Pinging Remailers

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Hal Finney writes:


> What I think is a better idea was proposed here last year, and I think
> someone was doing it for a while.  It is for someone to volunteer to
> be the keeper of the remailer aliveness information.  He runs scripts
> every day to ping the remailers, keeps lists of which remailers are
> currently active, and so on.  This information is collected and put into
> a file retrievable by email or finger.  This way you need only check a

Matthew Ghio was doing this for a while, and posted about it here
several times.

I told him I'd "subscribe to" a robust, stable, pinging service, one
that offered a table of various things, including:

- time in operation (important for deciding to use it or not)

- successful remails out of last N (e.g., "32 of last 34 attempts were
valid")

- maybe a _recent_ result (e.g., "5 out of 5 in last 24 hours were
valid")

- remailer policy, including encryption, logging, etc.

I still intend to pay Matthew once I get back to using such remailers
(I haven't in a long while) and can confirm that Matthew is indeed
offering a stable, robust, useful service. I doubt he'll maintain it
just for me, so maybe others of you can help. (I hate donation-based
systems, so clearly a true "subscription finger" or "subscription ftp"
would be better...and maybe fairly easy to implement, too.)

--Tim May



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