From: b44729@achilles.ctd.anl.gov (Samuel Pigg)

On the user side, I think a good tool to augment this would be a mailer program which kept a list of the functioning remailers with keys, and randomly selected a route through them using a random (reasonable) number of hops, and performing the necessary nested encryptions. Then it could start the remailer hopping process via special socket connection to the first remailer in the chain.

This seems like a good idea. Note that on the ftp site there are scripts and a program which will set up a chained remailing if you are willing to type in the names or numbers of the remailers to use. Extending these to use a random route or set of hops would not be a major job.

Perhaps a protocol could be worked out for the mailer program to request from any one of the remailers a current list of the functioning remailers? (in an effort to transparentize the process some more, as manually maintaining a list of current remailers would be tedious.)

More and more I think this would be a good idea. People are always complaining about temporary "down time" among the remailers. Perhaps someone could run a service which would run every night, ping all the remailers, and keep a file with a list of those remailers which have responded in the last 24 hours. This file could be made available by finger, ftp, or some other method. Perhaps someone could volunteer to write such a beast? This is another project that seems doable in a moderate amount of time. Putting these two together, as Sam suggests, would produce a more robust and convenient way of using the remailers. Nice ideas, Sam. Hal Finney hfinney@shell.portal.com