Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Bill Stewart]

[The remailer-bandwidth sub-thread...]

> >>>     Were that to happen, I'd bet a bunch of new remailers would be
> >>> in place before the heliocopters were finished refueling.
> >>
> >>Obviously you don't run one: the resources required are _not_ trivial, at
> >>least from the bandwidth perspective.
>
>Its not the bandwidth, its the learning time, for the human who has
>to choose the code to install, install it, configure it, and test it.
>Attention is the limited resource.

Attention *is* the limited resource; if it can be turned into
script-kiddie-fodder it's ostensibly possible to get lots more.
The big wins with Zero Knowledge were supposed to be two things -
professionalizing the software so it's easy to install,
and a business model that encourages ISPs to keep it around
so you're not constantly worrying about getting kicked off your ISP,
which leads to much of the monitoring that requires ongoing attention.
Doesn't look like they won, but I'm glad they tried.

Julf's original remailer ran on a 486 fed by a 64kbps private line.
Modern remailers may get enough more traffic than that, but I doubt it -
that's 691MB/day if you're not worried about really fast response time.
I think most of the current remailers get a few thousand messages/day,
probably averaging less than 10KB/message, so there's plenty of Headroom.
Encryption burns a lot of CPU, but CPU's pretty near free these days.
If the system gets used for Napster-like services, however,
that involves lots more traffic.

Cable modems don't gain you much - there's great downstream speed,
so the remailer doesn't interfere with your other usage much
and you can absorb bursts of traffic, but the upstream is usually limited
to 128kbps in most of the US - only double the capacity of Julf's.
Also, most cable-modem carriers have highly short-sighted views of
what activities they want to allow and how many complaints they'll tolerate,
so you could get the boot pretty fast if you're not a middleman or in-only.

Petro's example of a colo site with dual gigabit feeds is more interesting,
though that's highly unlikely to be full-time access for Gig-E per host,
and most host computers can't keep up with that kind of load anyway.
Still, the last estimate I heard for Usenet (probably 2-3 years old)
was that the non-binaries used about 1 T1 full-time and the binaries used 2 
more,
so that's a total of ~5Mbps of drivel delivered right to your doorstep;
remailers definitely should be smaller than that Until It Changes.

Somebody said that remailers are pretty far down on the list of people
who the government wants to Squash.  True, but it wouldn't be hard to get
most of them shut down quickly if they did want to, either directly
in the US and cooperating countries, or through online cracker attacks
elsewhere (particularly by harassing the ISPs of the remailer operators,
who may not fold to overseas political pressure but don't like being attacked.)