On 24 Sep 1997 21:11:07 -0500, Eric Nystrom <enystrom@nscee.edu> wrote:

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On Wed, 24 Sep 1997 phelix@vallnet.com wrote:

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remailer could automatically announce itself to the world (perhaps via a newsgroup post). The various listing services would pick up on this. The more automated it is, the better.

How about posting availability notices alt.remailer-availability.announce (create it if necessary) or alt.anonymous.messages?

Yes, I was thinking along these lines, though right now I'm concentrating on the client end of things.

I'm not sure that Usenet would necessarily be the best idea for a primary source of remailer availability notices. After all, the latency associated with Usenet might be a problem.

That's a problem only if we expect remailers to stay up only for a few days at a time. I'm sure such guerilla remailers will exist, but will they be the dominant type of remailers?

And more to the point, some of us have a problem reaching a news server. On a company LAN connected to the Internet, for example, any and every J. Random Eudora-user could or would become a remailer. (You could have 10 or 50 or more remailers per organization -- enough that it would be difficult for the sysadmins to squash them all.) But most companies do not allow access to a news server.

I suspect that a company that didn't allow access to a news server would also not allow you to run a remailer behind their firewall.

A client could telnet out to someplace in the outside world to announce its presence or whatever, but not post to or read from Usenet.

But then we're back to the problem of having a centralized service that can be attacked. I suppose it's unavoidable. Let's hope we at least have many different pinging services.

I think Usenet would serve an important role as a secondary, backup source of information that would support and mirror the pinging services. But to have Usenet as the only source of remailer availablility might be a little short-sighted.

I just had a thought. Run a pinging service through the eternity servers. Anyway, in private email, the thought of digital postage stamps has come up. Are there any ecash system that offer total payer anonymity (payee anonymity is not absolutely necessary here)?