[Remops] Attn Middleman remailers

[Bananasplit Admin]

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On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 10:48:59AM +0000, Anonymous wrote:
> Bananasplit Admin <admin at bananasplit.info> wrote:
 
> I don't agree. The second best solution is to download a regular set of 
> stats. The best solution is to run your own pinger.

Hi Amigo,
Yes, running a local pinger is another good option.  Any method that
ensures a Middleman has an up to date list of reliable remailers is
certainly better than nothing.

> Whitelisting pingers is a fudge. It gives a completely inaccurate 
> picture of latency (and reliability) of the middleman remailer as a 
> middleman will always depend on other remailers and upon the accuracy 
> of it's stats. If pingers are whitelisted and the stats remain/become 
> out of date then the middleman will look good in stats but in the real 
> world will be fairly rubbish. This will then have a knock-on 
> detrimental effect on other remailer traffic when it is picked as a 
> random hop due to the abnormally good statistics.

Tricky one this.  :)
For normal day-to-day usage, Middleman shouldn't be doing randhops.  The
client should be selecting a chain that terminates at an exit remailer.
As many people configure their client to ignore high-latency nodes,
Middleman that do not whitelist pingers will be ignored as they are
falsely reporting high latency, (their own plus a randhop).

In a perfect world, Middleman nodes should respond directly to pingers
*and* have correct stats.

> I do not whitelist pingers. I do run my own echolot pinger and my 
> mixmaster remailer (middleman) uses it.

Nothing wrong with this, but pingers will report an incorrect latency
for the remailer.  A Middleman could have zero latency; messages come in
and instantly go out.  However, to all the pingers it will appear to
have latency due to the randhop of every ping.

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