Re: Remailer Use

[eric@Synopsys.COM]

Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu> writes:

>> Suggestion--Put a big "Comment:" field in each remailed message which
>> explains what is going on.  Regular users will get tired of it, no
>> doubt.  Perhaps it could be called "X-Remailer-Education:"
>> 
>> Eric

My solution to this has two parts.

Part 1: mixes should refuse to resend mail to anywhere except the owner
of the mix or other (registered with it) mixes.

Part 2: someone should provide a service that sends a standard text
message to an arbitrary address.  The text message should tell the
recipient how to run a mix and register it with the network of mixes.
It will also say that someone wishes to contact them anonymously.

This should help calm people's fears that they might be held
responsible for abusive messages sent through a mix under their
control.  It is hard for someone to complain about receiving an
anonymous message when they had to explicitly run a piece of software
to be able to receive any anonymous messages at all.

The incentive structure for this system encourages people to run mixes
if they want to retain anonymity.  It has an advantage over filters
that keep a list of places to not send to:  it is a positive filtering
scheme, rather than a negative one, and thus should scale better.

The person who runs the standard text sender of part 2 can feel
comfortable being responsible for the messages sent out because they
wrote or approved the text.  They can throttle the service so the
message can only be sent occasionally to any given address, and block
it entirely for anyone who requests it.

For this to work, we need to have an easily installable mix package
that will run on a large variety of machines.  Not easy, but it should
be where we're heading anyway.

-eric messick (eric@synopsys.com)