Tucker Ignores Web Technicalities

"Publishing material on the Web is far more anonymous and far-reaching than anything written in any newspaper." So wrote Ethan M. Tucker in a Feb. 20 Crimson column on anonymity and free speech in the Internet, revealing in particular his lack of knowledge on how the Web works, and suggesting his lack of general knowledge on how the Internet works.

In order to publish material "on the Web", in the usual sense of the phrase, a person needs to place the material on a Web server, which can then serve the material to "clients" (for example browsers) who request the material. The server can be shared by the person's Internet service provider, or a personal one connected to the Internet via the person's Internet service provider. In either case, public registries on the Internet make it easy to find the person and/or organization responsible for the speech in question. In addition, in order for the speech to be presented to somebody browsing the Web, the person must have explicitly requested the information from the server, via the client being used. In order to make such a request, a precise URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address of the Web page is needed. Unless the page in question is linked to by some other, more visible Web site, for example an on-line newspaper, which before linking to the page would presumably exercise its editorial control.

As any person familiar with how the Web works would know, communication anonymity is hard to achieve for Web browsers, and almost impossible for Web publishers. As for electronic mail, which, due to its design, is easier to "spoof" with anonymous messages, there are simple ways to authenticate messages to confirm their senders' identity. Internet users ought to be educated to treat any anonymous or unauthenticated mail with suspicion and caution. For those who truly take offense to anonymous or unauthenticated messages, software filtering is also easy to set up. The mailing list mentioned in the article could have been set up with a simple restriction against unauthorized submissions; the fact that the restriction was not in place implies either that the convenience of not having to approve every message manually was deemed to be greater than the risk of offensive messages being sent through the list, or that the administrator(s) of the list were simply technically incompetent. --Chung-chieh Shan '99