Remailer-list pinging frequency

[Raph Levien]

Hi all,

   I believe that I am providing a useful service with my remailer
list, but I have received one complaint about the frequency of
pinging.

   I send hourly pings. This is helpful for quickly identifying
remailers which have gone off the net. If you don't want me to do
this, let me know. I apologize for not having brought this up before I
started with the hourly pings.

   My pinging script can be configured to adjust ping frequency on a
per-remailer basis. If you would like a greater interval between
pings, I would be happy to do this. I already do this for penet.

   An anonymous poster from rebma criticized ping traffic as a way to
improve remailer mix. It might be that the two goals (improving mix
and collecting good statistics) are at odds, but I would be willing to
modify my ping script to make the pings more like mix-improving
traffic. Ideas include:

1. Encrypt the ping, so it looks like so much PGP traffic.

2. Pad it with a random amount of junk (but not _too_ much :-), so
traffic analysis based on size will fail.

3. Chain it through other remailers. A good approach might be to
choose two random remailers out of the "top five," and sandwich rebma
between them. The drawback is that it penalizes rebma for their
latency and failure rate, but this might be acceptable.

4. Randomize the time that the ping is sent.

   If the operator of the rebma remailer would be so kind, please let
me know if and when I have been de-Detweilered, and whether you would
like me to implement any of these suggestions.

   Also, I plan to autopost the remailer list every Monday, to both
cypherpunks and alt.privacy.anon-server. This is my first experience
with spamming the net, so if anybody has any objections or cautions, I
would like to hear them.

Raph Levien