From: "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 94 17:54:34 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: Rising from the ashes of Underdog
Message-ID: <199411250154.UAA05114@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Happy Thanksgiving, C'punks !

I was forced to shut down the Underdog remailer on this account the other
day, under pressure from my sysadmins.  Since I've been concerned about the
vulnerability of the remailer anyway, I had already laid plans to start a
remailer on another account. I have far too much work to handle over this
vacation to establish it now, but I hope to begin operating a Mixmaster
remailer within the next several weeks. [Lance, could you send me the code, 
please ?  Thanks.]

An interesting dilemma emerges from this project. On the one hand, it would
be good for the operator(s) of an anonymous remailer to be anonymous {her,him,
them}sel{f,ves}, for {his,her,their} protection. On the other hand, it would
be good for the operator(s) to have (a) good reputation(s) so that the 
remailer will be trusted and hence used.  The answer, I suppose, is
positive reputation development for a nym. So I'd say this is a good example
of a concrete application of the study of positive reputation systems, in
case anyone was hunting for justification.

I promised to elaborate on the reasons for the shutdown. The gist is that
some complaints about the Scythe spam were sent over my head, and the effects
finally filtered back down to me yesterday. It appears some people didn't
notice (or chose to ignore) the headers giving my complaint address. Some
folks here are apparently laboring under the impression that I actually
_wrote_ all those articles myself ! Damage control is underway, but my
reputation here has probably suffered permanent harm. :<  At any rate, 
operation of a remailer will apparently violate a forthcoming acceptable 
use policy which was already in the works. I haven't broken any existing
rules, but it's been made abundantly clear to me that such actions will
not be tolerated. Meanwhile, I need to hack the old remailer script to
automatically junk all the remailer mail until it stops flooding my mailbox....

- -L. McCarthy, only halfway through the longest week of my life
"I know you won't let me down, `coz I'm already standing on the ground" -Eagles

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