Re: Remailer Attack
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Robert A. Costner wrote:
Also, by my reading of the "uptime" statistic in Raph's remailer chart, a reply block is not going to be very reliable for receiving mail.
The Redneck remailer, for instance, has a 99+% uptime rate. The reason for this being high is that it is run under a business model. The connectivity basically cannot go down. There has only been 23 minutes of connectivity downtime in the last year. Redneck is run on a business quality network with multiple backbone feeds. But things break down after that. Redneck also runs on an underpowered 486 with no "hotfix" backup machine. It is not considered to be a mission critical piece of equipment. I might notice Redneck have a problem at 1:00 am, but it can wait until in the morning to get fixed. Situations like this, combined with software upgrades account for downtime.
Thank you for this detailed description. One more question: When redneck is down, do other remailers discard their mail if they cannot connect to it? If this is the case, it would seem to be a serious design flaw, probably prompted by the desire to save disk space. A quarter per message would probably cover the cost. Another general comment on remailer statistics: 99+% uptime sounds good, but really it isn't. For some reason, we are accustomed to the idea that remailers should lose messages. Well, they shouldn't. A remailer is just electronic mail with a few extra features and electronic mail is exceptionally reliable. According to Raph, redneck has an uptime of 99.83%. By my understanding, this means for every 1000 messages handled, redneck loses 17. That's actually pretty high, especially if it's your message that gets lost. I do not mean to pick on redneck in particular, or, really, any of the remailers. But where the remailer network stands right now, it cannot be used for everyday mail which cuts down its usage quite a bit and makes it a lot harder to build nifty things on top of it like reply block systems.
This is similar to the AOL effect. It is often hard to have respect for an unknown poster from AOL. The remailer at EFGA is new. I've come to realize that this natural hostility towards a remailer is a good reason to put the remailer on a separate domain. We might do this.
Ideally the domain would be shared by other non-anonymous users, but hostility would probably be reduced even if the domain were something like "guest.efga.org", even if many people knew that really meant "anonymous". Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNC2EIJaWtjSmRH/5AQESzQf+NzGRBRjoYL7mQl9q50VsphcnkgQiq1wR XW+UKjrCokfW/Bwt6vMKKJco9cquZiuOkISoCX9+JZlhJkm2l5YxswUcrxaaVNpr T4w1aVQGzcNSDVq3oUwfFiG29S4DQaKV6HD+hz9ffS8fCMtyoA4wkFgLLALqxJpE MsHPQoI2vZtAU7Ht8HgFg2dQsJqoYDAWp8Un9CFnWNYECQ2yPZNVvbiQ7jlmplP6 IrOBQ9E5dk+gaAq4yPfoWD0GTAjBIIaaLMbh+rg+0oUe9LaK0Vl/kIbHx9DvuRN+ 0IbxUy5kwGDhBhWLznDo0B19Xl5QQdj65qBp3TmZqqtQC2MCpeynFA== =2Oiw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
At 08:03 PM 9/27/97 -0400, Anonymous (Monty Cantsin) wrote:
One more question: When redneck is down, do other remailers discard their mail if they cannot connect to it? ... According to Raph, redneck has an uptime of 99.83%. By my understanding, this means for every 1000 messages handled, redneck loses 17.
For a variety of reasons, mail is never "lost" to Redneck because of downtime. Only if the Redneck remailer is unreachable for a period of say five days (it really depends on the sender's ISP) will a message get lost. Then it will be attempted to be returned to the sender, by the Sender's ISP's machine, not redneck. In a case where Redneck is too busy too often, or for some other reason, the sender's ISP's equipment will resend the message to Redneck dozens or hundreds of times until the message goes through. The downtime statistic is more an indication of when email has to be sent more than once to get to Redneck. Apparently this is 17 out of 1,000 messages on the average. To be honest, I don't really know how the stats program works, I'm just assuming this is what is being checked.
For some reason, we are accustomed to the idea that remailers should lose messages.
I'm not sure what you mean here. A properly run remailer doesn't lose messages. There may be criteria that triggers a remailer to discard a message, but a message never gets lost. Did I open up a can of worms by saying that? Policies will vary from remailer to remailer. Some items that might get discarded (or might not) would be things such as Mail from cyberpromo.com A 300MB email bomb 6,000 identical messages to the same address A message to a particular newsgroup Mail to someone who has requested to be blocked Remailers support free speech, but some mild restraints are placed to aid in preventing abuse. If you are talking about setting up a remailer as a business then as a business there would be policies of what did or did not go through. You asked earlier which remailers charge for services. I'm really not sure. Check www.cyberpass.com. I believe they offer anonymous accounts and accept Ecash. -- 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
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