Since the project appears not to have a mailing list of their own, so I figured I may as well ask here. What is the current development status of Mixminion? I see no updates since 2007, though the network appears to still be running. -- Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn@speakeasy.net>
Since the project appears not to have a mailing list of their own, so I figured I may as well ask here
It was effectively killed (or put into hiatus) when Roger Dingledine hired Nick Mathewson to work full time for him on tor a couple years ago. Mixminion was effectively Nick and Roger's baby. Roger jumped first to pursue Tor full time and then brought Nick over later. Since then nobody had picked up the torch. I spoke with Roger about this a couple years ago at Defcon and his take was basically he could do more good (and arguably has) with Tor than he ever could with Mixminion given the steep entry curve for normal users to Mixminion, the indifference of the layperson to anonymous email given the growing Web 2.0 post-email web forums and blogs, and a greater need for anonymous surfing, posting, and tcp streams than email. I have cc'ed Roger on this if he wants to add further information; I don't have Nicks email. -Peter
On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 12:11 +0000, Peter Thoenen wrote:
Since the project appears not to have a mailing list of their own, so I figured I may as well ask here
It was effectively killed (or put into hiatus) when Roger Dingledine hired Nick Mathewson to work full time for him on tor a couple years ago. Mixminion was effectively Nick and Roger's baby. Roger jumped first to pursue Tor full time and then brought Nick over later. Since then nobody had picked up the torch.
I spoke with Roger about this a couple years ago at Defcon and his take was basically he could do more good (and arguably has) with Tor than he ever could with Mixminion given the steep entry curve for normal users to Mixminion, the indifference of the layperson to anonymous email given the growing Web 2.0 post-email web forums and blogs, and a greater need for anonymous surfing, posting, and tcp streams than email.
That's a shame. There're certainly a lot of email users, even of the younger generations. In particular, email lists are used *quite* frequently by political activists (in my area, at least) -- I've wanted to include an email anonymity network on an Ubuntu remix for a while for this reason, but haven't yet, since Mixmaster seems obsolete and Mixminion's debian package seems to have unfixed security bugs. I admit I haven't done a great deal of research into this, so I might be mistaken. It's also my understanding that Mixminion is more tailored to email and thus more secure than POP/SMTP over Tor could be. Is that the case? Should I care that Mixminion is dead? Would it be a waste of time to write a setup tutorial for it, or integrate it with Thunderbird or Evolution? [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
participants (3)
-
Peter Thoenen -
Shawn K. Quinn -
Ted Smith