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Re: The utilitiy of IP is at stake here

2003-05-29 15:38:23

on 5/29/2003 3:39 PM Peter Deutsch wrote:

I personally want a next generation system that would *increase* my
privacy, not attempt to make a virtue out of *removing* the few shreds
of annonymity I have left. I would specifically refuse to use such a
system. And yes, I also want it to make unsolicited, bulk email harder
to send to me, but not at the cost of my privacy.

Everybody wants to see caller-ID but nobody wants to send it.

Actually, the use of an identification system doesn't necessarily have to
go directly against privacy or anonymity. It leaves the door open for some
kinds of abuses in that area, but those aren't a whole lot worse.

A ~certificate would validate the identity you are using for that piece of
email. That identity doesn't have to be your name or anything else that
identifies you personally. Hell, use 20 certificates, call yourself Batman
in one group and Wonder Woman in the other, nobody will care. As long as
they all verify -- and as long as I can track you down with a court order
that exposes what I need to know when I have a demonstrable reason to know
it -- nobody should care about the identitiers you choose to use.

The real risk here is that the delegator will know who you really are and
might tell somebody. I don't see much difference between that and the risk
we already have from upstreams being able to sniff and delegate, though.

Besides, if everybody feels that strongly about it, a mail system like the
one I laid out doesn't *require* user identification, only host and domain
identification. If folks want the user part to be optional, that's fine
with me.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/