From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 17:21:13 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Message pools _are_ in use today!
Message-ID: <199607180615.XAA12448@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>>receive message pools by satellite dish-- hurray for true broadcasting!  

tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) wrote:
>Yeah, and I should have mentioned the "PageSat" Usenet distribution model,
>too. (It was a really hot topic 3-4 years ago, but I've heard little of it
>in the past couple of years...the rise of the Web has made passive
>downloads of Usenet a lot less interesting.)

Volume has been a real problem.  Usenet is probably close to 10MB/hour
these days, which is 30 kbps if you don't compress it, or 10-15 kbps
compressed (since the binary newsgroups are a good chunk of the volume
and are already mostly compressed.)  That's pushing what you can do with
really-low-end satellites, and as Tim says, the Web has affected the
size of the market for that kind of service.  

I don't know how easy it is to get one of these pseudonymously, and they
do cost a bit, but an amusing transmission medium for message pools is
alphanumeric pagers; you can get pager cards for PCs, or just limit
your messages to 250-byte blocks....  Bay Area alphanumeric service
probably costs $25/month, though nationwide is $60-100.

>2. The authorities already have identified a suspect, call him "Bob," and
>wish to know if he reading (and perhaps decrypting) messages to "Alice."
>
>As several of us have noted, #1 is tough--real tough. The authorities would
>have to contact 10,000 or more ISPs who have local newsfeeds and subpoena
>their logs of who read which newsgroups...assuming such logs are even kept

Getting everybody is tough.  Getting a lot of the potential suspects,
however, isn't as tough as it looks - the vast majority of home Internet
users are on AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, UUNet, Netcom, or (RSN) AT&T.
Anonymous Message Pool users are a bit more likely to use niche-market ISPs,
especially under pseudonyms, but if the number of users increases 
significantly there'll still be a reasonable proportion on the big carriers,
which are probably more cooperative and probably keep more complete logs.

On the other hand, several of the big players are good places to get 
disposable accounts charged to that secured Visa debit card you
opened under a pseudonym....

#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs
#				Confuse Authority!