From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 93 20:27:00 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Remailer Reliability
In-Reply-To: <9309030152.AA04188@toad.com>
Message-ID: <9309030322.AA20056@netcom5.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Eli Brandt writes:

> After being largely off-line for most of the summer, I came back to
> find that my remailer had been bit-bucketing most encrypted messages,
> apparently due to PGP 2.3's lack of backward compatibility.
> (There'd better be a good reason for that, PGP team.) I'll get
> around to building 2.3 RSN.  There will also be a momentary
> interruption of encryption service when this old Sequent machine
> gets swapped out from under the Sequent binary...

Glad to have Eli back! (and we missed you at the Extropaganza last
weekend)

This underscores one of the persistent problems with remailers: the
generally flaky nature!

(No insult or criticism intended...the folks who run remailers are to
be commended, but the fact is that "multiple hop" remailing routes are
are a real gamble these days, what with so many remailers temporarily
or permanently disabled or (somehow) not passing messages through.)

Karl Barrus's list of functional remailers is a great first step, but
we need to somehow establish a better "market system" of remailers
(digital postage woud be a boon here) so that the upness or downness
of remailers would be more predictable.

Like others, I suspect, I have to "ping" the remailers before sending
anything, and then hope and pray they aren't taken offline for
maintenance (or whatever) between the time I ping them and the time I
use them for something important.

If Sameer Parekh's "instant remailer" code multiplies the number of
remailers by some factor, we will even more urgently need to deal with
this issue of remailer reliability.

-Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.