Re: Well known ports and name service

["Jon 'Iain' Boone" <boone@psc.edu>]

hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)  writes:
>
> Any forum which captures the desirable qualities of a public space
> will therefore have to restrict content in some way.  The trick is not
> to restrict content too much, and to make sure the restrictions cut
> broadly across opinion boundaries.

  Agreed.

> >  First of all, I'd like to see remailer servers running on a well-known
> >  port.  That way, anyone could stick up a remailer, provided they had
> >  access to a C compiler.  
> 
> The problem with a well known port is that it restricts remailers to
> one per machine.  Then in fact only one person per machine could set
> up a remailer.  This does make a difference, because the sysadmin is
> not the only one technically able to monitor the remailer; its
> operator is also able.

  Yes, that is a problem.   

> A pseudonymous service, like a pseudonymous person, should not need to
> be linked to any particular machine except during an actual
> transaction.  If I have a pseudonym, I can post from anywhere and my
> identity is communicated by a signature.  Likewise should a
> pseudonymous service be able to hop from machine to machine.
> 
> The techniques of location-independent computing, developed for radio
> links, can be applied here.
> 
> What we need is a name service which has public keys as identities and
> which can map virtual and pseudonymous services to various
> combinations of IP address, port number, and protocols.  In the
> decentralized spirit, this name service should not have a root.
> Someone Saturday mentioned that there was a paper from some Plan 9
> folk about rootlessness; pointers will be welcome.

  Actually, the Mobile IP working group of the IETF is busy defining a 
  system of proxy agents which will accept packets for mobile machines
  and then forward them on to the proper destination.  Something like
  this would be useful for anonymous remailers.  

  Imagine a scheme whereby a "core" of these agents were available on well
  known ports of established machines.  When you start up your remailer,
  it registers with the core agents and does it delivery.  It can then 
  move to another machine.  A lack of a "keepalive" packet every n seconds
  would indicate that the remailer had gone down and it would be purged from
  the records.  

 Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone@psc.edu | (412) 268-6959 | PGP Key # B75699
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