Making Remailers Widespread

[Bill Stewart]

At 01:06 PM 9/28/96 -0400, "Mark M." <markm at voicenet.com> wrote:

>Since maintaining a block list is probably one of the most time-consuming tasks
>involved with operating a remailer, it would be a Good Thing to add an option
>to the remailer cgi program to operate as a "middleman" remailer.  This would
>only require the remailer operator to add or remove entries from a list of
>allowed destinations.  The operator wouldn't have to deal with disclaimers and
>would only receive complaints from other operators if the remailer is
>malfunctioning in some way.

That's another good approach, though a second-string objective compared
to having full-scale terminal remailers running everywhere.
But it's clearly a strong fallback position, and might be easier to
get people to adopt and not turn off.  It does depend on the availability
of a list of working remailers with the correct feature sets,
plus adequate distribution of either PGP keys or some S/MIME-related equivalent.

One way to do that is to parse Raph's list appropriately (and check
signatures on that); another is to have some centralized (sigh) DNS server
do a round-robin distribution so that random.remailer.net picks a
random known-good remailer to deliver through, perhaps also delivering a PGP
key.

I'd far prefer a distributed solution, but this does let people volunteer
to take heat for a little while and dispose of their remailers if they
have to.  In particular, it may be useful for winsock remailers that
are willing to connect up and be a delivery remailer when they're connected
and disconnect when they're unavailable.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts at ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	
# You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto