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I guess it'd be possible to treat remailers as disposable - when one had pissed off enough people, it could be abandoned - but this lack of long-term reliability seems poor.

Someone had posted a protocol scheme that would allow new remailers to advertise their existence on a newsgroup, which would cause any number of auto pinging "reputation" services to begin monitoring this new remailer automatically. Once reliability, etc., was established, the reputation services would "add" this node to the remailernet. Similar actions would take place if a remailer just "went away". Quality of service, features, etc., would be part of the advertisement, and would result in a form of competition between remailers. Similarly, reputation services would have differing criteria for "blessing" a site, which would result in a form of competition between the _reputation servers_ for a good reputation. The key to this whole scheme is in the automation of the process. Done correctly, it would result in a self-organizing, self-healing ecology of remailers, that would naturally gravitate toward providing the features and services in most demand. Yeah, sure. Looks good on paper, anyway. Lots of real-life hassles to work out, but it _probably_ could be made to work. == Johnathan Corgan "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." jcorgan@scruznet.com -Isaac Asimov -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLyB9001Diok8GKihAQEZAAP+MU2qaWZahpOgsdoyk7XuHvAnMbNGgalw zJqLNz4H8knRINEZsDsTR7pIMbnhMWxlRfDtgXXNCE8KXvdCA3FkVyG4MItFn5vF fQZxw9rg87m/B9YwEOEah9N4RhNXs2RHsB8dVinMkncw9REklWbGkydcxf0EvKkc Y6JgzEkX54w= =Tu9L -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----