CNN.com on Remailers

[Len Sassaman]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Tim May wrote:

> [The "prompted a bunch of programmers to rethink" comment has it all
> backwards. Chained remailers were deployed in 1992. The theory was
> known from Chaum's 1981 paper, and the flaws in the
> Kremvax/Kleinpaste/Julf/Penet type of approach were widely known: this
> was why chained remailers, in multiple jurisdictions, were deployed.
> Hal Finney wrote the first code for this, building on the
> Perl/Sendmail scripts Eric Hughes had already released.]

The quoted portion is basically accurate (true to what I said), but I was
talking about theoretical attacks at that point. I think I said something
along the lines of:

"The cypherpunks developed a system based on the ideas in Chaum's 1981
paper. Penet-style remailers were potentially vulnerable to hackers and
court orders, which in fact ended up being the downfall of anon.penet.fi.
These problems prompted them to build better remailers."

I had this post up my screen when I was talking to him:
http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.1997.05.29-1997.06.04/msg00310.html

Penet was *in operation* prior to Eric and Hal's chained remailers, right?
If not, then that's my error.


--Len.