Remailers and ecash
Given: We want more (reliable) remailers But someone has to pay for them Conjecture: New remailers can be financed by charging the users a fee per message to use the remailers. If a remailer charges a fee, the number of users will be reduced to those who are willing to pay the fee. When the number of users is reduced, the potential for traffic analysis is increased, which reduces the value of the remailer. If the value of the remailer is reduced, it will not be worth the cost to many users, and those users will seek a less expensive, higher traffic remailer. Thus, the commercial remailer is forced to lower its prices until it is unprofitable. Conclusion: Pay-per-message commecial remailers are not economically viable. Hence we need a new economic model to finance remailers. Several have been proposed: - Advertiser supported - Pay a flat fee per month for remailer access - Everyone a remailer. Remailers only accept messages from other remailers. To use remailers you must run a remailer. - Get companies to run remailers on their firewalls to reduce traffic analysis by competitors/spies - Pay for access to an anonymous message pool - Sell a spam filtering service to fund remailers - Sell a spamming service to fund remailers - Sell cpu cycles in exchange for remailer access - Charge people for extra services, such as low-latency - Pay for a nym account, nymserver subsidizes remailers - Have the money launderers subsidize the remailers - Somehow get all those Mac users to pay - Offer $50 to the first person to set up a remailer, as Monty Cantsin did - Fund social programs for universal remailer access and universal health care like Cynthia wants
At 07:00 AM 10/2/97 +0200, Anonymous wrote:
Hence we need a new economic model to finance remailers. Several have been proposed:
- Advertiser supported
I've thought about putting ads in the headers of remailer messages. No one I've approached, even for free advertising, has thought this was something they wanted to be connected with. -- 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
GREENPEACE NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT TO STOP WHALING! Robert A. Costner wrote:
I've thought about putting ads in the headers of remailer messages. No one I've approached, even for free advertising, has thought this was something they wanted to be connected with.
BOTHERED BY PESKY CRITTERS INTERFERING WITH YOUR FISHING? CALL SMITH & WESSON Robert, Perhaps the idea will become more realistic once Web tools are fine- tuned to the extent that we can selectively target everyone on the face of the earth. (In about 6 months, time...) Just think of the potential for a politician to be able to send out advertising via anonymous remailers which matched the predelictions of each and every recipient. Bob Dole needs your support to SAVE THE CHILDREN! Bob Dole needs your support to NUKE THE CHILDREN! Bob Dole needs your support to KISS THE CHILDREN! Bob Dole needs your support to KISS THE CHILDREN IN BAD PLACES! Bob Dole needs your support to LEGALIZE FARTING IN PUBLIC! Bob Dole needs your support to CRIMINALIZE FARTING IN PUBLIC! The advantage that anonymous remailer advertising has is that it gives the impression that the unknown masses are of like mind, and it allows plausible deniability. Also, advertising could be sent to the originator of anonymous remail, depending on the content of their messages. Money launderers could receive ads for Gucci products. Perverts could receive ads for Victoria's Secrets. Spammers could receive ads for Dr. Kevorkian. Whistleblowers could receive ads for Funeral Parlors. Toto could receive ads for Mental Health Facilities. A. Nonymous
Racist Remailer <rr@dev.null> wrote on 2 Oct 97: [manifest immaturity deleted] Okay, on whose watch did this one get out? (Yes, I did reply, and yes, I plead guilty for keeping this thread going by having done so...so do you too have to reply?) Mitch Halloran Research Biochemist/C programmer/Sequioa's (dob 12-20-95) daddy Duzen Laboratories Group mitch@duzen.com.tr
At 6:28 AM -0700 10/2/97, S. M. Halloran wrote:
Racist Remailer <rr@dev.null> wrote on 2 Oct 97:
[manifest immaturity deleted]
Okay, on whose watch did this one get out?
(Yes, I did reply, and yes, I plead guilty for keeping this thread going by having done so...so do you too have to reply?)
I expect you're new on the list, having only seen your name the last few days. Welcome to the list. As for "on whose watch did this one get out?" question, I hope you are not assuming or expecting that remailer operators screen messages for politeness, or even for sedition, libel, and copyright violation? Remailers simply remail. Some remailers have elected to have lists of addresses they will not send to (like *.whitehouse.gov), and some limit sizes, and a few other such things. But neither _content_ nor _title_ is a screening criterion by any remailer I have heard of. Get used to it. (Oh, and please send posts to one of the "real" Cypherpunks lists, not the temporary toad.com address.) --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
At 04:12 AM 10/2/97 -0600, Racist Remailer wrote:
Also, advertising could be sent to the originator of anonymous remail,
This does seem like a second place that remailer advertising could be "sold." Advertising to the sender side seems like a better idea than recipient advertising, but I'm not sure it would go over very well either. When the crypto vote recently came up in Congress, I suggested putting "advertising" about the vote on outgoing remailer messages. This would have involved promotion of non EFGA web pages. The owners of such web pages, who are pro-crypto, did not care for the association with a remailer. For a recipient side ad, I thought of simply sending out a terms of service message, perhaps replaced in the future by paid advertising. We discussed this, and decided that users would be bothered by getting return email when they send the remailer a message. We considered sending a return message not with each message, but say only once per month, or only once every two weeks. Feedback I got on this was that users would not like the remailer acknowledging them. Obviously we would have to build some database of who sent something when in order to make this work. A database of who has sent a message in the last two weeks is just another chink in the armor waiting to be exploited. -- 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
participants (5)
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nobody＠REPLAY.COM -
Racist Remailer -
Robert A. Costner -
S. M. Halloran -
Tim May