Re: Remailer listings/strategy

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

David Merriman writes:

>         This may have been hashed out in a previous incarnation, but on the 
> subject of remailers and their availability, why not just have each one 
> broadcast a message of it's availability periodically (hourly? every 4 
> hours?) on, say, the Cypherpunks mailing list.  Then, each remailer could 
> also listen in, read in who's up, and if it doesn't hear from a remailer 
> within some period of time (or some number of scheduled broadcasts), assume 
> that it's down until it hears from that system again.  This would also allow 
> individuals to maintain personal listings of available remailers, as well, 
> and automate the process of keeping track of what remailers are 
> up/down/available.
>         The additional traffic wouldn't seem to be _too_ much of a burden, 
> those individuals who didn't want the broadcasts cluttering up their 
> mailboxes could filter them out, and doesn't require massive effort or 
> changes to implement (ie, new newsgroups, etc).
>         What blazingly obvious thing am I missing here, or does it make too 
> much sense to work? :-)

Several flaws:

Mailing lists are a poor forum for sending "I'm up" messages out,
for various reasons:

1. Volume. 20 remailers x a message every 4 hours = 120 message a day
to the list. Not a good idea, for many reasons.

2. Scaling. Even with fewer than 20 remailers, the system breaks down.
Imagine if our goal of hundreds of remailers is met!

3. Not automated. Sending a text message out to everyone, and then
having interested folks write a script to parse the messages and
whatnot, is more work (probably) than having them finger or ping the
remailers themselves (don't have to go through mail as the
intermediary). And the remailer operators themselves would have to do
the donkeywork of creating and sending messages automatically, which
most of them probably won't do.

4. Mail to the list is hardly perfect itself, as we've seen many
times. Delays, downtime, etc. Why inject a new delay/variable?

5. Function. Basically, it's not the function of a mailing list like
ours to broadcast such messages. If many remailers do it, why not
money providers, other mailing lists, etc.?

6. Not all remailer users are going to be on the Cyherpunks list, so
why would the list be the solution? (Better would be either
distribution of the pinging scripts, a centralized finger pinger (I
like the sound of that: "finger pinger") such as Matt Ghio was
running, or perhaps an "alt.anonymous.messages.status" group, acting
as a message pool.

These are just the objections that come inmmediately to mind.

--Tim May

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