I've been thinking a little bit about the problems with unreliable remailers. Supposing that we can never rely on the reliability of all the remailers in a given path (because of not just bugs in the software, but political hassles) it would be good to figure out a mechanism by which a problem can be noticed. For example: supposing that I made the following mail path :: Request-Remailing-To: hh@soda.berkeley.edu :: Request-Remailing-To: remail@tamsun.tamu.edu :: Request-Remailing-To: hfinney@shell.portal.com :: Request-Remailing-To: cypherpunks@toad.com Suppose that remail@tamsun.tamu.edu wasn't working. Maybe it would be possible for the remailer to notice that the next address in the hop is a remailer, and check to see whether the next remailer is working or not. (Send a ping-message.. This would slow things down greatly, yes.) Then if the remailer isn't working, something can be done. (Maybe figure out some way of telling the originator [through encrypted return-paths] that a certain remailer isn't working) This idea (obviously) isn't fully thought out. There are some glaring problems with the system in that it would end up destroying a good deal of the anonymity in the system. It might be possible, however, to modify this idea to make it workable. It is definitely likely, in my mind, that remailers will continue to be unreliable as long as net-anonymity is a controversial topic. -- | Sameer Parekh-zane@genesis.MCS.COM-PFA related mail to pfa@genesis.MCS.COM | | Apprentice Philosopher, Writer, Physicist, Healer, Programmer, Lover, more | | "Symbiosis is Good" - Me_"Specialization is for Insects" - R. A. Heinlein_/ \_______________________/ \______________________________________________/