At 05:10 PM 9/28/97 -0400, (Monty Cantsin) wrote:

If the downtime statistic reflects connection failures it isn't that useful. This sort of problem is relatively common on the Net and is handled automatically. I strongly suspect it really does reflect disappeared messages.

A missing message may just be a delayed message. Almost all remailers on Raph's list are at a 99+% uptime rate. This figure is probably computed based on a ping to rlist and a reply through the reordering pool. I would suspect that Raph waits for the latency period of the remailer. If the ping does not return, then uptime is less than 100%. My suspicion is these pings are "missing" because they are near the end of the list of pings and just stuck in the reordering pool, or stuck in the normal connection failure process. I've personally had messages in the reordering pool for over six hours. Since almost all of the remailers on Raph's list are at 99+% uptime rates, then I would daresay no messages get lost. Even if you wish to assume that remailers lose messages due to bugs in the software, a payment system is not likely to fix that any more so than the current group effort. Public domain, freeware, and shareware software has often had higher quality than commercial software. -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key