Nathan Zook wrote:
But there is a major difference between active cooperation and agreeing to a standard. Active cooperation is just that--something which cannot be automated, or which involves automated judgement decisions. I claim that my ideas are merely standards. A standard which might even be extendable into the dominions of a hostile government.
Yes! Standards are not collusion. In fact, standards can lessen the amount of ad hoc contact needed between remailer operators, and thus reduce somewhat the prospects for compromise and collusion. Robust standards are also helpful for building "hands-off" remailers, in which remailer account owners take a hands-off approach, possibly even to the point of creating the accounts and then never checking again. The proposals I've made, sometimes called a "Remailer's Guild," were not for a cabal, but for a market standard that would tend to reward those who follow certain standards and punish (all in a market sense) those who flout standards just for the sake of being different. (The real idea was to get some progress on deciding on some features and terminology, to the point that a "Release" version could be produced, like PGP 2.6, for example.) It may be that such convergence on standards can be done without any contact at all, just through market forces and things like pinging scripts. The remailer analog of a self-healing network, rerouting around brain-damaged sites. --Tim May, posting at 3:55 a.m. because this is my jet lag rebound period, in which I can't go to sleep because I slept for 11 hours upon my arrival at home -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay