-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
This is mostly addressed to jimbell: jim, it is now obvious that the remailer network is as weak as a 5 year old child. It cannot possibly withstand even mildest forms of "abuse".
Due to this fact, I question the viability of your assassination politics idea as it does not seem possible to safely operate an assassination bot.
The fundamental problem with the current remailer network, as others have noted before, is that it is a free service open to abuse by anyone. If remailers were commercialized, this would eliminate the spam problem and would provide the remailer operator with resources to legally defend him or herself. Currently, there is no modivation for an operator to continue the service when legally threatened. (As an interesting sidenote, a few hours ago John Perry announced on r-ops that due to an FBI investigation into the use of his remailer to mail threats to some apparently influential person, he has shut down the jpunix remailer.) Consider the fact that Cyberpromo has managed to find an upstream provider willing to provide connectivity to them, even though they are almost universally hated by net users. They have been able to exist because there is a commercial interest. I do not doubt that the same would be true for remailers if they were commercialized. The only thing that could shut remailers down would be either legislation or seizing the computers on which the remailers run as "evidence." The obvious solution to this would be to run remailers in more civilized countries. Mark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBMzIQwSzIPc7jvyFpAQEQ9gf/aUCNWXtqAZlM2Qi8peAxR1UFfnhdyiBp eRbl6Rajy7dmf5Kuy7rRj2eLrRQFS/MBp/404urtZm7rUo70T6G2e5O+qae9VDBC FAH8DIDSRffH47jB9xcY/14rwFo7/IG2Kd4l/jmP7SyClCwP/CU1a3+yASFVJFw3 9A8S2sKjJevyXjMLFFBWCuo3ZPVKFJfmxV9yCmNWREXjW4moKtgNGHL7tgGQrev3 LtTGBCeVmSI5WCJsEn6EOVzLHFSx7kndfXLfULIHwPRIbHQuEv1qNGZu3dj8CJ4G HxDw4gU3ZDGANQ+5VveB6yddiivU1bjAXXhiOskLnZsSz1V6y8KwTA== =LyRp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----