At 01:19 PM 9/26/97 -0400, Anonymous (Monty Cantsin) wrote:
No, the nym servers differ in two important ways.
1. They use a reply block so your true identity lies encrypted beneath the public keys of several remailers. I would rather the message went to alt.anonymous.messages.
This is an interesting idea. I'm going to forward it to the remailer-politics list and see what people there think of the idea.
Also, by my reading of the "uptime" statistic in Raph's remailer chart, a reply block is not going to be very reliable for receiving mail.
The Redneck remailer, for instance, has a 99+% uptime rate. The reason for this being high is that it is run under a business model. The connectivity basically cannot go down. There has only been 23 minutes of connectivity downtime in the last year. Redneck is run on a business quality network with multiple backbone feeds. But things break down after that. Redneck also runs on an underpowered 486 with no "hotfix" backup machine. It is not considered to be a mission critical piece of equipment. I might notice Redneck have a problem at 1:00 am, but it can wait until in the morning to get fixed. Situations like this, combined with software upgrades account for downtime. Back to your question of latency, the actual latency on Redneck is about six seconds if chaining is not used. This is "high" because the remailer runs on an underpowered machine. If the machine is not doing its thing for any length of time, then the figure will go up dramatically, which is why you see the two minute latency now. Cracker however is *designed* to have additional latency. The figure shown is twenty something minutes, but actual latency of an individual message cannot be determined. Conceivably, it could be much higher or lower on any given message. The latency could be under 60 seconds during a busy time, or could be hours during a slow time.
2. The nym servers advertise that the accounts are nyms through the choice of domain names. So, presumably, people will respond with the same hostility that they respond to any other anonymous message. I presume the remailer operators want to minimize the number of times somebody is defrauded through an anonymous account.
This is similar to the AOL effect. It is often hard to have respect for an unknown poster from AOL. The remailer at EFGA is new. I've come to realize that this natural hostility towards a remailer is a good reason to put the remailer on a separate domain. We might do this. -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key