The idiocy of Choate

[Tim May]

On Saturday, December 29, 2001, at 03:27 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 09:01 PM 12/17/2001 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
>> The sender having to know all the steps is a major threat to the 
>> standard
>> remailer model. In fact it's one of the major shorcomings with the 
>> current
>> approaches. The sender should at most be able to set the number of
>> remailers, not which ones. That way there's on evidence sitting around 
>> on
>> their machines (and you can posit throwing the keys away each time - 
>> but
>> then you have to go out and get them again...and around and around we 
>> go).
>
> The remailer-stats pingers publish this information on web pages;
> you can retrieve it and read it by hand, or use a client program to 
> fetch it.
> If you don't want to keep it, don't.
> And some of the clients are web pages themselves (Javascript or 
> whatever),
> so you can just retrieve them.


As others have remarked, Choate simply has no clue how even the 
Cypherpunks remailers of 1992 work(ed).

That he thinks "having to know all the steps" is a bad idea tells me he 
is just too clueless to have ever been taken seriously, even for a few 
months, here on this list.

An old girlfriend of mine grasped the idea of envelopes-within-envelopes 
and how the security of the remailer chain depended on the sender 
deciding on a list of intermediate steps and then encrypting each nested 
envelope appropriately.

"The sender should at most be able to set the number of remailers, not 
which ones. " is one of the stupidest comments I have ever seen on this 
list.

This has been Cypherpunks kindergarten material for a decade (and many 
of us knew it years earlier).

--Tim May



>
> And obviously the sender needs to be able to pick the remailers to use -
> depending on the type of message, some messages need to be sent through
> remailers in appropriately safe jurisdictions, other messages don't
> need much security but need high reliability or high speed
> (so you want to pick remailers with good stats.)
>
>
--Tim May, Corralitos, California
Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.