co.uk
Communications Editor                       71750.2413@compuserve.com
EXTROPY: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought         AMiX: RWHITAKER
Board member, Extropy Institute (ExI)
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