From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 1997 01:02:23 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: Traffic Analysis (fwd)
Message-ID: <199710051718.MAA00600@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Subject: Re: Traffic Analysis (fwd)
> Date: Sun, 5 Oct 97 11:59:53 -0400
> 
> On 10/3/97 10:49 AM, Jim Choate (ravage@ssz.com)  passed this wisdom:
> 
> >If the MTBF for a remailer is n then the MTBF for m remailers is 
> >n*m. Inother words the remailer chain gets less reliable as it gets 
> >longer.  
> 
>   Jim, you want to take a look at that "n*m" again ... it doesn't
> wash. means MTBF goes *up* which means *more* reliable.

Remember n is a fraction, failures/time_period ...

If your MTBF is 1 failure per year for each system and you have 10 systems
your MTBF is 10 failures per year. Looks like multiplication to me....

Course you can look at it another way as well. Which would mean you would
have 1 failure every 10th of a year. That's division, and also misleading
because failures don't care about the time period, they may happen all
at once.

Depends on how you look at MTBF, I generaly look at it the first way because
I can use addition if I'm working on a system that don't have multiplication
(eg machine code on a 68HC11) that way I don't have to build some damn
floating poing library to do division ...

Statistics, damn statistics, and lies.


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