From: IN%"rjc@clark.net" "Ray Cromwell" 10-FEB-1996 23:32:12.32

The first piece of the Decense software is designed to provide "penet" like double-blind anonymous transactions for the http protocol. It is written as a cgi-bin script which provides a seamless mapping between anonymous ids and remote web servers. Servers running Decense can be chained like anonymous remailers to increase site level security.

[...]

http://<decense.server.host>/<cgi-bin-dir>/decense/<anonid>/<relative url>

I had one idea that you might want to keep in mind. Most web robots (e.g., Altavista's) try to avoid cgi scripts. Since I would assume that one would wish these to be indexed (information being available doesn't do much good if nobody can find it), this could be a problem. Setting up as to fool the web robots (especially making sure that the Decense urls aren't in the site's robots.txt file) into thinking this is a normal page with an appropriate link would appear to be a good idea. Now, of course the site running Decense would probably not like too much traffic (the reason for most sites not running anonymizing proxies, which should be combined with Decense), I would suggest that the system be set up to receive ecash from the web sites linked (or from the user, although that would remove the web robot access unless you could verify that it was a known indexing robot.) The MarkTwain pickiness on merchants may be a problem on this, depending on what links are available. One idea on getting around this would be to go through the European bank offering ecash; I don't know if their setup is compatible with the MarkTwain ecash, however. Lucky Green? Indeed, setting this up in a European country with good anti-censorship laws would be preferable in any event; the Scandinavian countries might work well. The greater tolerance for some such material in Europe is why I would think that the European bank might be more flexible. (I would be curious if a U.S. business could get a merchant agreement with the European bank; Lucky Green?). -Allen