From: "L. Detweiler" <ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu>
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 94 17:33:15 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Remailer Technology
Message-ID: <199401170131.SAA21284@longs.lance.colostate.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Hello darlings! I was playing with your remailers recently, yesterday
in particular, and was a bit disappointed in them for a variety of
reasons. I got a list of the current ones from K.Barrus some time ago
but even this supposedly up-to-date list had a lot that appeared not to
work. Out of ~20 on the list, ~8 sent back a ping message. One kept
sending me some strange error.

In another test, I sent out an informative posting to a whole bunch of
mailing lists recently through some of the remailers. The remailers
seem to be very fragile and can be overcome by a huge onslaught of
postings. It appears that every new message spawns a new process, and
the machines get overloaded and don't have memory left to do anything.
Kind of a serious flaw! One could mess them up doing this. Good thing
that no one has any malicious feelings toward the cypherpunks or their
remailers, or this might have already happened.

As a solution to the `spawning' problem, here is a possibility: I am
just guessing, but I bet the perl script is grabbing in the message
from the incoming socket at the beginning, and then closing the socket,
and then going about its business to send the message out. But during
this period, new messages can be sent to the now `clear' socket, hence
spawning a new process. A solution would be to keep the socket `busy'
for the duration of the execution of the perl code. Another solution is
to have the messages sent into a buffering script, and something else
continuously running in the background to go through the queue to send messages.

Finally, I was wondering if anyone else was doing Ping tests on the
remailers for run times and whether they post them. If there is
interest I would be willing to write a script to automate this process
and post the results say every week, so that people can keep abreast of
what remailers are active and responsive. If we want a strong
infrastructure for all our evil deeds, we have to make sure that it is resilient!

Thanks, and please don't flame me for trying *earnestly* to contribute!