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Pure Bollocks Issue 22_002
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H E Y ! W E ' R E H E R E !
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... but you don't know how to get in touch? Well, OK then. But to those of you
that we gave our top secret contact address to contact us, and you haven't
written back... OK, we realize that some of you might have been cautious since
you never heard of us before PB #21, and you might have thought it was a
strange type of joke! But we hope you'll get in contact as soon as you realize
this is not (just) a joke magazine but a pretty seriously decent diskmag (Well,
we hope to be decent anyway!).
OK, you want good news or bad news first? .....
The BAD NEWS
We still haven't got a PO box! Look, if you think that's a bit of an annoying
thing, then so do I, but I don't have enough money for a PO box yet! I probably
will by about mid April though.
[NOTE- WE NOW HAVE A PO BOX! SEE 'READ_ME.TXT' FILE FOR MORE INFO!]
The GOOD NEWS
We might not have a physical PO box, but we do have an electronic one! Yes,
it's that amazing anonymous email server in Finland! If you've got access to an
email account then you can email PURE BOLLOCKS at the address:
an18359@anon.penet.fi
or even
an18359%anon.penet.fi%uunet.uu.net@uk.ac.nsf
(OK, it looks a bit long, but email to Finland is 7p/K from Britain, so
it's cheaper this way!)
If you want to send us files, you can do this through email as well! Just
collect the files into an archive (arc, zip, lzh, or zoo) and use the uuencoder
in this issue to make a .UUE file of the archive. You can then transfer it to
your mail system and send it as the text part of your email message! If you are
sending us a file like that, please remember a few things:
1) Send us advance warning of it! For example, a text file saying "Hi! The
next message from me will be a file containing...."
2) Please send your .UUE mail message, with the filename as the subject
heading. For example:
To: an18359@anon.penet.fi
From: .............
Subject: FALCPLAY.UUE
Text: <uuencoded file...>
This is so we know what are .UUE files and what are not!
3) Please don't send us any files bigger than 720K! In fact, we advise you not
to send big files unless you really have to!
4) Don't send any illegal stuff through this server link! Quite a lot of the
server is shut down thanks to some people sending UUencoded porno GIFFs
through the system, amongst other hi-jinks.
If you haven't sent mail through this server before, it'll generate an
anonymous id for yourself! For more info, here's the text file I got from the
server about the facilities.
------------------------------------------------
German text available from german@anon.penet.fi (deutsch@anon.penet.fi).
Italian text available from italian@anon.penet.fi (italiano@anon.penet.fi).
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.
Due to reasons too complicated to mention here I wanted to set up an anonymous
server for the scandinavian user community. I got hold of a pre-release copy of
one of the server packages. 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 your-
id@anon.penet.fi 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.
In the anonymization process all headers indicating the true originator are
removed, and an attempt is made to remove any automatically-included
signatures, by looking for a line starting with two dashes (--), and zapping
everything from there on. But if your signature starts with anything else, it's
your own responsibility to remove it from your messages.
There are two basic ways to use the system. The easiest way is by sending a
message to recipient@anon.penet.fi:
To: alt.sex.bestiality@anon.penet.fi
To: an9999@anon.penet.fi
To: help@anon.penet.fi
Of course, in the case of mailing to a known user, you have to use addresses of
the form user%host.domain@anon.penet.fi, or the pretty obscure source addressin
g construct of @anon.penet.fi:user@host.domain. These constructs are not
necessarily handled properly by all mail systems, so I strongly recommend the
"X-Anon-To:" approach in these cases. This works by you sending a message to
"anon@anon.penet.fi", including a X-Anon-To: header line containing the desired
recipient. But this really has to be a field in the message header, before the
first empty line in the message. So:
To: anon@anon.penet.fi
X-Anon-To: alt.sex.needlework,rec.masturbation
To: anon@anon.penet.fi
X-Anon-To: jack@host.bar.edu
Valid recipients in both cases are fully qualified user addresses in RFC-822
format (user@host.domain), anon user id's (anNNN), newsgroup names
(alt.sex.paperclips) or one of the "special" user names of ping, nick, help,
admin and stat.
Sending to "ping" causes a short reply to be sent confirming (and allocating,
if needed) your anon id. "nick" takes the contents of the Subject: header and
installs it as your nickname. If you have a nickname, it appears in the From:
header in the anonymized message along with your anon id. "help" returns this
text, and stat gives some statistics about the system. Mail to "admin" goes
directly to me unanonymized, and can be used to report problems. If you want to
send mail to me anonymously, you can use "an0".
When crossposting to several newsgroups, you can list several newsgroups
separated by commas as recipients, but this only works using the X-Anon-To:
header. References: headers do work, so they can (and should) be used to
maintain reply threads.
Ah yes, please remember that the posting takes place at my local site, so you
can only post to groups that are received at penet.fi. I get all "worldwide"
groups, but various exotic local groups don't make it here. I have gotten a
couple of comments about permitting anonymous postings to technical groups. I
can only answer that I believe very firmly that it's not for me to dictate how
other people ought to behave. Somebody might have a valid reason for posting
anonymously to a group I might consider "technical". But remember anonymous
postings are a privilege, and use them accordingly. I believe adult human
beings can behave responsibly. Please don't let me down.
