Tim writes:
> [...]
> At another level, ratings serviices. Raph Levien used to run one, circa
> 1993-96. It reported latencies (delays), dropped messages, encryption and
> other polices at the site, etc. Very useful. Both in terms of helping users
> decide which remailers to use in a chain and in terms of motivating
> remailers to be more reliable.
>
> However, I have not seen nor heard of this remailer stats report in a long,
> long time. As with so many other things involving the Net, Raph presumably
> moved on to other projects and nobody took over.
There are still some reliable remailer stats pages:
http://www.publius.net/mixmaster-list.html
http://anon.efga.org/~rlist/mlist.html
> Remailers are really in their infancy. After a flurry of developments in
> the 1992-5 period, stagnation has set in.
>
> Commercial remailers are of course the real answer. We've known this for
> many years. See the archives for literally hundreds of articles on
> pay-per-use remailers, etc.
I'd say the best thing about freedom is the number of users it may
generate. Anonymity is only as good as the amount of potential users.
As there are no remailers taking stego encoded inputs (*), senders and
recipients are identified. Looking only at the typical maximum
latency, and the people who sent messages into the network in that
time frame provides the pool of potential senders. Currently with
mixmaster remailers this probably isn't that big a pool.
Combined with an analysis of the number of people who technically had
the knowledge to write a given message, the plausible cover isn't that
large.
If freedom gets to 1 million users -- that'd be some serious cover.
Adam
(*) stego remailers, and the chaining of them a post I made back in
May 97 with
Subject: chained stego & interfaces to remailers
