-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May wrote:

At 2:58 PM -0700 9/25/97, Anonymous (sic) wrote:

...

The remailers should all have about the same latency. 0 seconds seems like a good Schelling point. What would it take to reduce remailer latency to under 60 seconds for most of the remailers? Do people need old 486s to dedicate to the task? Do they need money? Better software?

If you operate a remailer, please tell us what you need to make it really work well. Perhaps the rest of us can help make it happen.

Think about a zero latency. How would mixing then occur? How would the mapping between incoming and outcoming messages be obscured?

Latency, per se, is of course not the key issue. Mixing is.

It depends on your application. Right now, it's hard to get messages through the remailer network in good time *and* the security isn't all that high. Increased traffic would give us more options as far as mixing and the like. But increased traffic won't happen until we have usable remailer network. Right now it's sort of usable, but only for the dedicated, and there aren't many of us. I seem to be the only persistent authenticated nym who posts with any frequency. Tools which are not used do not get improved.

* throwaway accounts, and yet with some robustness or reputation capital backing them

One problem with operating a nym is that people almost always respond to it with suspicion and hostility, even on this list. It would be nice to have an ordinary looking e-mail address that took in messages, encrypted them for your public key, and then sent them out to alt.anonymous.messages for pickup. Going the other way it would be nice if the account would accept signed messages and send them out as normal e-mail or news articles. This would allow nyms to participate in NetWorld like everyone else. Note that this does not require one to trust the operator of the machine - all they have is a public key and no information of your identity. This should be easy to set up.

* increased traffic at all levels

* a profit motive for remailers, using "digital postage" (though this may work against the second point, having more traffic)

If digital postage results in remailer operators making money, this should increase the quality of the remailer network. A high quality remailer network should increase traffic. Once we have a high quality high traffic remailer network which is profitable (!!!), well, things could really start to cook. A quarter per message per hop seems reasonable at this time. The annual revenue hits a million dollars if a little over 10,000 messages a day are handled by the network. This figure does not seem unattainable. Those who find a quarter is too much should start remailers. This is a little off the wall, but if there was a significant market for remailers, some organizations might start affinity remailers. That is, if you like the ACLU you can give them money by routing your messages through their remailer. We tend to like the people we trust. Another feature that would be nice would be to be able to define the message id in advance. Were this available it would be possible to send a message to all three cypherpunks nodes simultaneously to maximize its propagation and to ensure reliability. Were this supported for Usenet gateways, it would be possible to gate the list through the remailers such that the person doing the gating would be hard to identify. Also, BCC fields would be nice. I don't know a way to post a message to the cypherpunks list and bcc: it at the same time to the coderpunks list, but it would be real useful. (The idea is to let people on coderpunks know about a relevant topic, but keep it on the main list.)

* more chaining tools for average users (on Windows and Macintosh machines, using standard mailers)

It's probably better to take the tools as far they will go for ourselves and not worry too much about evangelizing right now. Once the core technologies are in place and are working reliably, we will be in a stronger position to take things to The People, if it doesn't happen of its own accord. 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 iQEVAwUBNCsj3JaWtjSmRH/5AQH2mAf+PCobu6dVqOYFCBsiXFITbKDAWDHpIdHr yOSvSIIK2UI7UYCGq16ECLAvSqyVUQ2xuxVC729CQ61tbHYszcQ+j2+KaorJKREi HmpvKmmQo7fwbeURNdDqIXxxObZDaJMuItqPeMO1QHVt7zPyjh44UUuYZjOV633Z 94LlalFRNyHKD8Q4GCBpsTQ+T1evVYKgHpx5HL2H8hJF2ELMdwJ+JXyU+7xMg0Pe qNo4M39bJG4REQoJ6xZ5xFQp7Vs3PdloLAd7wyencwOnpWCUFzZ53WjM6qdDiLzT 9yZNT5n1ZqM0kf8DikOv4ZsGOiP4E+aRqtJsgyt4tppCpjErk5j3GA== =Birf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----