anonymous zephyr

Right, so welcome to the anonymous zephyr home page

Be aware it's still very rough, and will be for a good long time.
If you feel you have time to make it better, send us email anon-admin@mit.edu

Questions:

What is anon?
"anon" is the name for an anonymous zephyr class.

What's anon's purpose?
Well, a couple of people felt like seeing how other people would react in an anonymous zephyr environment. It's a place for people to discuss things they might feel uncomfordable asking in person.

Are there any rules?
yes and no. there's nothing the admins can do to stop you from saying stuff, anon is not censered in any way. However there are a couple of things the admins don't want to see happen. We don't want to see people people getting hurt. This means no slandering people, and no giving out names. The only exception to this is if the person has made it clear they don't mind being discussed on anon. We'd also rather not see people act incredibly stupid or irratating just because their name's not attached to their zephyr.

And will you be enforcing these rules, how can you?
If people start misusing anon, we will turn it off, either forever or for an unknown length of time. and we'll probably investigate feasible ways of acling the service. We care a lot about hurting people and naming names, please don't do it. We care a great deal less about being obnoxious, but there are better places to act immaturely.

We don't read your zephyrs and approve them, but between us we do read about everything that goes accross the class, and have no qualms about shutting down the service. we also rely on user complaints/reports as to what's going on.

Who runs this thing anyhow?
why, anon-admin, of course. :-)
you can determine who anon-admin from any athena prompt by blanche anon-admin
at the time of this writing it consists of cat and seph

Why them and does this mean I trust them?
because they wrote it. you're welcome to write your own, they'd probably even give you advice or scripts. ( anon-admin@mit.edu) Well, you trust that the script they run isn't saving your name and zephyr anywhere, and that they won't just subscribe to anon's zephyrs directly

Why do you care so much about slandering?
one: it hurts people. we think hurting people is bad
two: if people get hurt, and complain anon may be shut down by the powers that be. self-policing is always better that facist admins.

Why do the admins bother with it?
Because it amuses us.

Why do I care?
I can't really answer that, you're the one reading this.

How do I get in touch with them?

are there any forums for discussion about it?
discuss the web stuff

How do I use it?
To see the zephyrs people are sending, just subscribe to class anonymous.

To send zephyrs anonymously zwrite to anon@zone.mit.edu, it will keep whatever instance you send to it. You may also zephyr the class as yourself, but you won't be anonymous

Just how secure is it anyhow? How safe is my anonymity?
A malichious user can compromise your anonymity in several ways. They can sniff packets and read your zephyrs to anon@zone.mit.edu that way. Anyone that can get root on sakhmet, can steal the srvtab for anon, and subscribe to message,*,anon@zone.mit.edu, and thus just recieve the zephyrs. Anyone that has zone cell kdc bits can just create another anon srvtab.

What sort of security measures are you taking?
right now, we're reling on users to be good. Hopefully this will change. Soon I'll add a random delay between when it recieves a zephyr, and when it sends it. I'd like to implement kzwrite so someone sniffing cannot attach your name to the zephyr body. I'd like to use an athena principal instead of a zone one, that way people with zone kdc bits can't abuse them. I'd like to move it to a more secure machine.