Remailer Technology

Hello darlings! I was playing with your remailers recently, yesterday
in particular, and was a bit disappointed in them for a variety of
reasons. I got a list of the current ones from K.Barrus some time ago
but even this supposedly up-to-date list had a lot that appeared not to
work. Out of ~20 on the list, ~8 sent back a ping message. One kept
sending me some strange error.

In another test, I sent out an informative posting to a whole bunch of
mailing lists recently through some of the remailers. The remailers
seem to be very fragile and can be overcome by a huge onslaught of
postings. It appears that every new message spawns a new process, and
the machines get overloaded and don't have memory left to do anything.
Kind of a serious flaw! One could mess them up doing this. Good thing
that no one has any malicious feelings toward the cypherpunks or their
remailers, or this might have already happened.

As a solution to the `spawning' problem, here is a possibility: I am
just guessing, but I bet the perl script is grabbing in the message
from the incoming socket at the beginning, and then closing the socket,
and then going about its business to send the message out. But during
this period, new messages can be sent to the now `clear' socket, hence
spawning a new process. A solution would be to keep the socket `busy'
for the duration of the execution of the perl code. Another solution is
to have the messages sent into a buffering script, and something else
continuously running in the background to go through the queue to send messages.

Finally, I was wondering if anyone else was doing Ping tests on the
remailers for run times and whether they post them. If there is
interest I would be willing to write a script to automate this process
and post the results say every week, so that people can keep abreast of
what remailers are active and responsive. If we want a strong
infrastructure for all our evil deeds, we have to make sure that it is resilient!

Thanks, and please don't flame me for trying *earnestly* to contribute!

> Hello darlings!

Lum - "DARLING!"  <LEAP!>  (egregious Japanse animation reference)

Hello, Larry.

Isn't it amazing?  You can spend all day typing & editing posts; it
only takes me about 1.5 seconds to hit the "delete" key.  (Sort of
like the way a $200,000 disposable anti-air missile can take out a
$30,000,000 jet fighter.)  It's probably the best filter in the world:
knows exactly what I do and don't want to read.  Plus, when you do
occassionally come up with a useful post, such as the one I'm replying
to, I can save it.

-Anthony
agarcia@sugar.neosoft.com

>Isn't it amazing?  You can spend all day typing & editing posts; it
>only takes me about 1.5 seconds to hit the "delete" key.  

me too, Medusa.

what about the fact that the same stuff can appear in many places? with
virtually no additional effort! what about `fallout' of clueless
newbies responding to idiotic posts? in places you don't even know about?

an interesting thing about SQUISH-- whoever did it probably has
suffered no serious consequences, if the remailers are actually secure,
and it would be possible to do the whole thing over again next weekend
without any negative consequences on their part.