🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm probably not the only one who has been really surprised at the very
strong reaction in support of anonymous services that the suspension of the
anonymous posting service at anon.penet.fi caused. This proof of support 
(evidenced, among other things, by the fact that I have received more
than 350 personal mail messages since the announcement of the suspension of the
service. Of these, only 6 have been against resuming the service) have vastly
improved my chances of resuming full operation. I really want to thank
everybody who expressed their support for the service, both on news and in
e-mail.  I don't have the words to express how much I appreciate it!

As of now, I have re-enabled anonymous posting service to the local Finnish
sfnet and finet groups. If this leads to finet.sex suddenly being
distributed all over the world, I will swear off computers and set up a
coffe shop on some suitable Greek island...

I will also re-enable the service to those groups that have explicitly voted
to allow anonymous postings (misc.kids and alt.sexual.abuse.recovery come to
mind). If other groups subsequently take an explicit vote to request anonymous
service, I will resume service to those groups as well. I have also
re-enabled anonymous postings to news.admin.policy, as a lot of people
have expressed their unease with discussing in public their reasons for
needing anonymity.

After taking some legal precautions, I could actually re-enable full service
pretty soon. But I would like to take advantage of the current break in the
service to implement the improvements and changes I had planned for
anon.penet.fi Mark II. Among changes I already have in the pipeline is
support for PGP and PEM encrypted messages, digital signatures, and "public"
and "private" anon ID's, as well as a cleaner user interface. I expect the
new, improved service to become operational by mid-April.

Meanwhile, I would like ask *you* for help. I have set up the address
"id...@penet.fi" to receive input, suggestions for improvements, comments
etc., so please let me know what kind of features you would like to see
(both technical and policy-related) in the new server by sending your input
to that address.

I would also suggest that those groups that had started or had been thinking
about doing a vote on the desirability of anonymity for that group continue
with their plans and let me know the results.

A lot of people have contacted me to ask for help in setting up a similar
service, or to inform me of their plans to set up a service. I really
applaud and support these efforts, but I also encourage the anon service
operators to make their policies very clear to their users. One example is
that some potential anon service operators feel the best way to deal with
abusers is to expose them on the net. Personally I feel that the idea of
public stocks belong to the middle ages, and that it provides a very
dangerous way to expose somebody by sending faked abusive messages (and yes,
it is trivially easy to fake the identity of the sender of both e-mail and
netnews articles even without an anon server). There are also different
policies regarding logging messages, the physical security of the server
etc.

A lot of people have also asked me to reveal the exact events and names
that caused the suspension of the service. I don't feel that that would
serve any useful purpose at this point, as things have turned out pretty
favourable and any public flame wars would only mess things up again.
I once again repeat that I'm convinced the individuals involved acted out
of their regard for the best of the net, and didn't realize the special
circumstances that caused their actions to have such an impact.

Again, my sincerest thanks to everybody who expressed their support!

	Julf