-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Jonathon Rochkind wrote:
People often like to postulate on the list that eventually there won't be any more of these philantropic free remailers, and people will be charging small amounts for every remailed message, to make some money off it. I've thought of a pretty good reason why this might not ever happen. [...] one's primary reason might be to ensure oneself anonymity.
Interesting point... I guess that is a good reason why free anonymous remailers might not ever die out, but pay remailers may be able to offer enhanced features and services that would tend to attract the vast majority of customers (assuming such a service would be considered as valuable by enough people ;) I mean, it is easy enough to run a remailer from a school account or something like that, except you have little control: it may be forbidden (here at Rice for example), you may be told to shut it down (Netcom, U of Buffalo, U of Washington), you may have a disk quota (previous remailer I ran which stored messages, mixed and sent them at midnight) which would limit certain features, you may not be able to use "cron" or "at", you may not be able to turn off sendmail logging, you may not have the account for very long... you may want to offer usenet posting but can't, you may be subject to various denial of service attacks, you may want to name your remailer "nobody" but can't, you may want to alter sendmail config files, etc. And then maybe you'd like to experiment with something really different, like running an fsp daemon and letting people fsp files to you to be remailed. Or something of this nature, which may require leaving a program running all the time, listening to a port for connections. But maybe you can't do this either. On the other hand, if you owned your own machine and net connection, you are in a position to address all these concerns, and the people who are concerned enough to seriously use anonymous remailers may be willing to pay a postage fee. Karl Barrus klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLkrT9MSF/V8IjI8hAQFACgP/VrZDA5uSq3yHKqUeca8YVsFIkbesoCiF OQAnUWBMRFpgLK1azYZSJBkfdxllk1SPIsryM87jofQ0U7RAIqF/u9j9Cf9Me5DF v0oPFdmBYFAPICevsXJDgFed9ZD9i9Vee/OWJYM+XQlZCBeCXu4xNrKG8IjUFPo3 vwV99N/MpBI= =Y3r6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Karl L. Barrus: klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu 2.3: 5AD633; D1 59 9D 48 72 E9 19 D5 3D F3 93 7E 81 B5 CC 32 2.6: 088C8F21; 97 73 9E 8B 98 3E DD B5 E8 97 64 7E 20 95 60 D9 "One man's mnemonic is another man's cryptography" - K. Cooper