On Mar 04, 1996 15:11:43, 'tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)' wrote:

At a Cypherpunks meeting a couple of years ago we spent some time brainstorming this. It seemed plausible that a small outfit could make

such

"remailer boxes" and sell them cheaply. (Hardware prices have plunged even

further.)

I had written on similar things over the past few months, on the "$20 Mixmaster" post. New hardware drives with replaceable media in the 100+ Mb range has developed. The Syquest 135 Mb drive, featured in the latest issue of _PC Mag_ can, with the parallel port version, reportedly boot. This means one can have the drive that weighs about two pounds and a $20 disk, place another OS on the disk, and have a very portable remailer system. I viewed the whole thing as more geared to the amateur market, whereby jr. high school students and the like could set up their own remailers, known only to a "small circle of friends." T.C. May's theory of the commercial "mom and pop" version is just as valid. One major way to "increase the noise level" is to greatly increase the number of remailer, especially small ones that may come and go based on little more than word of mouth advertising. Imagine two scenarios. In scenario one, the are two or three large xerox stores in a city. All advertise in the yellow pages and are known throughout the city as the place you go to have your xeroxing done. They all do a tremendous volumn of business. In scenario two, there are an enormous number of small stores with xerox machines, large numbers of home offices with the machines, and large numbers of people with word-of-mouth knowledge of friends with machines to use. What society is easier to crackdown on? --tallpaul PS: A week or two ago, someone posted a notice of anon remailers under Windows that was in alpha test and due in beta in about a month. Same thing. Same benefit.