Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)

Forwarded message:

> Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 02:29:28 -0400
> From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
> Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)

> 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.

Duh.

>  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.

Like a T1 doesn't require a POP. Like T1's and their associated CSU/DSU's
and such don't break (tell that to several of my customers who will get a
hearty chuckle out of that one). Like they don't need air-conditioning and
other support services.

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

True, but to be effective they must be available on demand and the user
shouldn't have to wait until your auto-dialer feels this is a good time to
deliver the service.

> 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.

I have found that my 128k connection very seldom gets congested even with
high traffic. Other traffic choke points usualy limit the amount of
traffic that I see. Even when one of my customers runs their resume tracking
program (which will saturate a ethernet easily in testing) can seldom
saturate the line for more than a few seconds.

> 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".

Ah, so cracker is not a true commercial model but rather a hybrid then?
You pay for some services and a 3rd party donates the rest?

I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it
must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of
saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of
your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the
accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those
figures to a true commercial enterprise.

Whether you have realized it or not, all those seemingly great freebies and
perks for nothing actualy make the remailer less stable because your
operation relies on the good feelings of a 3rd party which can be used to
Mallet's advantage.


    ____________________________________________________________________
   |                                                                    |
   |    The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there   |
   |    be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.       |
   |                                                                    |
   |                                       -Alan Greenspan-             |
   |                                                                    | 
   |            _____                             The Armadillo Group   |
   |         ,::////;::-.                           Austin, Tx. USA     |
   |        /:'///// ``::>/|/                     http:// www.ssz.com/  |
   |      .',  ||||    `/( e\                                           |
   |  -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-                         Jim Choate       |
   |                                                 ravage@ssz.com     |
   |                                                  512-451-7087      |
   |____________________________________________________________________|

At 07:46 AM 9/29/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it
>must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of
>saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of
>your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the
>accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those
>figures to a true commercial enterprise.

Cracker is a colocated machine.  I've said this before.  The connectivity
charges includes space, electricity, air conditioning, back up power,
network management, bandwidth, and so forth.  For connectivity pricing, I
took the cost of a rack and prorated it for one machine.  Cracker is run by
Electronic Frontiers Georgia (EFGA).  EFGA is a non-profit Georgia
corporation.  No, I never said we were a commercial enterprise.  I merely
outlined what the equivalent cost to a commercial enterprise would be.  In
Cracker's case, that is $50K per year based on prorated prices, not the
full charges.

Of course I left out our donated legal time we have.  When used, that is a
chunk of money.  $50K per year would not begin to cover the costs of
operation for a standalone commercial remailer operation.  It does
represent what Cracker currently is using, including current donated
resources.

To run Cracker as a standalone commercial enterprise would take a lot of
ecash, and I don't think it would be feasible at this point in time.  For
an existing internet business, adding a remailer may be very inexpensive, a
cost of practically zero, except for the complaints.



  -- 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

>>I'm wondering about your co-location machine, from your comments above it
>>must be sitting in a field since you don't pay rent (or was that your way of
>>saying somebody else pays the rent for you?). Is this so? Since so many of
>>your utilities and physical plant are donated I have to question the
>>accuracy and utility of your figures as well as the applicability of those
>>figures to a true commercial enterprise.

Depending on the security, performance, and price you're looking for, 
you can run your own machine on your own premises, 
run your own machine in somebody else's colocation facility (either
as a favor, like anon.efga.org may be, or using a commercial ISP),
have somebody else run a dedicated machine for you (mostly ISPs),
buy a shell account on an ISP or other service provider's machine,
use a free shell account from somewhere, or use an IP-only connection.

Sure, free colocation space is nice, but there _are_ plenty of ISPs
running commercially reliable colocation services that get you UPSed
electricity,
professionally maintained routers, and some share of a T1 or T3 to the world,
for far less than the rent you'd pay for doing the whole job yourself,
since they have economies of scale by handling multiple colocation
customers and
also handling their own servers.   

Shell accounts are still typically $20-30/month, though obviously it's a
lot less 
secure since somebody else has root on the machine your remailer's secret
key lives on,
but that does include professionally maintained hardware, mail systems, and
backups.

				Thanks!
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639