Certainly an external service of that sort seems like a simpler idea than baking anonymous posting into the system. A hypothetical service can receive to-be-posted posts from people and post them under its own identity with whatever filtering and data its programmers desire, and all the Nusenet system cares about is "here is an identity, posting posts, just like any other identity." And, if the filtering and data proves problematic, it's "here is an abusive identity, which we will block." (In fact, it seems to me that prohibiting this sort of anonymous posting would be more difficult than allowing it!)
With that said, I'm not really clear what you mean by a "anonymous identity server", since to me "anonymous identity" seems self-contradictory. The problems with the Penet remailer seem to have been that it attempted to provide opaque pseudonymity, in which a poster had a persistent identifier (which then was information that needed to be securely stored) -- and, in fact, Wikipedia describes it as a "pseudonymous remailer", not an anonymous one.
I understand "anonymity" in this context to mean "there is no way to tie this message to anything else the poster may have posted or to any private communications medium"; the technical problems are only ones of securely deleting information. By contrast, "pseudonymity" in my understanding is the situation where there is a name, and we as outsiders know that the name connects several things (perhaps multiple posts, perhaps a post and a maildrop, perhaps some other things) that are associated with that name, but we don't know anything that would allow us to know which person is responsible for this set of connected things.
This is relevant because I don't think there is any significant disagreement about the value of pseudonymity, so long as the pseudonymity cannot generally be used as a means to achieve anonymity (i.e., by allowing a single person to obtain an essentially inexhaustible supply of pseudonyms at negligible cost). The experience on Usenet -- and here on Dreamwidth -- has been pretty strongly in favor of the proposition that pseudonymity is a positive feature.
no subject
With that said, I'm not really clear what you mean by a "anonymous identity server", since to me "anonymous identity" seems self-contradictory. The problems with the Penet remailer seem to have been that it attempted to provide opaque pseudonymity, in which a poster had a persistent identifier (which then was information that needed to be securely stored) -- and, in fact, Wikipedia describes it as a "pseudonymous remailer", not an anonymous one.
I understand "anonymity" in this context to mean "there is no way to tie this message to anything else the poster may have posted or to any private communications medium"; the technical problems are only ones of securely deleting information. By contrast, "pseudonymity" in my understanding is the situation where there is a name, and we as outsiders know that the name connects several things (perhaps multiple posts, perhaps a post and a maildrop, perhaps some other things) that are associated with that name, but we don't know anything that would allow us to know which person is responsible for this set of connected things.
This is relevant because I don't think there is any significant disagreement about the value of pseudonymity, so long as the pseudonymity cannot generally be used as a means to achieve anonymity (i.e., by allowing a single person to obtain an essentially inexhaustible supply of pseudonyms at negligible cost). The experience on Usenet -- and here on Dreamwidth -- has been pretty strongly in favor of the proposition that pseudonymity is a positive feature.