Subject: [PGP-USERS] *** THE HAYSTACK REMAILER IS GONE ***
They are dropping like flies, unfortunately. use of the remailer to spam people who have already turned off access to their accounts from other sources,
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;
Several months ago, someone (Toto, I believe) posted a thoughtful message suggesting that the burgeoning Internet would result in a huge influx of carpetbaggers of one sort or another, and that the established entities, such as lists and remailers, had best be making plans to deal with the changing frontier or suffer the consequences. Another person, whose name escapes me, as she rarely posts, replied that she thought the post would prove prophetic, much more so than people believed. I mention this mostly to point out that it has been only a short time since this prediction was made, and it is already coming to fruitation in more than a few areas. Survival is going to mean adjustment to the fast changing conditions of the growing Internet. Social and political issues are going to impact developments as much or more than technology, and any entity which cannot adapt in these areas will die off, like the dinosaurs. While I sympathize with the remailer operators for having to deal with spamming problems, spammers and assholes did not suddenly appear out of nowhere in the recent past. The quickening pace of changes in the future will no longer allow system operators and administrators to wait until problems become unmanageable before they make plans to deal with them. In addition to pure anonymous remailers, perhaps there is a need for variations, as well, which encompass varying forms of subscription or authentication. Perhaps limiting the number of posts from an address, raising that limit according to gained reputation capital. As far as anonymity being maintained, is it possible for the system files which log identity/address to be encrypted with a password that is not known to any human, but only to the system? i.e. - even with a court order, there is no way for the operator to provide the info. Lessening the legal hassles could spread the use of remailers, with many being resistant to abuse. Those to whom the anonymity is very important would not have any problem finding the remaining pure remailers. Most of the quick-buck crowd would probably not make the effort to find them, having assumed, from the spam resistant remailers, that they are not a valid option for them. If cypherpunks are serious about making remailers available to the public then we will need to make them both useable and functional for those who might be open to running them. This cannot be done by making them only useful for 'pure' use. If someone were to design a remailer that would only let whites use it, there would be a great hue and cry, but there would also be more remailers available, shortly thereafter. Then someone would design one that could only be used for minorities, etc. If you really want to spread the use of remailers, design them so that you can make a pile of money off of them, in a good way. Then get rich while you further their development and use. TruthMonger