Gnutella remailers

[Steve Schear]

At 09:57 PM 9/3/2001 -0700, A. Melon wrote:
> > I know this suggestion has been made before, probably by myself, but it
> > seems the remailer programmers may be missing a good opportunity in not
> > pursuing the inclusion of remailer code in the popular Gnutella cleints
> > (e.g., LimeWire).  They advertise they are looking for new "content
> > communities."  http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/formgroup I don't see any
> > reason why email can't be added as a new form of content.
>
>Remailers are trickier than other P2P applications because of the problem
>of sending the mail out.  If one of the P2P users gets "volunteered"
>to be the outgoing portal for some harrasing mail, he won't be running
>the client for long.

I believe Ian Goldberg came up with a rather elegant solution: allow the 
the clients to only function as entry and middlemen remailers and use 
throwaway accounts at hotmail or similar fall guys as the exit points.

>Probably the biggest complaint people would have is untraceable spam.
>It's already a nuisance with other chat systems.  If the anonymous comm
>system has per-user traffic limits or some other way of handling spam
>then it could be a good basis for no holds barred discussions and data
>exchange.

Hashcash or a similar computation-based postage (e.g., the camram project, 
if it ever gets itself together) is probably a better solution to SPAM 
(untraceable or not).

steve