-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 4:12 AM +0000 on 8/11/02, David Wagner wrote:

I hope I don't need to point out that always using the same exit remailer does *not* prove that he is using just one hop. One can hold the exit remailer fixed while varying other hops in the path. Your question seems to be based on a mistaken assumption about how remailers work.

Sorry to give that impression, and, as much as I respect you, and James Donald, who also makes the same assertion about me, both of you would be wrong in assuming that I don't know how remailers work, at least in principle. While I haven't ever built a remailer, I *have* used them on occasion, and I did edit Sameer Parekh's excellent introduction to anonymous remailers for one of the first issues of First Monday, when I was on the editorial board there in the middle 1990's. That said, I would be willing to bet a (very :-)) nominal amount that the esteemed Mr. AAARG! is, or was, in fact, using one hop, at most, though to prove the bet out would be difficult thing to do. In fact, to add further insult to his street cred, or at least kick some dust on his patent-leather penny-loafers, I wouldn't be surprised if the remailer is his own, though that would probably be too stupid even for him to do, and I'm not going to waste my time rooting out, even at a first pass, who runs the AAARG! remailer. I just say I wouldn't be surprised, is all. :-). At the foundation, then, my point is still the same one that I started with: the same, well, idiots, tend use the same outbound remailer hops, usually to the exclusion of all other remailer nodes, and, oddly enough, to the exclusion of all other users of that particular remailer. It becomes quite easy then to filter them out, which is, frankly, nice, at least as far as I'm concerned. Besides Mr. AAARG!, another user of a certain Austrian remailer node comes to mind. Both of those gentlemen, if I were to only charitably call them such, do not vary their output remailers, much less do other potentially clueful things, like actually sign their messages, for instance. Obviously all this might have to do with finding enough working remailers to string together, and, of course, the lack of genuinely any easy to use mixmaster clients out there, even now, and not for actually trying, using a whole bunch of money in a couple of cases. I suppose, given the use of lots of remailers as a platform to heckle ostensibly reasonable discussion from the back benches, if not to actually stalk online and send poison-pen email, it's easy to find their difficulty of use a blessing; though like most people who care about such things, it doesn't help the cause of ubiquitous internet privacy too much. Maybe we need cash, or something. Someday. :-). Ultimately, I think it boils down to genuine gall. If someone like Mr. AAARG! would actually endeavor to instruct the residents of the cryptography list, or even cypherpunks :-), of the utility of shoving a particularly egregious bit of technological emetic down our collective throats, or even the throat of the general public, one would think he would have a better clue about remailer hygiene when he treated us to his current round of venturi-vaporised drivel. So, Mr. AARG! is, probably, just some advanced-degree moke who works at Intel, or is a Waveoid, or other such Wintel digital "rights" "management" IP-control fellow traveller, and, given the paucity of his nocturnal emissions from behind the Great Oz's Green Velvet Curtain, or, better, the elementary answers people here are forced to use to explain more rudimentary things than remailer operations to him, probably helps me, just a smidge, with my assertion about his probable clueless use of the remailer network. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPVX8J8PxH8jf3ohaEQJ0MgCgv3PLVPALWxBzYhkTfINn8jC3WkoAoJ+g nkXbBBPv5oaQVL4qTSP+T0Fu =zqRj -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'