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/