new release of Crowds
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--- begin forwarded text X-Authentication-Warning: akalice.research.att.com: majordomo set sender to owner-crowds-talk@research.att.com using -f Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 10:28:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Reiter <reiter@research.att.com> To: crowds-talk@research.att.com Subject: new release of Crowds Sender: owner-crowds-talk@research.att.com Precedence: bulk Crowds 1.0.3 is now available. If you already agreed to our license on our web page, there's no need to do it again; just send email to crowds-support@research.att.com from the previous email address that you gave us, and we'll send 1.0.3 to you. The main change in 1.0.3 is a configuration file that eliminates the need for command-line arguments to anon.pl, and that also enables us to ship distributions ready to join our crowd (i.e., the registration step is eliminated). Hopefully this will make Crowds easier to use. - Mike --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
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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 email stutz@dsl.org Copyright (c) 1997 Michael Stutz; this information is <http://dsl.org/m/> free and may be reproduced under GNU GPL, and as long as this sentence remains; it comes with absolutely NO WARRANTY; for details see <http://dsl.org/copyleft/>.
participants (2)
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Michael Stutz
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Robert Hettinga