Re putting remailer aliveness on usenet: What I think is a better idea was proposed here last year, and I think someone was doing it for a while. It is for someone to volunteer to be the keeper of the remailer aliveness information. He runs scripts every day to ping the remailers, keeps lists of which remailers are currently active, and so on. This information is collected and put into a file retrievable by email or finger. This way you need only check a single site to find out which remailers are up, and you don't have the usenet waste of sending stuff all over the world that only a few people are interested in (yes, I know usenet does this already, but it won't forever). Just like people set up web sites that point to interesting resources, some people will (and perhaps are already) run sites which point to good remailers. This is just as useful a service as running a remailer, and a good deal less controversial. This seems like a good solution to the problem of finding running remailers. Hal