NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/personal/poly/437

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-01 | 7.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!rutgers!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!reed!pdxgate!qiclab!n7kbt!acs2
From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: alt.personals.poly
Subject: Using the alt.personals.poly Anonymous Contact Service
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 1 Jan 93 10:25:02 GMT
Sender: [e-mail] (Anonymous Contact Service)
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Followup-To: alt.personals.poly
Organization: Anonymous Contact Service @ N7KBT
Lines: 154

INTRODUCTION TO THE ALT.PERSONALS.POLY ANONYMOUS POSTING AND CONTACT SERVICE

Last update: September 21, 1992

Alt.personals.poly 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.poly. 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.

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!n7kbt.rain.com!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 e-mail message to            To post to:
** ----------------------------------------------------------
** [e-mail]                All the World

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 "--"), it will be deleted.

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
ap-poly.[1-9999]@n7kbt.rain.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 includes mail sent from
the same person but happened to go through a different path to get to
n7kbt.rain.com. Both aliases will work. This may be a bug or a feature,
depending on your point of view.

You can give yourself a nickname by including a line like:

ACS-Name: My nickname

in the first message (ping, post or reply) you send to the ACS service.
This is intended to make it easier for people who read your messages
to remember who you are.  ACS-Name: must be at the beginning of the
line.  Anything after the ':' and one space will be your nickname.

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.poly just
to find out what your alias would be if you posted a "real" personal.
Send a message to ap-poly.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 n7kbt.rain.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.

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 n7kbt.rain.com, and the system will do the rest.

WHAT IF MY SITE DOESN'T CARRY ALT.PERSONALS.POLY?

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.poly. 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
"ACS ping reply", 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 ap-poly.admin.
Eventually, these capabilities will be automated, once I figure out how
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 may be automated someday.  In almost all cases
however, cancel requests cannot be honored.  Your article will probably
have gotten to hundreds of sites before I ever see your e-mail request.

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

--
To correspond with the ACS administrator, send EMAIL to:
[e-mail]            (non anonymous mail)
[e-mail]            (anonymous mail with no replies)
uunet!n7kbt.rain.com!{ap-poly.admin,ap-poly.0}
--
To use this service, send EMAIL to:
Anonymous posting:        [e-mail]
Anonymous reply:        <user's alias>@n7kbt.rain.com
Test path/get alias:        [e-mail]
ACS administrator:        [e-mail]