At 07:31 PM 10/27/96 -0800, Tim May wrote:

But Greg probably already knows about all these things. If he thinks there's a market, maybe there is.

Actually, I don't think there's enough of a market to justify a real business; I don't see any serious $ here (in fact, there's probably very little $ here). As far as I can tell, most of the money being made with the Internet so far comes from selling things to people who think they can make money on the Internet. My mention of a price comes from my impression that there may be some folks who'd be interested - mostly law-oriented folks but this is likely true of other "serious professionals/academics" - but who have organized their information gathering practices around paper, such that an electronic-only publication isn't "real" to them. But given my relatively poor cash flow situation and the tendency of human beings to sign up for anything that's free, I don't think it's a good idea to offer free FAX or paper distribution, since those media choices would cost me per subscriber. Mostly I see a hole right now in between the one-shot web pages/FAQs people build which explain remailers (and other privacy technologies) and Raph's remailer list, which is pretty tightly focused on the technical/reliability aspects of cypherpunk-style remailers without providing a lot of historical or technical context. (To clarify, I think both the FAQ's and Raph's remailer reliability tracking are valuable, and I see them as inspirations to also do something useful.) Also, the privacy/remailer market is fragmenting (evolving), with pro-privacy (or faux pro-privacy, or anti-privacy) mail receiving/forwarding services, viz c2.org, netbox.com, pobox.com, thebook.com, mailmasher.com, hotmail.com, etc. I see it not as a business but more like a way of organizing what I'm thinking about already in a way that might be interesting to others. -- Greg Broiles | "We pretend to be their friends, gbroiles@netbox.com | but they fuck with our heads." http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | |