Eli Brandt writes:
After being largely off-line for most of the summer, I came back to find that my remailer had been bit-bucketing most encrypted messages, apparently due to PGP 2.3's lack of backward compatibility. (There'd better be a good reason for that, PGP team.) I'll get around to building 2.3 RSN. There will also be a momentary interruption of encryption service when this old Sequent machine gets swapped out from under the Sequent binary...
Glad to have Eli back! (and we missed you at the Extropaganza last weekend) This underscores one of the persistent problems with remailers: the generally flaky nature! (No insult or criticism intended...the folks who run remailers are to be commended, but the fact is that "multiple hop" remailing routes are are a real gamble these days, what with so many remailers temporarily or permanently disabled or (somehow) not passing messages through.) Karl Barrus's list of functional remailers is a great first step, but we need to somehow establish a better "market system" of remailers (digital postage woud be a boon here) so that the upness or downness of remailers would be more predictable. Like others, I suspect, I have to "ping" the remailers before sending anything, and then hope and pray they aren't taken offline for maintenance (or whatever) between the time I ping them and the time I use them for something important. If Sameer Parekh's "instant remailer" code multiplies the number of remailers by some factor, we will even more urgently need to deal with this issue of remailer reliability. -Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.