From: rarachel@prism.poly.edu (Arsen Ray Arachelian)
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 94 09:30:31 PDT
To: rishab@dxm.ernet.in
Subject: Re: Faking hostnames and inconvenient anon IP
In-Reply-To: <gate.1TogLc1w165w@dxm.ernet.in>
Message-ID: <9404271617.AA29790@prism.poly.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


> Oh, there are other ways of faking hostnames, depending on your level of access
> to systems (your closest nameserver, for example). My point was that it's not
> quite as convenient to have anon IRC (or any other IP protocol) as it is to send
> anon mail through a remailer.

In that case one of us (who owns a machine directly plugged into the net)
should set up an anon server that doesn't check for user/host names, or
better yet, provide a bouncing off point for anonymous telnet...  Say
something like you telnet to port 666 on toad.com, and then you're given
an anonymous temporary id.  At that point, you are prompted with a menu for
what to do... telnet to another site, ftp into another side, call 
an IRC server from somewhere, etc.  All the anon server would have to do
is bounce packets...   I think this idea came up before... an anon packet
forwarding service of sorts...

If a user goes through several of these, s/he is granted pretty decent
anonimity...  Perhaps another play on this would work with encrypted
packets?  Where each user who dials into one of these packet bouncers
talks to it via a PGP like RSA and key-exchange system.

All the IRC server will see is that someone named anon7 logged in from
eminar.toad.com...

Of course if the sysadmins who run irc's are true assholes, they'll
blacklist the anons, but if there are enough anon packet bounces
on the network, this will be pretty hard.  They'll just have to recognize
that the right of privacy is one that outweighs their desire to keep
logs.  Granted anon packet bouncers can be used to throw junk mail
or messages thought irc's, but we could install a time delay in the
anon forwarding software so that it can receive quickly, but only send
slowly.  (Slowly enough for one person to type to an IRC, but not for a script
to send thousands of messages.  Granted, there are still other
forms of abuse available, but if we could limit one we could
still get somewhere and not have the IRC sysadmins bitch too
hard....