Source Code 1992 March/Source_Code_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_March_1992.iso/usenet/altsrcs/1/1584/Intro

Text File | 1990-12-28 | 8.7 KB | 189 lines

Subject: Using the alt.personals Anonymous Contact Service
Newsgroups: alt.personals,alt.sex,alt.sex.bondage,soc.motss,soc.couples,soc.singles
From: [e-mail]
Distribution: na
Followup-To: alt.personals
Organization: Anonymous Contact Service
Reply-To: [e-mail]

INTRODUCTION TO THE ALT.PERSONALS ANONYMOUS POSTING AND CONTACT SERVICE

Alt.personals is a newsgroup for posting personal messages, somewhat
like the personals sections of newspapers and magazines. It is not
moderated. In order to provide anonymity for those who wish
it, an automated anonymous contact service has been provided to allow
anonymous posting to alt.personals. This system consists of an anonymous
posting service and a double-blind e-mail forwarding service, so that
replies to anonymous posts will also be anonymous.

There are essentially no restrictions on what can be posted via the
anonymous posting service, except that I'll cancel any articles that
are criminal in nature (offers to sell or buy drugs or sexual services,
soliciting sex with minors, stolen credit card numbers, etc.) I just
don't feel like getting busted for aiding and abetting this week.

The distribution of anonymous posts will be "na". This may seem absurd,
since it's unlikely that the posters in Alaska will be seeking
respondents in Florida, but there's no way I can provide this service
on a regional basis. Once the software is thoroughly tested, I'll
put it in the public domain, so anyone can start a regional version
of the service.

NOTE: Throughout this article, I provide e-mail addresses in Internet
form - [e-mail]. If your mailer can't handle
this type of address, you can use uucp "bang-path" addresses:
...!uunet!alembic!someone. You'll have to figure out how to get
e-mail to uunet on your own, but it's reachable from most places
in the Solar System. Ask your local e-mail guru.

HOW TO POST AN ARTICLE ANONYMOUSLY

Send an e-mail message to [e-mail]. The Subject: line
of this message will become the Subject: line of the article. A new
header will be created for the article, with From: and Reply-To: lines
of the form "[e-mail]". Nothing in the header of the
article will tell anything about who or where you are. If your message
has a signature in the standard form (beginning with a line containing
"-- \n"), it will be deleted. The FIRST 25 LINES of the body of your
message will become the body of the article. REMEMBER: A MAXIMUM OF
25 LINES PER ARTICLE. Anyone posting articles with lines over
80 characters long will be dealt with severely.

This article will then be posted to alt.personals with a distribution
of "na" (all of North America).

NOTE: The first time you send something to the ACS, be it a posting
or a reply to a posting, you are assigned an alias of the form
acs-[a-zzz]@alembic.ACS.COM. As long as your From: line contains
the same information when it gets here, anything you post or e-mail
will appear to come from this alias. If you send something that has
a different line in From:, you will be assigned a new alias. This
may be a bug or a feature, depending on your point of view.

Suggestions For Anonymous Posting

1) The Subject: line of your article, in addition to giving
some hint about why you posted it, should give information about the
geographic area you're in, or interested in hearing from people from.
(Interesting syntax, there.) This allows people who aren't in that
area to bypass the article without wasting a lot of time.

2) Don't include phone numbers, street addresses, or e-mail addresses
in the body of the article. It sort of defeats the point of anonymous
posting, doesn't it? If your mailer automatically inserts such
information about you anywhere but in a properly formatted signature,
get it fixed.

3) PLEASE don't post anonymous test messages to alt.personals just
to find out what your alias would be if you posted a "real" personal.
Send a message to acs-ping (see below) instead.

These are suggestions. Not guidelines, not rules, not laws. You
can put anything you want in an article. It's your life.

REPLYING TO ANONYMOUS ARTICLES

Just reply to an anonymous article as you would to any other posting
or send e-mail to the alias listed in the From: line of the article.
The message will be e-mailed to the poster's alias at alembic.ACS.COM.
When it gets here, the software will intercept the message, substitute
your e-mail address with an alias, replace the poster's alias with
their real e-mail address, and send it on with a completely rebuilt
header, no signature, and a MAXIMUM OF 25 LINES OF TEXT. 25 LINES,
GOT IT?

At this point, it's possible for any two people whose aliases are
registered in the database here to carry on an e-mail conversation
without ever knowing each other's e-mail address. Just send your
message to the alias at alembic.ACS.COM, and the system will do
the rest.

And for the last time, it can't have more than 25 lines of text,
or it'll get truncated.

WHAT IF MY SITE DOESN'T CARRY ALT.PERSONALS

You can still post your personal article as outlined above and receive
anonymous replies, but you can't read anyone else's postings. I have
no intention of creating a mailing list or a server to provide the
articles to those who don't get alt.personals. If someone else wants
to set up such a system, they're welcome to.

PRIVACY AND SECURITY

I've done what I can to ensure that the identities of the users of
the Anonymous Contact Service will be kept private, but I can't make
any guarantees. I will not divulge the name of anyone using the service
without a court order, but there is always the possibility that someone
will successfully crack my system, or that someone will examine your
article before it gets here. Usenet is not totally private, and you
use this service at your own risk.

One of the things that happens fairly frequently on the net is
bounced e-mail. It could be unpleasant if this happened to a message
destined for the ACS. To make sure that you have a clean mail path,
you can send e-mail to "[e-mail]". This is a mail
echo system. When your message gets here (if it gets here), the system
will grab your return address and send you an e-mail message containing
your alias in the ACS system and the header of your message as it
arrived here. If you don't get a reply with a Subject: line of
"Message RCVD", assume that either your message never got here,
or the reply went astray. In either case, you shouldn't try to use
the anonymous posting service. Try to find another e-mail path that
works first.

ADMINISTRIVIA

If you need to get in touch with a human being about problems with
the ACS system, send e-mail to "[e-mail]". In
particular, if you need to have your alias removed from the database
or your e-mail address has changed, you need to send e-mail to
acs-admin. Eventually, these capabilities will be automated, once I
figure out to do it securely.

If, for some reason, you want to cancel an article you've posted,
the only way to do it (unless you're a superuser) is to send e-mail
to [e-mail] and ask for it to be cancelled. This
is another item that will be automated someday.

There is no way for me to cancel e-mail you've sent to an alias, so
don't even bother asking.

MONEY

The Anonymous Contact Service is free. However, every byte that
gets posted or e-mailed passes through uunet and costs me bucks.
If you feel an insurmountable urge to make a small donation to
help defray those costs, send me a message and I'll give you
my snail mail address. Checks and small unmarked bills only, please.

THE FUTURE

I've been warned by people who should know that this little adventure
in communications may become very popular, and hence very expensive
for me. If that turns out to be true, I'll either have to modify
the system so that only a handful of messages a day are posted/mailed,
or shut the system down entirely. If either option becomes necessary,
I'll try to warn everyone well in advance, so you can make appropriate
plans.

I hope that others on the net will want to start regional versions of
this service. The software that I've written to form this system will
be put in the public domain after it's been operational for a while
to make sure most of the bugs are gone. Ideally, this national service
will ultimately be replaced with a large number of regional services,
and I'll only have to worry about posting to the DC area. If you're
interested in setting up your own ACS, drop me a line.

This informational posting describing the service and how to
use it will be posted to alt.personals, soc.singles, soc.couples, soc.motss,
alt.sex, and alt.sex.bondage every month.

I welcome any suggestions, comments or criticism about this service.

--
Dave Mack
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
uunet!alembic!{csu,acs-a}