-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- A side note: "The ultimate hacks of Wall Street." Now THERE is an idea... You think Donald Trump could see the usefulness of e*? Ivan Boskey? (sp) To the point: JP's withdrawal, and Homer's thread point to something that I've felt for a while: The classification of our tools as munitions has an important point--they should not be used by children. A.S.R not withstanding, (such a person has had their childhood robbed) what we are doing is _very serious_. Sometimes we talk about pulling down the entire structure of our governments and economy as if it we a Sunday afternoon parlor exercise, or a pipe dream. It is neither. We are on the verge of a restructuring of our society. Cypherpunk projects are the bleeding edge. Implementation calls for serious, considered efforts. Childish behavior is not only uncalled for, it must be anticipated and prevented, or as a minimum, found and fought. I have long been concerned that the remailers are far to vulnerable to either childish abuse or TLA attacks. The former is reaching the stage of threatening to swamp us, either by resource depletion, or by stigmatizing our efforts. There is little, if anything, we can do to stop a chained, PGP'ed mail bomb, "This is mail bomb number XXX. Boom!" It is therefore in our best interest to not encourage children to send such messages in such a way. I believe Homer's message was erroneous for this reason. We do have considerable interest, however, in maintaining a positive image. Positive image is a multifaceted jewel. We must look to preserve it as much as possible while pursuing our goals. We are capable of controlling mail bombs, for instance, in the following way: Take an incoming message, capture From: line. Strip header. MD5 body. Add to sorted table [From: MD5(message) date]. Check for repetition of first two fields. If reps = 1, forward message. If reps = 2, send message to From: "Possible error. Two copies of message <message> received." If reps = 0 mod 5, send letter to postmaster@From:. "Possible mailbomb or spam. <reps> copies of <message> received from <From:> at your site in the past week." Clear table of entries more than a week old every midnight. If all remailers did this, then no matter where the net was entered, the messages would be rejected. And spammers/bombers would be spamming/ bombing their own postmaster. Probably a bad idea. If not all did it, then add special handling to hit remailer-operator@. This would encourage the operator to auto-magically handle the spam-bomb himself. Dealing with huge files and/or TLA's is a topic for another day. Remember: spook@cia.gov, snitch@fbi.gov, and cracker@nsa.gov are probably all listening, maybe even denning@aol.com. Is it a stretch to consider that _they_ might spam-bomb us, trying to discourage the best? Finger or request keyserver for PGP 2.6.2 (tm) key. PGP<->Mail/News installation incomplete. Factors for modulous are not proven primes. Key may be far weaker than expected. Encode at your own risk. Key ID: 14712B4D 1994/12/26 Nathan H. Zook <nzook@bga.com> Key fingerprint = 44 B3 D8 66 3D 55 1E 2E F8 92 22 A6 33 8C DE 24 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBLx3pBHmgMs8UcStNAQGuhAf+KGYJnYRPAODHvjF4CmakZ1oZKDo2BiFQ 5nkphXtoTgADVQM8XlYhqW3MTKhKo30dfZ0/GMLdaZ+4SCM85thqNvLW1klaandk tuAF4NBTx8f5rb3ufm9iktXv907smf6aUZAwz0T4cl630+/dVPI2Jkit0jid5KmD TzB/bFr1lM7Vp2ZoR+Y6/geYYNx06OMvLl62hTpGP2KtusFs1erRuYXj8UJkXd77 JNnTLjrPdLhx6iIQ6IxNXAISnmIgXPGFVRto/EEgFa8XWUoOBeuRdBGhT4eoNAjX 45YxdJrmlSPxHZDu8P2rldfays31qPCY7qJtSKBdRzYqqyz8LT+4YQ== =luXm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----