From: Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 94 20:15:54 PDT
To: solman@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: anonymous anonymous remailers?
Message-ID: <199408040315.XAA24952@cs.oberlin.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> > Assume we create the alt.anonremailer.net newsgroup mechanism that  
> > Jonathan Rochkind recently suggested (and it worked). >  > Could we
> then not use the newsgroup, in combination with a net of   >
> well-known remailers, to give us the capability to have some remailers
> at   > unknown locations by having some remailers post encrypted reply
> blocks as   > their "addresses"?
> 
> This is just painfully non-scalable. Sure it will work for now, but
> its not something that will last once large numbers of people begin
> using it.
 
Why? Which part, the whole idea of a remailer control newsgroup, or just
the idea of remailers with unknown locations? I'm not sure how reliable
remailers with unknown locatoins would be (one remailer in the chain
goes down, your unknown remailer can't be contacted, and there's no easy
way to verify whether the chain is still intact any more), but I'm not
sure I actually see anything non-scalable about it. Nor about the
"alt.anonremailer" concept. If you've got 500 remailers posting once
a day, your still not the largest newsgroup out there. And when combined
with a realtime verification system (you get the address of the remailer
from the newsgroup, and _then_ you connect to a certain port and get an 
acknowledgement message, to make sure the remailer is up), you could
lower traffic yet further. Maybe you only need to post once every ten
days with the "my remailer is here" message. This could then accomodate some
3000 remailers and still not be as high traffic as comp.sys.mac.hardware.
And I think by the time there are 3000 remailers to be accomodated, the net
will be easily handling full motion video, and people will be exchanging
20 minute long quicktime movies in the newsgroups, and we wont' have a 
bandwith problem at all.
 
But maybe I'm missing something obvious. Enlighten me.