[tor-talk] On the Theory of Remailers

[Moritz Bartl]

On 07.01.2013 21:53, David H. Lipman wrote:
>> I'm hoping this will be of interest to this list.  To encourage
>> interest in the waning art of remailers, I'm starting what I aim to be
>> a long series on how they work, design choices, technical limitations,
>> and attacks.  The first five are now live at https://crypto.is/blog/
> I hope you fully elaborate on how remailers are used for abuse.

Without being racial, sounds like an "American idea" to me, similar to
crazy Disclaimers on almost every product. If every system ever invented
would come with an elaboration on how it is being abused (hey, that's in
the name, AB-USE) that list would most likely be illegal for most things
(because assisting crime is illegal in most places) and otherwise very
tiresome.

If you are looking for studies on abuse of remailer technology, no
larger instance so far bothers to collect figures. Same for Tor. How
could Tom know?

Yes, this is indeed a sad state. Everything and everyone needs more open
data.

As one data point, unlikely to be of relevance for neither Tor nor
remailers: We run both, and judging from a comparison of bandwidth
consumption or passed messages vs. abuse complaints (because that's all
I can take into account): widely below one percent. That's my rough
estimate -- sorry, I would like to have better statistics but I
currently don't. Are there any on "general abusive Internet traffic"?
What is that? In the case of remailers, it's additionally hard because
of all the dummy traffic.

Also, in the end all abuse statistics can and always will be only about
"reported abuse", not actual abuse.

-- 
Moritz Bartl
https://www.torservers.net/