At 09:57 PM 9/3/2001 -0700, A. Melon wrote:
I know this suggestion has been made before, probably by myself, but it seems the remailer programmers may be missing a good opportunity in not pursuing the inclusion of remailer code in the popular Gnutella cleints (e.g., LimeWire). They advertise they are looking for new "content communities." http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/formgroup I don't see any reason why email can't be added as a new form of content.
Remailers are trickier than other P2P applications because of the problem of sending the mail out. If one of the P2P users gets "volunteered" to be the outgoing portal for some harrasing mail, he won't be running the client for long.
I believe Ian Goldberg came up with a rather elegant solution: allow the the clients to only function as entry and middlemen remailers and use throwaway accounts at hotmail or similar fall guys as the exit points.
Probably the biggest complaint people would have is untraceable spam. It's already a nuisance with other chat systems. If the anonymous comm system has per-user traffic limits or some other way of handling spam then it could be a good basis for no holds barred discussions and data exchange.
Hashcash or a similar computation-based postage (e.g., the camram project, if it ever gets itself together) is probably a better solution to SPAM (untraceable or not). steve