Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 15:09:25 -0500 (EST) From: "Fred B. Ringel" <fredr@joshua.rivertown.net> Reply-To: fredr@joshua.rivertown.net To: pgp-users list <pgp-users@rivertown.net> Subject: [PGP-USERS] *** THE HAYSTACK REMAILER IS GONE ***
Hi all-
Here's another one from this week (in addition to jpunix). They are dropping like flies, unfortunately.
Boy, this really, really stinks.
Fred ==========================================================================
*** IMPORTANT NEWS REGARDING HAYSTACK@HOLY.COW.NET ***
The Bovine Remailer, also known as haystack@holy.cow.net, is hereby CLOSED. Mail sent to that address will bounce; I don't know on a technical basis what putting it in the middle of a remailer chain will do. There are no other remailers or anon services associated with cow.net.
It has been a fun year, but the simple fact is that running a remailer is a thankless, embittering, nasty job. For every success story of alternate or persecuted viewpoints seeing the light of day, there are another four or five cases of legal threats, use of the remailer to spam people who have already turned off access to their accounts from other sources, and the extremely disturbing trend of posting newsgroups with falsified From: Headers, intending to cause endless spam bots to mail the forged address. No one carefully put in a forged address to endanger or misrepresent another person, but it was only a matter of time.
Haystack was running on a Sun 3/280 at the cow.net loft. At the peak, this machine was recieving over one thousand e-mails a day, doing PGP calculations, and sending them out, and the 30mhz processor wasn't up to the task. The final straw was the use of the remailer to send out several hundred "MAKE MONEY FAST"-style messages to a group of folks who then rebelled or retaliated to the remailer itself; everyone associated in this sucks.
If you think this is a shame, then put up your own remailer; no doubt you'll have a thicker skin that the admins of haystack, and will somehow flourish under the increasingly fascist and overbearing environment of the Internet, but the games up here, for now.
Yes, for now. We might return some time in the future, should technical and financial issues be solved, but it seems rather unlikely at this juncture.
Once again, if you enjoyed using haystack, you might consider fighting the good fight and putting up your own. A good, solid increase in remailers might save the culture. It is nearly a crime that so much perfectly powerful computer hardware exists out there, hooked to the net, and a mere dozen computers, in our case quite aged, were/are doing the remailing work.
So, well, like we said, it's been a blast. See you later. Moo.
- The Haystack Administration.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ Fred B. Ringel -- Rivertown.Net Internet Access Systems Administrator -- http://www.rivertown.net and General Fixer Upper -- Voice/Fax/Support: +1.914.478.2885 Although in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice, there is.