Inilah salah satu kebanggaan saya dia adalah orang yang Mengoperasikan anonymous remailer paling populer didunia.

Johan Helsingius is the 32-year-old president of Penetic, a Helsinki,Finland, firm that helps businesses connect to the Internet. His hobby is running a controversial anonymous remail server on the Internet, anon@penet.fi. Think of it as your own secret PO Box on the Net. Anyone can send e-mail to the server. Unlike some other such servers, anon@penet.fi also forwards replies to you. (Send e-mail for further instructions.) We caught up with Helsingius recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wired: What's the setup of penet.fi? What kind of computer do you use, where is it, and so forth?

Helsingius:

It's a generic 486; I don't even remember the brand. It's just a typical 486 box. The current machine has been in operation for something like a half a year - an earlier 386 ran out of steam pretty early.

Where physically is it?

That's something I probably wouldn't like to discuss. It's not in my house. It used to be. It's now somewhere that I have access to, but I wouldn't like people to know where it's located. It's in a machine room at a business in Helsinki, a pretty big business with lots of machines. Nobody knows except a couple of guys who are running the computing room. It's not in a university, because at universities you always run into political problems.

I'm a bit paranoid about people getting access to the actual server. I think there are lots of people around who'd like to have that database, the database correlating the real people to their anonymous handles. That's kept forever, but I don't keep copies of the messages that actually go through the machine.

How do we know that you don't read any of the mail that flows through penet.fi?

You don't. There's absolutely no way I could guarantee to anyone, I mean really prove I'm not looking at the stuff. There's no way to prove it. People just have to trust me.

Do you use it yourself?

I haven't actually posted anything through the server, except using the administrative account anonymously. I actually don't use it myself, nope. I never had the need. But I can definitely relate to people who have the need. Who has the need? People who want to talk about things having to do with minorities. I actually belong to a Swedish-speaking minority [that makes up 4 percent of Finland's population]. I was born in Finland to Swedish- speaking parents. It's not a problem but it sort of makes you appreciate the problems. There are some situations where I wouldn't want people to know I belong to the Swedish-speaking minority.

So why do you run an anonymous remailer?
It's important to be able to express certain views without everyone knowing who you are. One of the best examples was the great debate about Caller ID on phones. People were really upset that the person at the receiving end would know who was calling. On things like telephones, people take for granted the fact that they can be anonymous if they want to and they get really upset if people take that away. I think the same thing applies for e-mail....

Living in Finland, I got a pretty close view of how things were in the former Soviet Union. If you actually owned a photocopier or even a typewriter there you would have to register it and they would take samples of what your typewriter would put out so they could identify it later. That's something I find so appalling. The fact that you have to register every means of providing information to the public sort of parallels it - like saying you have to sign everything on the Net. We always have to be able to track you down.

anda bisa membaca lebih lengkap di http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer