From: Karl Lui Barrus <klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 94 20:45:21 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: MAIL: commercial remailers
Message-ID: <9408130345.AA22435@flammulated.owlnet.rice.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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I wrote:
>>Interesting point... I guess that is a good reason why free anonymous
>>remailers might not ever die out, but pay remailers may be able to
>>offer enhanced features and services that would tend to attract the
>>vast majority of customers (assuming such a service would be
>>considered as valuable by enough people ;)

Scott wrote:
> In actuality having only purely commercial remailers in a chain
> would likely lead to security concerns of the following nature. When
> remailers end up requiring postage, people will tend to use the
> cheapest remailers to cut down on costs. Who will be in a position to
> offer the cheapest rates under a commercial proposition? Someone who

But this assumes that commercial remailers will not take in enough
money to keep themselves afloat.  Which could very well be true!

What you describe is a serious problem indeed: in which only a "deep
pockets/government front/whatever" can run a pay remailer and most
free remailers exist on unsecure systems.

> This speaks highly for the "every man a remailer" concept. If you know
> people who run remailers and trust that they are not compromised

But this is the problem, if the remailer operator is just an ordinary
user, he/she may not even know their remailer is compromised, since
there is only so much an ordinary user can do.  You're trustworthy
friends may be victim of a sysadmin who does sendmail logging, etc.

Karl Barrus
klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu

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-- 
Karl L. Barrus: klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu         
2.3: 5AD633;   D1 59 9D 48 72 E9 19 D5  3D F3 93 7E 81 B5 CC 32 
2.6: 088C8F21; 97 73 9E 8B 98 3E DD B5  E8 97 64 7E 20 95 60 D9
"One man's mnemonic is another man's cryptography" - K. Cooper