I've started a small project, and I'm curious to know if others think there's any long-term value to it. Dallas Semiconductor makes a small Java-based computer called the TINI. (Check out http://www.ibutton.com/TINI for details.) The unit itself is the size of a memory SIMM and costs $35. The card isn't too useful until you add their socket board which costs $30 or so and provides an Ethernet port, a serial port, and a connector for power. The OS for the TINI has a complete TCP/IP stack, and has a nice Java implementation. My idea was to make a throwaway remailer. For $80 worth of materials, you can have a unit that can remail messages in the Cyperpunks tradition. It could be easily hidden. Here's the pros and cons as I see them: Pros: small (easily hidden in a large corporate or university environment -- the TINI can even pick up its IP address via DHCP) doesn't have a disk drive so there's no room for logs. Inexpensive, so it can be sacrificed if discovered. Cons: It might not be able to have crypto. I'm not sure if something PGPish can be ported to it and still leave room for the incoming message. It comes with less than 300K of useable RAM. However, the TINI does have a socket on it for an Ibutton, so one of Dallas' Crypto or Java buttons might be able to take on the crypto load. That's more money per unit, however. Also, due to the small memory footprint, it doesn't look like a lot of messages can be stored locally, so there's not a lot of room for latency and message re-ordering. It would also be tough to harden these things against any kind of denial of service attack. Bombing it with mail or strange packets will probably lock it up. Currently, the TINI also requires that SOME email server take email from it, since the code that comes with it really isn't a complete mail service, but I think it could probably do it's own delivery eventually. I'm envisioning that the code would announce itself to some set of web servers so that people can know where to find a few of these transient remailers when they wanted to send some messages. I've already got a small chunk of code that can do some crude remailing, so the basic idea works. Does this seem useful to anyone? The TINI is fun to tinker with, so I'm not out anything if someone points out a hugely glaring hole in the idea, here. One hole that I've already noticed is that the code that runs on a TINI could just as easily run on a Windows machine and do the same job, and there's been very little interest in having a widespread network of little remailers for workstations. -Bill -- Bill O'Hanlon wmo@pro-ns.net Professional Network Services, Inc. 612-379-3958