Bruce Baugh wrote:
I've been enjoying the discussion of "disposable" remailers, but I note a problem. If this has been addressed before, well, now it's being noted again.
In my (admittedly limited) experience with nym servers, the reply path is fixed - it goes through specified hops. This creates A Problem when any one of the remailers involved goes down. There's no way for the mail to get through. There's not even a way for the nym holder to verify that there is a site down, as opposed to some more transitory problem, without information from an external source.
This seems to me a fairly serious weakness, given prevailing governmental attitudes.
What would it take to create a nym server that could route around the death or disability of any given mailer?
Well, that would be a serious problem. The big question is: who decides the routing? With the existing nym setup, the client decides the entire route. The nymserver knows only the first hop. For the nymserver to be able to route around damage, it would have to know that there is damage, and that implies knowing the route. One fix for the problem is just to refresh your nym regularly. If you are lucky enough to be using premail, then just run "premail -makenym nym@alpha". I'm considering adding code that automatically figures out which nyms need to be refreshed when a remailer drops in the reliability ratings and automatically does it, but that probably won't make it into the next release of premail. The fact that you can refresh nyms makes the problem you bring up much less severe. Raph