me:
One current suggestion is to add some sort of money system to the remailers as a condition of use. This is exactly the wrong priority at the current time. [...] [re: other transaction costs] The current priorities should be to lower these costs.
[later]
There much more need for improving the ease of use of remailers than for paying for them.
rjc:
Are you objecting to paying for remailers on a philosophical grounds (anti-property/money)?
Four words: Libertarian Political Correctness Witchhunt. If it's not really clear that I was making a statement about priorities, I don't think that repeating it a fourth time will help. If, of course, I'm not all in favor of monetarizing remailers immediately, could it be that I'm not in favor of ... money? Please.
The situation is not helped by either-or logic. We need both ease-of-use and some notion of postage.
Are you talking about me? It appears that you are, but I thought I was only comparing priorities. Enough of this. I'd rather discuss lowering transaction costs. rjc comments on my list:
-- Finding out that remailers exist and what they do. build a remailer "who" server into each remailer
I point out this doesn't help if you don't know where the first remailer is. What I was specifically referring to was public education. Were remailers ubiquitous, there would be a chapter on them in each of the latest rage of 'how to use the internet' books. They could be a well-used service, like archie. In fact, they are not. There are numerous reasons for this, some of which are self-referential (as in, there aren't a lot of remailers yet) and some of which are not. For example, there's no FAQ for comp.mail.remailer, because there's no such group. Why shouldn't there be?
-- Finding a remailer to use. ditto
I specifically made this a separate item because it has a different solution. Let's assume the potential user has some beginner's document about remailers. How do they go about finding out what remailers exist? Well, the document could have a list of them, but that doesn't exactly work well in the face of rapid changes. Some centrality in the initial query seems called for. That could be a stable machine, or some stable name, even. What the query actually looks like is less important. We need DNS or something like DNS for this purpose. We need something where changes can propagate outward rapidly, which pushes data out, and unlike BIND (the standard implementation of DNS), which pulls it in after it times out. The standard DNS query format could be kept, but the current back end may not quite work. And what about users on Compuserve, AOL, Genie, Delphi, and Prodigy?
-- Deciding what remailer to use. ditto (remailer server should list remailer properties like keylength, private?, delay length, chaining?, mixing?, padding?, encryption required? etc)
Certainly a standard way of listing the properties of a remailer would help. This seems to be mostly a matter of syntax. There is, also, the question of trustworthiness. That mythical beast the reputation system might be applicable, but I know of none to judge for suitability. More generally, there are questions of policy. What, for example, is the policy of the remailer in case of administrative request for mappings? Are there liquidated damages available to someone whose privacy is breached? These legal issues are not so easily made into syntax.
-- Figuring out how to use a particular remailer. standardize remailer help system, standard remailer command format (but not neccessaily the commands themselves) Sorta like an SGML for remailers
I think the commands ought to be standardized, just like RFC-822 standardized on the To: field. I realize this is going to create a little havoc for the half-dozen or so remailer developers who have all chosen not to talk to each other during their developments. If you don't have standard commands, then you need a way of specifying semantics for all these various commands. Not good.
-- Formatting a message for a remailer. see above
Personally, I don't think we need multiple algorithms for this. Is there any compelling reason, other than to avoid wasting existing but not yet deployed code?
-- Receiving mail through a remailer. Get/Creating a nice client.
There's a transaction cost to switching clients which is huge. It's completely unrealistic to expect everyone to use a particular client for remailers. It just won't happen. Far better is to rework existing clients to support remailers and to get those changes into the main distributions.
Reducing complexity cost: All of this could be lowered by creating an easy-to-use remailer client which is compiled (or perl/tcl interpreted) and installed with every unix out there so it becomes ubiquitous.
The dream of universal software. When I can unpack some software and type 'make', and do nothing else except read the man pages that 'make' caused to be formatted, I'll call that universal software. And not before. I'm glad lowering these transaction costs garnered a response. But what I really want to see is, what did I forget about transaction costs to use remailers? Eric