Thanks, Davin. I threw out those ideas casually as if they'd just hit me, but in truth they represent part of my core thinking about the Zone software for the last several months.

The "Iranian student" controversy is another reminder of the problems caused by uncertainty of identity, and how that uncertainty leads to amateur investigations that actually undermine privacy. The basic thing I need to do is add a registration system as part of a broader strategy of "identity management and certification". If you register with the Zone and provide at least a working email address (and by working, I mean working over the long term to prevent the use of throwaway email accounts--if all you offer is an email address, then that address will receive an email once a week to which you must respond to keep your account alive), then you'd be free to adopt aliases for use in public. The fact that "the Zone knows who you are" provides reassurance that in the event of identity disputes, there is a way to resolve them, and eliminates the incentive for people to trace IP addresses (which will no longer need to be published) and otherwise attempt to violate another poster's privacy. Eventually I'd like to accommodate multiple levels of identity assurance, up to address verification by return of a signed form mailed to the address, to allow me to provide what amounts to a "notary" service for online agreements.

My long term plan, BTW, is to develop more communities like the Zone, and link them together with the underlying identity management system so that people can move freely between sites in a zone of law and order carved out from the generally lawless Internet. If there's a recognizable authority taking responsibility for safety and security, people will be freer to focus on the positive things that brought them in the first place. The concept is a sort of privatized government in which citizens freely contract for the infrastructure of civilization.

Along with the idea of a "fortress" or "gated community" comes the need to make it safer for citizens to venture out into the surrounding wilderness. Proxies and anonymous/throwaway email accounts are the basic armor and weaponry you need for an expedition in the wild; or sort of like extruding a bubble of the protection you receive on the inside of the system so that it surrounds you when you venture out.

Imagine, if you will, that you log in to the Chatterbrains Network (oh, forgot to mention that I've registered chatterbrains.com, .net, and .org to support the broader venture). You enter your virtual home, where you have access to your personal participation and privacy tools.

Say you registered through the HabitableZone, so by default your home is initially "HabitableZone themed" (but you'll be able to customize it a lot). You check your "me@habitablezone.com" email account, plus the other accounts you've set up to be retrieved through your ZoneHome. Suppose you want to respond to a personal ad somewhere, or ask a sensitive medical question. You click the "anonymous account" button and the software creates a new and obscure email account, like "arglebargle23838556@chatterbrains.net" and you compose and send your message. Any replies will be routed back to you without revealing your identity.

Fire up the proxy interface, and you can go out and surf anonymously. You'd also have RSS news feeds, both external feeds as well as feeds from sites like the Zone announcing the latest discussion topics. You could arrange the discussion site feeds in a way that gives you a "panoramic" view of all the boards you're interested in.

Morning routine out of the way, time to go play on the Zone. Today you have in mind a practical joke, so you go to the Identity Manager and create a new alias for yourself. If it's not already been taken, it becomes your identity for this session or until you change to another; it's put into the author field of the message form. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that your practical joke falls flat and people complain. Instead of a huge brouhaha, a moderator simply looks up the alias, and sends you a warning about it. The mod may or may not choose to "out" you depending the facts in the case. A moderator might also choose to involuntarily "retire" that identity.

All of the above is built out of the dynamic tension between assurance of identity on the one hand, and obfuscation of identity on the other. It can work very effectively if there's a trusted agency in the background to maintain both sides of the equation. Trust is key. Like Caesar's wife, such a "government" must be not only above reproach, it must be above the appearance of reproach. Because it would also be a commercial venture, there are real and material penalties for violation of trust. Could be a useful realization of the Libertarian ideal.

But wait, there's more. Many posters are aspiring authors and publishers, so the system should make it easy to publish your work. Your "ZoneHome" has both a private and a public face, and on the public face you'll be able to present your own blog, your favorite RSS feeds, links, photo album...pretty much whatever you want to publish. It's fairly easy to set it up so that the software can produce PDF files, and so you can publish "ebooks" of your own original works, or compilations of message threads.

It's still just a gleam in my eye, but that's a pretty good snapshot of where I want to go. The HabitableZone community's invested more than four years in training me, and maybe by now I've learned enough to be able to go out and reproduce this success elsewhere--that is, maybe it's time for the Zone to embark on a program of colonization.