Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)

["Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>]

At 12:25 AM 9/29/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>> From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
>> So I proposed, and documented, that the minimum level to achieve this
>> would be a $50K investment over a year's time.  This is in fact, more or
>> less what the Cracker remailer takes to run.
>
>I have to disagree on the annual cost to run. Considering the load of
>remailers a simple ISDN would be sufficient.

Sure.  You can run a remailer on whatever bandwidth, and under whatever
conditions you choose.  When I did a breakdown of the pricing, I simply put
forth what Cracker has behind it, not the minimum required.  But with an
ISDN line, you  then have to have a location to house it, so you in theory
require rent.  You also add one more thing in the loop that is subject to
failure.

The winsock remailer demonstrates that a remailer can run on a 28.8K PPP
connection, part time.  Remailers never have been bandwidth intensive.

An advantage of the 10MB connection for Cracker is that when those several
hundred megabyte mailbombs, and thousands of addresses to the same location
come in, they can be discarded faster than with a 64K ISDN connection.

In reality, Cracker runs with whatever resources have been made available
to us.  It turns out we were offered a spare 10MB connection before we
offered a spare 64K connection. And interestingly enough, the true cost of
the 10MB connection is less than the 64K ISDN connection would be.  There
are definite advantages to a colocated machine even if it is what we are
"stuck with".


  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key