Likely application for high-bandwidth proxies (fwd)

[E. ALLEN SMITH]

From: lmccarth at cs.umass.edu

>This makes it harder for transitory proxies, but not for fairly permanent
ones, I suspect. An outfit like C2 could presumably register with a corporate
credit card. Its proxy then carries connections paid-as-you-go with e$, or
paid in chunks in advance with a check.
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	That could work with a known amount of charge, which the person would
pay to the proxy (or some portion of it). A very interesting idea.
	But how about the larger idea of anonymnity (such as through an
organization with anonymous account access) with _general_ access to a
corporate credit card? You'd need to either A. have knowledge of the users
(what I'd call semi-anonymous) or B. get the price of what the person is
purchasing at the time and subtract it from their account. The latter seems
possible with the FV system, so long as it records enough info to distinguish
who's using what so the appropriate account can be charged for it (the system
would allow a yes answer only if the account had enough money to pay for it).
One would need to know in any case at each point when a given account charged
something. This might work via not telling the user the CC/FV number is (which
one would want to do in any case) and logging which account used something
when. One could use multiple credit cards (with multiple fees, unfortunately)
and rotate them around from account to account every day or so (whatever the
finest grain distinguishable by the card report was). I wonder how much info
gets reported back on corporate credit cards to the corporation issuing them.
Any information or suggestions? In general, the problem is finding out what
nym is charging what.
	Another way to do it, but an unpopular one, would be to have a required
deposit equal to the credit limit available on the card. This limit could be
checked on a regular basis (a phone call, hopefully automatable, to the credit
card issuer) and adjusted appropriately.
	-Allen