Author’s current address: Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350,
Seattle, WA 98195-2350.
An exception is that this technology can be used by
parents and employers to censor children’s and employees’
reading material.
The encryption schemes are based on the difficulty of
factoring large numbers. Only if an exponentially-better algorithm is
found would it become feasible to forge signatures.
Some employees are required to put disclaimers on
messages that they are not speaking for their employer.
Eighteen percent of 1222 studied messages sent to
NewtWatch, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and The Right Side of
the Web were judged to be at least somewhat flame-like by human raters
Spertus 96.
My favorite of the epithets applied to me are
"Anti-Babe," "a VERY dangerous woman," and "more astonishing than the
girl with two heads."
Hiding one’s gender to avoid attention can
backfire. One gender-neutral home page of a woman was linked to from
her fiancé’s page as the person he was going to marry. He
subsequently received e-mail expressing admiration of him for publicly
admitting that he was going to marry a man and concern that people
might flame him for this.
Susan Clerc has chronicled a different double
standard, in the differing reactions to men and women who post lustful
messages about celebrities [Clerc].