michael kiernan really needs our support now, page-16

Love this - the moderators seem to think that a poster can be taken to court based on one of their posts.

I ask them to test this in reality (in the real world).

Situation:

- A poster signs up for usage of hotcopper at an internet cafe in Siberia.
- The email account used is either an HTML server anywhere in the world, or just a new account created with one of the many freeware email servers being ran on the machine.
-The poster posts what the hell they want. Their IP is logged on Hotcopper's HTML server.
- The poster leaves the internet cafe having left no personal identity whatsoever.

This 'simple' scenario outlines how easy it would be to avoid any sort of detection of identity using hotcopper (if one had the desire to do so). It's easily possible to do all sorts of other things like IP forwarding, remote log in, using other accounts if you really want.

I think this notion of the internet being some sort of big brother moderated "you're being watched" type of scenario is just fanciful, and some of the comments by moderators in this context are really far fetched. I have no problem with ownership of the site, and rules and guidelines, but if you do give reasons to moderate a post, stating that you may be sued, or you can somehow be prosecuted is very misleading. Even if the person's identity is discovered (which I'm sure most hotcopper users' could be given the correct jurisdictions - as they've no real reason to hide it), how would a prosecution case respond to the simple defense of 'I left my computer logged in, I have no idea who could have posted that?".

Anyway, enjoy your freedom of anonymity on the internet, and don't feel like you have go to any lengths to hide it. But if you do, it shouldn't be too hard to do so.

N.