Article 264 (79 more) in alt.security.pgp: From: hmiller@lucpul.it.luc.edu (Hugh Miller) Subject: PAX - Public Access Unix - Anonymous Posting Service Message-ID: Date: 15 Dec 92 08:39:53 GMT Sender: root@lucpum.it.luc.edu (System PRIVILEGED Account) Organization: Loyola University Chicago Lines: 328 Here's the file you can get by sending an empty message to anon.info@pax.tpa.com.au. PAX - Public Access Unix (Adelaide,South Australia) - Anonymous Posting Host ============================================================================ Last modified: Fri Nov 20 18:55:52 CST 1992 Information about Anonymous & Privacy-Enhanced Posting. ======================================================= PAX is conducting research into the viability of anonymous privacy- enhanced mail as a means of providing practical, secure and confidential electronic mail and news. An experimental server has been setup and you are encouraged to use it. There are many anonymous posting services in existence which provide anonymous electronic mail and posting to specific newsgroups where posting is sometimes harmful to one's health or reputation ! Such services allow you to: - post anonymously to those news groups - reply anonymously to posts by email - converse anonymously with another anonymous user, neither of you knowing your real identities Privacy-enhanced electronic mail refers to the concept of encrypting one's mail prior to sending it off into the ether, presumably to someone at the other end capable of decrypting it. If one uses a so-called "public key" method of encryption, then one can make one's "public" key widely known so that anyone can encrypt mail to you, but only you can decrypt it using your "secret" key. There is much development going on in this area, but one quite popular public-domain implementation is Philip Zimmermann's "Pretty Good Privacy 2.0" which makes use of a number of cryptographic methods including the RSA algorithm in places (See Legal Issues later on). PGP allows you to: - exchange public keys with another individual - encode messages to them that only they can read - receive messages from them that only you can read These tools are all very well for the specific purposes for which they were designed, but unfortunately your anonymous message or post is not actually anonymous until it gets to the machine that host's the service. Anyone in between, including your own administrators, can in theory read your post, even though they won't know to whom it is directed. What is more they can also read replies addressed back to you. This can be highly embarrassing at best, and result in dismissal or disconnection at worst if your thoughts, beliefs or activities are disapproved of by the powers that be, even if they are perfectly legal. PAX's privacy-enhanced anonymous services were conceived in the belief that free speech and privacy are fundamental rights and that it is high time the networks to which we are connected provided such services on a routine basis. Seeing as they don't we have to make a start somewhere. This service provides: - conventional anonymous mailing and posting services via a "normal" alias assigned in the usual fashion - the ability to post to ANY newsgroup that is carried out of PAX (which includes most non-regional groups) - PGP 2.0 based privacy-enhanced mail & posting, including: - ability to register your "public" key with PAX, so that PAX can send encrypted messages to you - local generation of a unique public key which is sent to you, so that you can send encrypted messages to PAX - any encoded messages from you mailed to a user or newsgroup are decrypted at PAX before being passed on in anonymous form - any anonymous replies to your "pgp" alias are encrypted before being mailed to you For example, once you have obtained your PGP 2.0 software (as described later) and got it going, and once you have generated and registered your public key and received PAX's key in response, you will be able to post to any newsgroup without anyone beyond your machine having access to the plaintext of your post. Furthermore, if another user has registered in the same manner, and you know their anonymous alias or are responding to one of their anonymous posts, even though you don't know who they are and haven't exchanged keys to communicate directly, the PAX service will automatically decrypt any encrypted messages from you and re-encrypt them before passing them on to the other person ! How to use it. ============== All transactions are handled by email, and commands are selected by the name of the alias to which you mail, not by the subject or body of the message (which are ignored unless sending or posting a message). The separator between the "anon" and the command is a dot (period,'.') and nothing else will work ! Not '-', not '_', not ":", only a dot. The site to address mail is "pax.tpa.com.au". If this fails for some reason, you may need to address it to the specific host (at present) ie. "flash.pax.tpa.com.au". "Normal" (unencrypted) commands: - To get information (this message): mail anon.info@pax.tpa.com.au - To see what your "normal" alias is, or get one: mail anon.ping@pax.tpa.com.au - To send a reply to another anonymous user: mail anon.###@pax.tpa.com.au NB: - eg. mail anon.36@pax.tpa.com.au - don't be creative ... anon.036 won't work - an attempt is made to strip off signature lines by discarding everything after a line starting with "--" or "__" - To send a post to a newsgroup: mail anon.post.groupname@pax.tpa.com.au NB: - eg. "mail anon.post.talk.abortion" will send a post to "talk.abortion" - only the Subject field from your post is used, the rest of the header is discarded - the newsgroup is selected by the alias; Newsgroup header fields are discarded; hence cross-posting isn't feasible - signatures are stripped as above "PGP" (encryption) commands: - To register your public key with PAX: (ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY) mail anon.key@pax.tpa.com.au NB: - first you have to make install pgp and make a key then send it in a "anon.key" command - the body of the message MUST contain an ascii encoded public key generated by PGP V2.0. You may use your regular public key that you give to other people if you wish. The user ID name must be unlikely to conflict with one PAX already has, so use your full name, or include your email address or something. If you want you can use a unique key just for PAX - it makes no difference. If PAX already has a key of the same user-id it will reject yours. Note that this means that you need different key user-id's on different machines (or mail addresses anyway). # makes new keys & adds to your "keyring" pgp -kg Enter a user ID for your public key: First M. Last of somefirm # extract key in ascii form suitable for a message body pgp -kxa "First M. Last of somefirm" savedfile pubring # send it to PAX mail anon.key@pax.tpa.com.au