Free Email as Anonymous Remailer Re: NPR is at it again...

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

>>Some commie law professor broad :-) is talking about how there oughtta be a
>>law against anonymous remailers, deja news, and various forms of "illegal"
>>email...   >>The ganglia twitch...
>
>like hotmail and yahoo mail??? these are *awesome* remailers. I picked
>up a yahoo mail account recently and am blown away with all the *FEATURES*!!
>separate folders, filtering, external mailboxes support through POP,
>binary attachments, my gosh!!!!! my cup runneth over, for free, TOTALLY
>ANONYMOUS   check it out cpunks, a cpunk wet dream!!

They're NOT SECURE!  But Web anonymizers can fix most of the holes.
In particular, Hotmail + www.anonymizer.com is a reasonable
substitute for the old penet.fi remailer.

There are scurrilous rumors that some people actually put bogus information on 
their free email accounts!  (My cat certainly didn't do that :-)
But the portal services can keep records of who's connecting to them,
at least by IP address, which can be traced back to ISPs,
and from there back to phone lines, etc., depending on the extent
of records the various ISPs keep.  It's not enough without anonymizers.

I suspect this is what will replace the current remailer system -
chaining through some set of Crowds, Onions, and commercial and free
anonymizers to reach a free email system to transmit and receive email.
An interesting project would be a free low-volume anonymizer cgi for Apache,
given the large number of current users and the much larger number
of people who will run web servers once they have cable modems.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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