jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind) wrote:

++Mail ping. Non-IP, simple, slow. ++ A mail ping simply consists of sending a message to a remailer with a Request-Resending-To: yourself. When you get it back, you know the remailer is alive. This has the advantage that it's hard for the remailer to trick you, even if it is an evil NSA remailer that wants you to believe it is alive, even though it really throws messages in in the trash. It can't differentuate between your "ping" (to be returned) and a normal message (to be thrown in the trash).

Sure it can. if (message_origin==request-resending-to) forward_message; To get around this you would have to chain, thereby relying on an additional remailer. Of course your origin and resend addresses could become are different through net.sorcery, but to rely on existing (and most likely transient) security loopholes are unsound foundations to construct a persistent reliable remailer net. Of course, clever Evil Remailer (tm) operatives might have their machines work *most* of the time, and have more than one, so that the entire network of remailers *seems* unreliable, or subtlely mangle encrypted messages so that the ball drops somewhere else. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- P M Dierking | "Emptiness is consistent with everything" --Nagarjuna