On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Tim May wrote:
[The "prompted a bunch of programmers to rethink" comment has it all backwards. Chained remailers were deployed in 1992. The theory was known from Chaum's 1981 paper, and the flaws in the Kremvax/Kleinpaste/Julf/Penet type of approach were widely known: this was why chained remailers, in multiple jurisdictions, were deployed. Hal Finney wrote the first code for this, building on the Perl/Sendmail scripts Eric Hughes had already released.]
The quoted portion is basically accurate (true to what I said), but I was talking about theoretical attacks at that point. I think I said something along the lines of: "The cypherpunks developed a system based on the ideas in Chaum's 1981 paper. Penet-style remailers were potentially vulnerable to hackers and court orders, which in fact ended up being the downfall of anon.penet.fi. These problems prompted them to build better remailers." I had this post up my screen when I was talking to him: http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.1997.05.29-1997.06.04/msg00310.html Penet was *in operation* prior to Eric and Hal's chained remailers, right? If not, then that's my error. --Len.