-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I don't think the idea of a "virtual server" for anonymity will really accomplish much. Even if you somehow manage to spread the software over several machines, you still need to publicize the entry and exit points for remailing requests. If the net police determine to shut down the server, they can go after those machines which are publically known to be the places where the anonymous messages come from and shut them down. Sure, if you have a network of machines you might be able to bring another one online pretty quickly to replace this one which has been shut down. But then the net police can go after that one. And so on. You'd get the same effect just by having a bunch of conventional remailing servers, only announcing one of them publically, and then having each one come online only after the one before it got shut down. The hard part in either of these scenarios is collecting more people who will run anonymity servers. I don't see that doing tricky stuff with virtualizing the calculations helps you much. Similarly, trying to put a machine at an unknown site, or perhaps in a friendly country, won't necessarily help. If the machine itself is inaccessible, the net police will go after its feeds, the points at which it connects into the network. Look at what happened to Julf. His machine was safe, sitting in a back room of his house. They went after his net feeds instead. The real answer is to publically defend remailers. I argue for remailing servers on the basis of preventing traffic analysis. Most people accept that the use of encryption is justified for email in order to protect individual privacy. I claim that remailing servers extend this protection to include not only the content of a message, but its destination as well. The net does little today to keep the facts private about whom you communicate with. Remailers provide that confidentiality. If we had enough remailers that we could confidentally run a virtualized system, knowing that we could keep brining them online faster than they could be shut down, I'd argue that a better use of those resources would be to publically identify all of the remailers and let them all operate on their own. This would provide a united front to oppose the anti-privacy forces, giving political strength to our goals. Hal Finney 74076.1041@compuserve.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.2 iQCVAgUBLAtoGqgTA69YIUw3AQGFeQQAsnAHwZpe+BRzhp9umLJzWJDFgcHYYYwu Bp5GJI2LmhQWB1pNluLxupW/ZZZqlO78HApOcU9jL/eFEhZakoAd4RJPVBjXpadm w1vkfSDQ6qXKnPyj28FM1sm3eSyfRu3evAd8+MfGNFOlCeyrYNfya6G3OBOcwpf1 bJFe7upKVVQ= =8apG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----