At 01:06 PM 9/28/96 -0400, "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com> wrote:

Since maintaining a block list is probably one of the most time-consuming tasks involved with operating a remailer, it would be a Good Thing to add an option to the remailer cgi program to operate as a "middleman" remailer. This would only require the remailer operator to add or remove entries from a list of allowed destinations. The operator wouldn't have to deal with disclaimers and would only receive complaints from other operators if the remailer is malfunctioning in some way.

That's another good approach, though a second-string objective compared to having full-scale terminal remailers running everywhere. But it's clearly a strong fallback position, and might be easier to get people to adopt and not turn off. It does depend on the availability of a list of working remailers with the correct feature sets, plus adequate distribution of either PGP keys or some S/MIME-related equivalent. One way to do that is to parse Raph's list appropriately (and check signatures on that); another is to have some centralized (sigh) DNS server do a round-robin distribution so that random.remailer.net picks a random known-good remailer to deliver through, perhaps also delivering a PGP key. I'd far prefer a distributed solution, but this does let people volunteer to take heat for a little while and dispose of their remailers if they have to. In particular, it may be useful for winsock remailers that are willing to connect up and be a delivery remailer when they're connected and disconnect when they're unavailable. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto