The anon.penet.fi Anonymous Server ================================== Yes, another anonymous server. Why? Well, several well-known servers have bitten the dust recently. And most of them have served only a very limited subset of newsgroups, and mail only to "registered", anonymous users. One quite successful attempt at solving this problem was the server running at godiva.nectar.cs.cmu.edu, written and operated by Karl Kleinpaste <[log in to unmask]>. Karl's software has been posted to alt.sources. Due to reasons too complicated to mention here I wanted to set up an anonymous server for the scandinavian user community. I contacted Karl, and got a pre-release copy of his software. As the version I got relied heavily on the advanced features of MMDFII, I had to modify it quite a bit. While hacking around, I removed the restriction of only supporting selected newsgroups. Within a week of startup, the server had been discovered by transatlantic users, and more recent stats show european users are definitely a minority. So what does the anon server really do? Well, it provides a front for sending mail messages and posting news items anonymously. As you send your very first message to the server, it automatically allocates you an id of the form anNNN, and sends you a message containing the allocated id. This id is used in all your subsequent anon posts/mails. Any mail messages sent to [log in to unmask] gets redirected to your original, real address. Any reply is of course anonymized in the same way, so the server provides a double-blind. You will not know the true identity of any user, unless she chooses to reveal her identity explicitly.