From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Wed, 11 May 94 23:06:50 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Message Havens
Message-ID: <199405120607.XAA23381@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Karl's idea about message havens is interesting, but I don't fully follow
how it differs from the anonymous pools we discussed last year (one such
pool is being run from the extropia site, I believe).  With a message pool
the receivers sift through all of the messages to see which they can decrypt
with their own public key.  Messages can be sent to the pool via anonymous
remailers.

One problem is that there may not be too many subscribers to any one pool,
so there is not much protection to the users.  With a protocol more similar to
WWW or gopher you might have a larger population of users, although again
you don't have any guarantee of how many other people are downloading all of
the messages.

The other variant on this idea we have discussed is to use Usenet, as
we have seen when people post encrypted messages to Pr0duct Cypher on
alt.security.pgp.  This seems to me to be an inefficient way to send
mail (sending it to thousands of sites just to get to one person) but
it certainly seems to provide good cover to the receiver.  He could be
literally any of probably tens of thousands of readers of that
newsgroup.

Hal