Regarding your post to cypherpunks asking about a distributed remailer network - this is very much what the Mixmaster remailers do now. Each message is cut into uniformly sized encrypted chunks which are traded in a stormy cloud of random traffic between the remailers, until they reach an outlet point. See http://www.obscura.com/~loki for more info. Mark Hedges Infonex Internet Inc.

On the subject of Crowds (<http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/7331.html>), a distributed system for anonymous Web browsing, I was wondering if anyone knew of any attempts or efforts to create a decentralized remailer network in the same manner -- can such a thing be done, and be useful?

Such a system might work quite like Crowds (or could even be a subset of Crowds itself, or based on it, as the source is available), with a small "jondo" program running on each host in the remailer network. To send an anonymous message you must be running a jondo, hence you are part of the network. The jondo takes your message, encrypts and randomly forwards it to any jondo in the network, which then either re-forwards it to another jondo or its final destination.

There is no way for the recipient to know who the original sender was other than that sender was part of the crowd running the jondos, and there is no central remailer machine to target since the "remailer" consists of a network of machines running these jondos. As members increase, the network performance as well as the degree of anonymity increases (imagine, for instance, if such a program came with Linux as a standard part of the OS).

m

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