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Unlike most people, I've been pretty immune to spam.

I've been using email regularly for 8-10 years (since somewhere in high school). I never recieved any spam throughout my undergraduate education (kind of before spam got really big). I haven't stuck with the same email account for more than 3 years, so far. I currently have three accounts that I use regularly.

I posted quite a bit to Usenet for a while as a teenager (enough to get banned from at least 1 ISP). Sometimes, but not always, using the defunct anonymous remailer. Maybe that was just too long ago to be much of a problem. At my last job (first one out of college), despite being on a number of mailing lists (WAP Forum, IETF, etc), I never got 1 piece of spam in over 2 years.

On my email account for graduate school, I've gotten 2 pieces of spam. Both were from the same place, Britney Spears' resturaunt, Nyla.

My personal email account has never recieved any spam. Again, I'm on a few mailing lists (Optics Society of America, ISOC, etc). But, I do find newsletters to be a bit of a nuisance. Now, at my latest job I'm getting regular spam. I have not made this email address public. I began recieving spam within the first two days of my account being active. The first one I recieved was clearly a dictionary attack (the same username at a bunch of different domains).

I must say, the IS/IT guys at my old company must've done some great filtering. They were generally good people, always knowledgeable and helpful, so I'm not too surprised.

My current university must also be doing a decent job, despite them not being very strong in computer science (note: I don't study computer science there).

Oddly, the bogus email account I use to register for things, gets surprisingly little spam. Mostly, it just gets the crap sent to me when I forget to check/uncheck the "I'm a gullible dumbass" box.

>She could have posted using the anonymous server in Norway (wasn't that where it was?)

Finland: anon.penet.fi, closed down in 1996 after COS forced Johan Helsingius (the site admin) to reveal the identity of one of its users. Here's a history of the service.

anon.penet.fi is long gone. Where's the quote from? it's great.

For me, one of the saddest events in internet history, was in 1996 when the church of scientology managed to get anon.penet.fi closed. Back then it was a very popular and widely used (and pretty much the only one) anonymous remailer, with hundreds of thousands of users all over the world.

The events leading to it's closing can be read at :

The Church of Scientology vs. anon.penet.fi

and at the Penetron site itself :

Penetron

The shutdown hit newsgroup posters worst, since especially many *.support.* posters were using the service (for obvious reasons). At the time there weren't really any other semi-anonymous web based email/news providers, and it took a long while until some other similar, much smaller scale, services appeared.

These days, it's hard _not_ to find a way to post/email more or less anonymously, but back then, anon.penet.fi provided an invaluable service, and the stupid courts here in Finland let the scientologists to destroy it all.

Anonymous remailer and mail -> Usenet gateway which I had to use because my University didn't allow non-CS students to post to Usenet directly.

Was shut down in 1996 due to spammers and legal concerns of email privacy in Finland. But while it worked, it was great!

They closed it down in 1996 (was it really that long ago?).

Maybe they should have done this, put the server in a wall and seal it up, then try to find it. If I recall correctly, the anon server was hidden in some vast server room, but laywers (From CoS, among others) were able to shut it down, due to "copyright" infringement in '96.
It's stuff like this that makes me depressed...

I believe that Malaby may be misintepreting John Perry Barlow's Declaration of CyberSpace Independence This declaration rests on the assumption that the Internet was (or could be) designed so that national bounderies would be irrelevant.

Malaby argues that certain steps can be mandated by various courts of law and legislatures that would reimpose traditional sovereignty on the electronic domain. He suggests that sales taxes, for instance, would not present much of a burden for electronic merchants, and recent steps taken by US auction sites to satisfy French concerns regarding Nazi related merchandise, are indicative of how easily the Internet can be renationalized.

Barlow's decalaration appeared in February of 1996 . In late August, 1996, Jaohan Helsingus closed down his anonymous remailing service because a court order (since reversed) compelled him to reveal the names of some of his clients. Incidentally, the case was brought by Scientologists, alleging copyright infringement.

The extension of national sovreignity into cybersapce is technically possible. However, it is also technically possible to design a telecommunications system that uses a combination of encyrption and anonymity to limit national intrusions to a minimum.

At the same time, we must also actively resist and/or circumvent proposals to embed censorship into network hardware and software. (I have seen at least on mention of the possibility of mp3 rejecting routers (The Absolute Sound, Issue 128))

substrate wrote:
A few years ago there was a true anonymous mail service based in (I think) Finland. It was something like penet.fi (its been awhile)

anon.penet.fi, yes. Read the story of its demise.

Key details not found there (unless you poke around some) are that the court case involved anonymous e-mail sent by a critic of the Church of Scientology, a lawsuit brought by Scientologists in Finland against Julf, and the subpoena served on Julf by reluctant Finnish police. Julf had simply hoped this day would never arrive; when it did, somewhat more quickly than he had expected, he was caught off-guard. Since he realized that he did not have the resources to protect the users of the service, he closed it.

which did do the job of servicing users anonymously well. The machine which did the work wasn't even physically connected to the internet except by UUCP connections over a phone line several times a day. Latency was large, but it did provide security.

Julf did a great job with anon.penet.fi, but let's not oversell it. The anon.penet.fi did nothing more spectacular than remail your text with its headers. There were instances of the service being spoofed, accidentally revealing addresses, and being abused by someone with prior (social) knowledge of the real e-mail address associated with an anon.penet.fi address. And in the end, it all boiled down to Julf: did you trust him? He was honorable, but that wasn't guaranteed.

Nevertheless, many thousands used the service mainly because it was the easiest anonymizer to use. And yes, as many security geeks pointed out endlessly, the ease of use made it more vulnerable than other systems.