From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 21:41:38 -0800 (PST)
To: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
Subject: Re: PGP Security
Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970320212654.00797a30@mail.io.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:38 PM 3/20/97 -0500, Mark M. wrote:

>The fundamental problem with the current remailer network, as others have
>noted before, is that it is a free service open to abuse by anyone.  If
>remailers were commercialized, this would eliminate the spam problem and
would
>provide the remailer operator with resources to legally defend him or
herself.

I don't think remailers get nearly enough traffic (at the moment, anyway)
to fund a meaningful defense, civil or criminal. It takes a lot of messages
at $.25 or $.10 each to come up with $10K or $20K. It's been ~ 2 years now
since my remailer went down, but at that time traffic was pretty low.

Also, charging for remailing is likely to alter the legal arguments
available to a remailer operator hoping to avoid liability for traffic - in
particular, I think it's likely to be a factor which argues in favor of
finding contributory or vicarious liability for copyright infringement,
since the remailer operator gains income through facilitating the
infringement.

Charging for messages will also change the availability of services like
Raph's remailer stats - even a miniscule cost becomes significant if you're
incurring it once per hour per remailer. It's a solution to the "spam"
problem - perhaps the only solution - but it's got other consequences, too. 

>Consider the fact that Cyberpromo has managed to find an upstream provider
>willing to provide connectivity to them, even though they are almost
>universally hated by net users.  They have been able to exist because there
>is a commercial interest.

I don't think a remailer will be able to come up with the kind of money
that Cyberpromo has. If Cyberpromo were a $10/month shell account or a
$20/month PPP account, they'd have been history months ago. 

>The obvious solution to this would be to run remailers in more civilized
countries.

I agree, especially if you define "more civilized" to mean "has an
underdeveloped or underutilized legal system". :)


--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
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http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.