As the server was originally intended to be used by scandinavians, it includes
help files for various languages. This works by using the language in question
as the address. So to get the german help file, send a message to
german@anon.penet.fi (or deutch@anon.penet.fi). Support for new languages is
added every now and then, when I find volunteers to do the translation. Any new
ones?
The user-id database is based on RFC822-ized forms of your originating address.
This may cause problems for some users, either because their site is not
properly registered in the name servers, resulting in non-deterministic
addresses, or because their mail router doesn't hide the identity of individual
workstations, resulting in different originating addresses depending on which
workstation you mail from. Talk to your administrator. If that doesn't help,
let me know, and I will make a manual re-mapping.
You might wonder about the sense of using a server out somewhere, as the song
goes, "so close to Russia, so far from Japan". Well, the polar bears don't
mind, and the ice on the cables don't bother too much :-) Well, in fact, as we
live in a wonderfully networked world, the major delay is not going over the
atlantic, but my local connection to the Finnish EUnet backbone, fuug.fi. Once
you reach a well-connected host, such as uunet.uu.net, there's a direct SMTP
connection to fuug.fi. My connection to fuug.fi is currently a polled
connection over ISDN, soon to be upgraded to on-demand-SMTP/NNTP. But for now,
expect a turn-around delay of 2-4 hours for trans-atlantic traffic.
Oh yes, then there's the question of confidentiality/security. The service runs
on one of the 386 boxes in my back room at home, and the machine is not
directly accessible from the internet. So the only one who can get to the
database is myself. Well, if the police or the local Secret Service comes
knocking at my door, with a court order to hand over the database, I might
comply. But then I might, of course, accidentally delete the file instead of
copying it... And maybe possibly there could be cases where, if somebody could
come up with really hard evidence of activities such as blackmail, I could be
persuaded...
Anyway, short of having everyone run a public-key cryptosystem such as PGP,
there is no way to protect users from malicious administrators. You have to
trust my personal integrity. Worse, you have to trust the administrators on
every mail routing machine on the way, as the message only becomes anonymous
once it reaches my machine. Malicious sysadmins and/or crackers could spy on
SMTP mail channels, sendmail queues and mail logs. But as there are more than
3000 messages being anonymized every day, you have to be pretty perverted to
scan everything...
Another thing is mail failures. I've had cases of mail routers doing the wrong
thing with % addresses, "shortcutting" the path to the destination site. This
could cause your mail to go to the final destination without ever touching my
server (and thus without getting anonymized). This can be avoided by using the
X-Anon-To: method.
And if your return address bounces for some reason (nameservers down, temporary
configuration failures etc.), the original sender and/or postmasters on the way
might get error messages showing your true identity, and maybe even the full
message.
There is at least one known way to discover the anon id of a user. It involves
being able to falsify your real identity, so it is not too easy to use, and it
doesn't reveal the real address lurking behind an anon id, but it can be used
to discover what anon id a certain user is using. To fix this problem, the
server requires that you use a password when you try to mail to a non-anonymous
user.
First you have to set a password by mailing to password@anon.penet.fi, with a
message containing only your password. The password can be any string of upper-
or lowercase characters, numbers and spaces.
Once you have set your password, you must include it in all your messages, in a
"X-Anon-Password:" line. As with the X-Anon-To: line, it can be either a part
of the header or as the first non-empty line of the message text.
So your first message might look like this:
To: password@anon.penet.fi
XYZZY99998blarf
And your subsequent messages might look like something like this:
To: anon@anon.penet.fi
Subject: Test...
X-Anon-To: foo@bar.fie
X-Anon-Password: XYZZY99998blarf
If you find this is too much of a hassle, and don't care too much about the
confidentiality of your anon id, you can set the password to "none", in which
case the server doesn't require you to have a password.
If you suddenly discover that the server requires a password for posting stuff
etc, somebody has managed to use your account and set a password. In that case,
contact admin@anon.penet.fi.
Crackers are just too clever. Undoubtedly somebody is going to come up with
some novel method.... Not much I can do about that...
If you intend to mail/post something that might cost you your job or marriage
or inheritance, _please_ send a test message first. The software has been
pretty well tested, but some mailers on the way (and out of my control) screw
things up. And if you happen to find a problem, _please_ for the sake of all
the other users, _let me know asap_.
And _please_ use the appropriate test newsgroups, such as alt.test or
misc.test. Yes, _you_ might get excited by reading 2000 "This is a test.."
messages on alt.sex, but I warn you that most psychologists consider this
rather aberrant...
And remember this is a service that some people (in groups such as
alt.sexual.abuse.recovery) _need_. Please don't do anything stupid that would
force me to close down the service. As I am running my own company, there is
very little political pressure anyone can put on me, but if somebody starts
using the system for criminal activities, the authorities might be able to
order me to shut down the service. I don't particularly want to find out,
however...
If you think these instructions are unclear and confusing, you are right. If
you come up with suggestions for improving this text, please mail me! Remember
English is my third language... [You're not bad at it though! -EGBSS]
Safe postings!
Julf
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Johan Helsingius Kuusikallionkuja 3 B 25 02210 Espoo Finland Yourp
net: julf@penet.fi bellophone: int. +358 0400 2605 fax: int. +358 013900166
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