Some good points, Johnny. I'm not convinced Spam and the remailers are inherently incompatible. Or at least, I'm thinking there's a sort of uncertainty principle that should work between legit remailable messages and spam. it may be a tricky business, but I suspect that the need of spammers to send out huge numbers of messages may be exploitable. Hell...they may in some ways be an asset if handled correctly: Much easier to hide remailed messages in larger torrents than in sparsely trafficked remailer networks. And of course, it may be that the need to sell goods (ie, from a specific URL) means that anonymity is not so useful, particularly if there are time+bandwidth constraints on portions of the network (eg a remailer has a max bandwidth that gets throttled back if there's a large woosh of traffic in a certain period of time). So I don't think the problem is unsolvable, but I agree with your essential point that it needs looking into. -TD
From: Nomen Nescio <nobody@dizum.com> To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Remailers an unsolveable paradox? Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 13:30:01 +0200 (CEST)
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Are remailers an unsolveable paradox?
We want to be able to provide the means for whistleblowers and others to communicate in a secure and anonymous fashion. Yet we need to make sure we're not abused too much since sooner or later laws will catch up with the remailers should abuse sky-rocket.
Once upon a time all email servers were open relays. This was a friendly time and spam wasn't invented. As time changed the focus turned on securing the relaying procedures and has continued until this day. Yet as we know the flow of spam (most of it coming directly or indirectly from US) continued to increase, despite even existing legislation today.
What are the possible solutions for the remailers? Make all remailers middleman only and adding the ability to opt-in for delivery outside the network? Having a network of middleman remailers and some nymservers that only delivers to other nymserver or opted-in servers will at least provide some means for people to communicate between themselves. It would in practise destroy the ability to contact anyone outside the network though, making the network an isolated place for a few. Using techniques like Hashcash should be more or less mandatory even today to make it harder to mailbomb or send large amounts spam? Why is it not?
Regardless of what any hardcore cypherpunk or old-timers in the remailer community may think about any ideas imposing restrains on the useability of remailers something just have to be made about the abuse of the system. I also predict that the abuse will increase so time is ticking in a sense.
Making sure we have robust remailing services in one shape or another and at the same time have some kind of at least indirect acceptance from legislators and also a low degree of spam flowing through are essential goals.
The average naive and ignorant redneck will never ever understand the principal arguments for free speech that makes remailers useful. The average american do not think and analyze what is told to him. You will probably today find millions of americans who believe that Saddam and Al-Qaeda did business just because Bush and the administration lied about that initially, even though it's more or less confirmed today that those links were not there.
The rednecks also vote however (to some extent) and that's why it will be a piece of cake to strike against the remailers if the politicians would like to. And they will, if and when serious abuse were to happen more often utilizing remailers. What would happen if it was found (or simply suspected or claimed) that some terror deed was planned using remailers? How long time would it take for us to see new laws being proposed? Not long. And don't forget that anyone (like Tom Ridge himself) could send bogues messages through the system trying to
Since providing a true non-censoring remailing service and at the same time safeguard against spam and abuse are therotically incompatible I guess remailers are indeed a paradox waiting to be shut down sooner or later by politicians if we're not open to at least discuss some aspects of how these services are operated.
Johnny Doelittle
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Effective today, Lemuria will be going middlemen.
Sometime around the middle of the month, Lemuria will go away.
This is final.
The main reasons are that I've lost my faith in the usefulness of the remailer network. I have indications that the remailer network is being massively abused, on the scale where the legitimate mails are a tiny fraction that would be better served using other means.
There are two main reasons for my thoughts. One is I have looked at the bounces I receive, and compared their numbers to my statistics. According to that data, without having run a statistically significant analysis, the major traffic coming through Lemuria is Spam, with threats and harrassment a second. I realize that in the no-bounces, the fraction of legitimate mails will be higher, but even assuming a factor of 10, it is still a negligable part.
Second, I've the mail attached below yesterday. In case you can't read german, it is essentially spam advertising the mixmaster software and some book and/or software I haven't tested, might be a mixmaster client, might be a trojan. This is a sign for me that the anonymous remailer network is being used systematically for abuse, on a large scale. I don't want to be a part of that.
As mixmaster has no features whatsoever to prevent this crap, and the "encrypted only" switch doesn't do what it should do, and legitimate traffic is close to zero anyways, I'll be taking Lemuria down and leaving the remailer community.
It was an interesting time, and between frog, the SciTol fanatics (from both sides) and a couple really cool people, I've learned a lot about society that I'm not sure I really needed to know. :)
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