-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <199407282120.RAA07884@cs.oberlin.edu> you write:
One naive solution would be for remailers to have a "ping" function. I could send a remailer a "ping" message, and it would just bounce some acknowledgement back. More likely, my software could do this periodically, and keep track of which remailers are down, or non existent, and not use those. The problem here is that an eavesdropper could get knowledge of which remailers I am planning on using, which could help traffic analysis enormously. The "ping" function could support anon encryption block, so that I can ping a remailer through several other remailers anonymously. This is an improvement, but the traffic generated by lots of people periodically doing this is going to be enormous. As it is in any implementation of this sort. [If you wanted to, you could make the remailers "ping" now by yourslef, just have a message resent to yourself. But we can't all do this automatically often, simply because of the traffic it woudl generate. I think.]
I thought extra useless junk traffic was one main objective of a remailing network? The more the better.. As far as the idea that an eavesdropper could tell which remailers you are going to use - they already know. They can ping the same sites you do and as long as you ping *every* site you know of, instead of just the ones you'd like to use on any given message, this doesn't give the spooks one iota of new information.
All participating remailers would post an "i'm here" message on it periodically, say once every 24 hours. This message would include the remailers public key as well. My local software could scan this newsgroup.
As long as the key isn't trusted just because it was in the newsgroup - this sounds workable. Or, each remailer could have a mailing list of addresses it sends the "i'm here" message to. Again, this gets the spooks no new information - if you use a remailer even once, you have to assume that if some one was watching closely enough, they *know* you used the system, and they *know* your chosen destination received a message from the system. They just can't figure out who sent what to who.
at the idea solution, but there's got to be some way to create a remailer-net that will allow my local software to generate long remailer chains to remailers that are all still existent (now, if one of the remailers included in my
This seems backwards to me - I think what you want is local software that is smart enough to figure out the state of the remailer-net. You needn't rip apart nor rebuild the whole net, just write some code :) - -- Baba baby mama shaggy papa baba bro baba rock a shaggy baba sister shag saggy hey doc baba baby shaggy hey baba can you dig it baba baba E7 E3 90 7E 16 2E F3 45 * 28 24 2E C6 03 02 37 5C Stuart Smith <stu@nemesis.wimsey.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLkACeai5iP4JtEWBAQHmFAQApaJMGuDPGHCtEBcfFV6kfGNAwx0fuTgO jQ8yp10UHbe8ItfmjTZBFdHY4zfnPFIL6htn+6gcmOygj6OFEu320r+hA4u3Q7s/ opSaL72kAM53MQOHLabnZ80eEWQts3PWE1i4SfuGomkHKi5BZOUA5HwC+5DF4zTk 7RkW5E7f7a8= =xUgv -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----