Hi all, I believe that I am providing a useful service with my remailer list, but I have received one complaint about the frequency of pinging. I send hourly pings. This is helpful for quickly identifying remailers which have gone off the net. If you don't want me to do this, let me know. I apologize for not having brought this up before I started with the hourly pings. My pinging script can be configured to adjust ping frequency on a per-remailer basis. If you would like a greater interval between pings, I would be happy to do this. I already do this for penet. An anonymous poster from rebma criticized ping traffic as a way to improve remailer mix. It might be that the two goals (improving mix and collecting good statistics) are at odds, but I would be willing to modify my ping script to make the pings more like mix-improving traffic. Ideas include: 1. Encrypt the ping, so it looks like so much PGP traffic. 2. Pad it with a random amount of junk (but not _too_ much :-), so traffic analysis based on size will fail. 3. Chain it through other remailers. A good approach might be to choose two random remailers out of the "top five," and sandwich rebma between them. The drawback is that it penalizes rebma for their latency and failure rate, but this might be acceptable. 4. Randomize the time that the ping is sent. If the operator of the rebma remailer would be so kind, please let me know if and when I have been de-Detweilered, and whether you would like me to implement any of these suggestions. Also, I plan to autopost the remailer list every Monday, to both cypherpunks and alt.privacy.anon-server. This is my first experience with spamming the net, so if anybody has any objections or cautions, I would like to hear them. Raph Levien