Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)
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Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 02:29:28 -0400 From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org> Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)
At 12:25 AM 9/29/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org> So I proposed, and documented, that the minimum level to achieve this would be a $50K investment over a year's time. This is in fact, more or less what the Cracker remailer takes to run.
I have to disagree on the annual cost to run. Considering the load of remailers a simple ISDN would be sufficient.
Sure. You can run a remailer on whatever bandwidth, and under whatever conditions you choose.
Duh.
When I did a breakdown of the pricing, I simply put forth what Cracker has behind it, not the minimum required. But with an ISDN line, you then have to have a location to house it, so you in theory require rent. You also add one more thing in the loop that is subject to failure.
Like a T1 doesn't require a POP. Like T1's and their associated CSU/DSU's and such don't break (tell that to several of my customers who will get a hearty chuckle out of that one). Like they don't need air-conditioning and other support services.
The winsock remailer demonstrates that a remailer can run on a 28.8K PPP connection, part time. Remailers never have been bandwidth intensive.
True, but to be effective they must be available on demand and the user shouldn't have to wait until your auto-dialer feels this is a good time to deliver the service.
An advantage of the 10MB connection for Cracker is that when those several hundred megabyte mailbombs, and thousands of addresses to the same location come in, they can be discarded faster than with a 64K ISDN connection.
I have found that my 128k connection very seldom gets congested even with high traffic. Other traffic choke points usualy limit the amount of traffic that I see. Even when one of my customers runs their resume tracking program (which will saturate a ethernet easily in testing) can seldom saturate the line for more than a few seconds.
In reality, Cracker runs with whatever resources have been made available to us. It turns out we were offered a spare 10MB connection before we offered a spare 64K connection. And interestingly enough, the true cost of the 10MB connection is less than the 64K ISDN connection would be. There are definite advantages to a colocated machine even if it is what we are "stuck with".
Ah, so cracker is not a true commercial model but rather a hybrid then? You pay for some services and a 3rd party donates the rest? I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those figures to a true commercial enterprise. Whether you have realized it or not, all those seemingly great freebies and perks for nothing actualy make the remailer less stable because your operation relies on the good feelings of a 3rd party which can be used to Mallet's advantage. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|
At 07:46 AM 9/29/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those figures to a true commercial enterprise.
Cracker is a colocated machine. I've said this before. The connectivity charges includes space, electricity, air conditioning, back up power, network management, bandwidth, and so forth. For connectivity pricing, I took the cost of a rack and prorated it for one machine. Cracker is run by Electronic Frontiers Georgia (EFGA). EFGA is a non-profit Georgia corporation. No, I never said we were a commercial enterprise. I merely outlined what the equivalent cost to a commercial enterprise would be. In Cracker's case, that is $50K per year based on prorated prices, not the full charges. Of course I left out our donated legal time we have. When used, that is a chunk of money. $50K per year would not begin to cover the costs of operation for a standalone commercial remailer operation. It does represent what Cracker currently is using, including current donated resources. To run Cracker as a standalone commercial enterprise would take a lot of ecash, and I don't think it would be feasible at this point in time. For an existing internet business, adding a remailer may be very inexpensive, a cost of practically zero, except for the complaints. -- 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
I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those figures to a true commercial enterprise.
Depending on the security, performance, and price you're looking for, you can run your own machine on your own premises, run your own machine in somebody else's colocation facility (either as a favor, like anon.efga.org may be, or using a commercial ISP), have somebody else run a dedicated machine for you (mostly ISPs), buy a shell account on an ISP or other service provider's machine, use a free shell account from somewhere, or use an IP-only connection. Sure, free colocation space is nice, but there _are_ plenty of ISPs running commercially reliable colocation services that get you UPSed electricity, professionally maintained routers, and some share of a T1 or T3 to the world, for far less than the rent you'd pay for doing the whole job yourself, since they have economies of scale by handling multiple colocation customers and also handling their own servers. Shell accounts are still typically $20-30/month, though obviously it's a lot less secure since somebody else has root on the machine your remailer's secret key lives on, but that does include professionally maintained hardware, mail systems, and backups. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
Jim Choate -
Robert A. Costner