[havenco-discuss] Re: [Announce] HavenCo Sealand Remailer Online

Ryan Lackey ryan at havenco.com
Mon Sep 17 00:23:24 PDT 2001


Quoting David Honig <honig at sprynet.com>:
> At 07:17 AM 9/16/01 +0000, Ryan Lackey wrote:
> >
> >My primary concern is limiting the usability of these services for 
> >HavenCo AUP violations; specifically spam and spam-mailbox.  A per-message
> >charge or decrement would likely accomplish this, along with either payment
> >or proof-of-work.
> 
> You could use human- and not machine- readable text that the user
> has to enter ---many free-hosting sites do this to prevent bots.
> That won't prevent emailing spam to a list, but will prevent
> mass mailings.

That's exactly what I meant by "proof of work".  This topic has been discussed
on p2p lists (mainly by the freenet people), as well as other places.  
Fundamentally, though, I don't like the idea of providing a service based
on "burning" human or computer time; this is deoptimizing best-case 
performance in order to improve worst-case.  And I *do* want automated
programs to be able to use the remailer network, blacknet style.

Other proof of work systems are entirely automated; such as adam back's
hashcash.

Already on the search engine sites which require "read these numbers" to
enter a URL, there are other sites which advertise "all new codes, all
the time".

The only viable long-term solution I see for most of these things is 
charging per-transaction for messages.  Remailers are exactly the kind of
application where "postage" could first be applied.  The problems seem 
twofold:

1) Remailer operators are exposed to new and additional legal threat if they
accept payment for service (right?)

2) It's much easier to trace payment instruments than remailer messages.
While a blinded cash system might only leak "this person is using the
remailer payment system", and not provide linkability to given messages,
it does complicate things substantially, and provides the potential for
a lot of tracing.

It would be an interesting experiment to simultaneously offer a "proof of
human work" system,  a "proof of computer work" system, and a pay per
message system, both bulk and per-message, and see which is most
popular.  Given the existence of ~20 public free remailers, it seems
unlikely people would use them, except perhaps if they had a good
web-based UI, integration into common MUAs, etc.  This would have the
effect of monetizing cpu time and human-who-can-read-numbers time, which
would be interesting.  (sort of like the "get paid to surf the web" stuff).

What would be really cool would be replacing "decipher these numbers" with
some kind of task which produced actual value, but could be evaluated
either by a machine or a horde of other humans; "prove this theorem", 
"sort these files", etc.

I wonder if any other remailer operators be interested in such a system.  It
becomes more interesting as the cost of being a remailer increases, of course.
-- 
Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE]	ryan at havenco.com
CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd.	+44 7970 633 277 
the free world just milliseconds away	http://www.havenco.com/
OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B  DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F





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