From: edgar@spectrx.Saigon.COM (Edgar W. Swank)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 92 19:40:22 PST
To: Cypherpunks          <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Remailers
Message-ID: <ywm8VB8w165w@spectrx.saigon.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I'd like to thank Eric Hughes and Mike Sherwood (who wrote privately)
and Hal Finney (who responded here) to my requests for enhancements to
Eric's remailer code.
 
By the way, Hal, your signature did not match the associated
plaintext:
 
   WARNING: Bad signature, doesn't match file contents!
 
   Bad signature from user "Hal Finney <74076.1041@compuserve.com>".
   Signature made 1992/12/19 21:43 GMT
 
This is likely due to some trailing blanks in your plaintext. I've
written to Branko to try to get PGP to remove trailing blanks if
-t is active.
 
First, I'm glad Eric agrees that anonymous posting to newsgroups
is a good idea and is on his "to do" list. Until then, thanks to
Hal for posting the info about the ucbvax gateway. I had that info at
one time, before hearing about remailers, but discarded it since I
thought I'd never use it.
 
I'm sorry Eric doesn't agree that stripping the .sig is a good idea.
I respectfully dissent. I've found that I can probably disable
my own automatic .sig, so I suppose this isn't too urgent.
Nevertheless, I would think it desirable to make remailers as easy to
use as posible. Having to remember to disable the automatic .sig is
certainly an inconvenience.  Forgetting to do so could potentially
be very embarrassing or even incriminating!!
 
The pax remailer uses "--" or "__" as sig delimiters (according to
their docs) & apparently this is satisfactory.  I think this means
that "----" would NOT be a delimiter, so it would be unlikely to be
used by mistake.  I wouldn't mind a more explicit delimiter, for
example
 
::--Remailer cut HERE--
 
if Eric thinks "--" is too ambiguous or is likely to be used
inadvertantly in the middle of a msg.  Anyway I guess I can
muddle through for the time being.
 
I agree with Hal that the pax remailer can probably be the first
in a chain to Eric remailers.  Probably also the last in a chain
of Anonymous returns.  But I don't see how pax could be used in
the middle of a chain.  I would encourage Eric to correspond with
the guy running the pax remailer:
 
   anon.admin@pax.tpa.com.au (a human)
 
to see if you couldn't come up with a common remailer code with best
features of both.  Certainly it would be great to have an Eric-style
remailer running in Australia!!

--
edgar@spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank)
SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005  Silicon Valley, Ca