Re: Remailer ideas (Was: Re: Latency vs. Reordering)

[Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>]

> 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 does seem like a better idea, except for one thing:
Everybody has got to trust the Keeper of the Aliveness Info. 
I'm not sure how much of a problem this is, nor am I sure that
the newsgroup method neccesitates any less trust. 
 
But I do think that a system where all trust doesn't lie in any
one entity is desirable, and I think that such a system is going
to have to be decentralized like netnews, rather then centralized
.  The other problem that a centralized system imposes is that if 
the Keeper Of Aliveness Info goes down, everyone is scrambling to
find a new one. This doesn't seem like a major problem, but again, an
ideal system wouldn't have this flaw.