At 4:48 AM -0800 2000/1/9, Amancio Hasty wrote:
> For instance, just because someone has an email name which resembles
> a real name lets say "Brad Knowles" does not necessarily mean that the
> real "Brad Knowles is sending the mail assuming of course that there
> is a Brad Knowles.
I've built up enough history over the years (all the while using
my real name and a real e-mail address, although the address has
changed over the years as I've changed employers, etc...) that you
can go do some AltaVista or Hotbot searches and find enough stuff
that I've written that we can be reasonably sure that this really is
me. I may not be proud of some of the stupid things I've done or
said over the years, but I'll own up to them regardless.
I'd say that the same is probably true of most of the people
posting to the various lists.
> Let me put another way I sure hope we don't assume that any given email
> truly identifies the individual and that the person is legally responsible
> for his email handle.
No more than you can be sure that a particular PGP key belongs to
the person it claims to belong to, or that a person who presents you
with a drivers license that claims to tell you their name or address.
However, in the case of electronic discussions, there is likely
to be enough history available that you can be reasonably sure you're
dealing with the same person who claims to go by the same name, even
if that isn't their real name.
It's hard to make the same kinds of connections with an alias.
Yes, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton published the Federalist
Papers under assumed names, because that was necessary at the time in
order to avoid the potential legal consequences of the British
finding out who the real authors were. However, I sincerely doubt
that any such claim can be made today for posting to one of the
FreeBSD mailing lists.
Claims of "needing" anonymity in cases like this just aren't
likely to be very well received, and the more strident the claimer
becomes in their "need" to remain hidden, the more likely people are
to either try to unmask the jerk or to decide to simply start
ignoring them.
If you want to post in a public place like this, and you want
other people to be able to help you or carry on an intelligent
conversation with you, I would suggest that taking the extremely
anti-social approach of using an alias is one of the worst possible
things you could as a first step.
It won't help stop the spam, and it will just annoy the people
you'd want to be talking to.
--
These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
____________________________________________________________________
|o| Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Belgacom Skynet NV/SA |o|
|o| Systems Architect, News & FTP Admin Rue Col. Bourg, 124 |o|
|o| Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.11.11/12.49 B-1140 Brussels |o|
|o| http://www.skynet.be Belgium |o|
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Unix is like a wigwam -- no Gates, no Windows, and an Apache inside.
Unix is very user-friendly. It's just picky who its friends are.
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