Re: REMAIL: cypherpunks strategy

[Johan Helsingius <julf@penet.FI>]

> Thousands of users are not enough.  If individual users are doing it,
> they are too subject to pressure from their system managers.  We don't
> have software capable of rerouting among a thousand remailers, 100 of which
> get their accounts canceled daily, 100 new ones added each day.  We
> aren't likely to get it soon, either.

Agree 100%.

> To permanently restore at least last month's level of service, we need
> a couple of dedicated, firewalled, buttressed sites.  You want a few
> geographically separated people who own their own systems (or who own
> or run the company that owns them), who have solid network links
> (possibly redundant), and who are fully committed to the idea -- as
> committed as funet.fi to persist past the vilification and harassment
> and threats.

Uh... I'm not so sure FUNET (the Finnish University NETwork) would agree
with you ;-)

But the truly overwhelming response in support of anon.penet.fi (I still
get flooded by notes of sympathy and support) on the net seems actually
to make a difference, as does effort of prominent personalities (especially
Peter Honeyman) to contact the Finnish autorithies. After talking to
them today, I might actually risk putting up the service again. But I
feel that to ensure that this is the last time the net.demigods try to
close down a server like this we should do our best to address their
concerns. This way, everybody saves face, and we might get a lot of
brownie points.

So what I would like to suggest is that I announce that anon.penet.fi
mark II goes on the air - let's say April 15th, with slightly changed
policies and with all the technical improvements we've been discussing.
And meanwhile I set up an adress for receiving sugestions on
improvements (both technical and political), and encourage newsgroups to
do polls on allowing or disallowing anonymity in that particular group.

But before doing anything, I really would like to get comments, views
and ideas from all of you!

> And those people need backup from the rest of us -- legal help if they
> need or want it, money to pay the networking bill if things get tight,
> loans of backup equipment during failures under load, system
> administration when folks try to break in and trash their machines,
> software creation and maintenance, advocacy, policy work, advice,

Couldn't agree more. If I go for anon.penet.fi Mk. II, I really want to
replace the current mess of shell and awk scripts with something more
efficient (linear search of a 0.5 meg database isn't very speedy...),
and I really would like to have code to check that the incoming SMTP
message actually comes from and existing site, and so on - so there is a
lot of coding to be done that I really could use some help on!

> a bunch of shoulders to cry on and warm words of encouragement.

Yes! I don't know how to express how important the support has been! You
really have to be a stubborn, crazy bastard to do anything like this,
but the hate mail still wears you down if you don't get a kind word of
encouragement every now and then. I really have to thank all of you for
your support!

> Three to five people providing such setups, in collaboration, would
> wedge a steel-toed boot so firmly in the door that it couldn't be
> slammed by any dyspeptic "net god".

Well, looking at the way the discussion is going all over the net, I
think we might be almost there already!

	Julf