Re: [freehaven-dev] eternity USENET comparison

[dmolnar <dmolnar@hcs.harvard.edu>]

On 17 Jun 2000, Brian T Sniffen wrote:

> Adam Back <adamb@zeroknowledge.com> writes:
> 
> > - Eternity USENET actually provides pretty aggressive
> > Reader Anonymity: consider how hard it would be to track
> > down which internet users read a given alt newsgroup post.
> 
> I don't need to be able to tell who's reading it to violate reader
> anonymity; I just need to be able to, given two people one of whom is
> a reader, pick the reader substantially more than half the time.  That
> is, I just need to be able to tell if Bob is a reader, given some Bob.

The moral of the story seems to be that we need to break down "reader
anonymity" and "reader" some more. There seem to be several different
notions lurking here. 

Trying to argue about whether Eternity USENET does or does not
provide "reader anonymity" will not be fruitful until we can
enumerate/distinguish these notions. Then we can figure out names which
will not be misleading. The goal is to prevent exchanges like the above
(although it's a useful exchange in that it highlights where our current
definition falls short :).

I'm in the middle of a message trying to do just that, based on your
response and Adam's original message.

BTW, I notice that there's a working discussion on terminology scheduled
in the workshop. I also notice that it's an hour and a half long. I wonder
if that will be long enough...perhaps we should start thinking of ways to
prepare -- for example collecting examples of systems which provide kinds
of anonymity which we want to distinguish?

-dmolnar