At 01:30 PM 9/1/04 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:

Yet we need to make sure we're not abused too much since sooner or later laws will catch up with the remailers should abuse sky-rocket.

You need a Bill of Rights that specifies freedom of expression, and judges that understand it. Since you appear to be European, where eg singers can be busted for singing political songs, these ideas may be foreign to you.

Using techniques like Hashcash should be more or less mandatory even today to make it harder to mailbomb or send large amounts spam? Why is it not?

Because when someone tells us that something is *mandatory*, we tell them to fuck off, and we put them on our watch list. OTOH nothing prevents you from 1. implementing a hashcash-based node 2. automatically filtering what you receive.

Regardless of what any hardcore cypherpunk or old-timers in the remailer community may think about any ideas imposing restrains on the useability of remailers something just have to be made about the abuse of the system.

Will no one think of the chiiildren?

Making sure we have robust remailing services in one shape or another and at the same time have some kind of at least indirect acceptance from legislators and also a low degree of spam flowing through are essential goals.

Any legislator seeking to control how people use a communications medium needs killing.

The average naive and ignorant redneck will never ever understand the principal arguments for free speech that makes remailers useful.

That's why mob rule^H^H^H^H democracy loses to the constitution. If you don't have the latter, you suffer the former.

The average american do not think and analyze what is told to him.

Well duh.

Since providing a true non-censoring remailing service and at the same time safeguard against spam and abuse are therotically incompatible I guess remailers are indeed a paradox waiting to be shut down sooner or later by politicians if we're not open to at least discuss some aspects of how these services are operated.

Why not use one of those "are you human" visually-distorted checks that various websites use? That is robust to automated spam. Adding *voluntary* hashcash to remailer injection nodes is another layer of defense in depth against spammers. BTW, while spam is abuse, is a threatening message really abuse, or just uncomfortable feedback?