Hal Finney writes:
What I think is a better idea was proposed here last year, and I think someone was doing it for a while. It is for someone to volunteer to be the keeper of the remailer aliveness information. He runs scripts every day to ping the remailers, keeps lists of which remailers are currently active, and so on. This information is collected and put into a file retrievable by email or finger. This way you need only check a
Matthew Ghio was doing this for a while, and posted about it here several times. I told him I'd "subscribe to" a robust, stable, pinging service, one that offered a table of various things, including: - time in operation (important for deciding to use it or not) - successful remails out of last N (e.g., "32 of last 34 attempts were valid") - maybe a _recent_ result (e.g., "5 out of 5 in last 24 hours were valid") - remailer policy, including encryption, logging, etc. I still intend to pay Matthew once I get back to using such remailers (I haven't in a long while) and can confirm that Matthew is indeed offering a stable, robust, useful service. I doubt he'll maintain it just for me, so maybe others of you can help. (I hate donation-based systems, so clearly a true "subscription finger" or "subscription ftp" would be better...and maybe fairly easy to implement, too.) --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | 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. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."