At 12:56 2003-07-03 +0000, Andrew Akehurst wrote:
I do take your point about the ease of setting this up. However it would
create
a nice market for companies to provide proxying to common webmail services.
They could let me log in at their website and proxy on my behalf to
Hotmail (or
whoever), passing the results back to my browser. To average Joe Public it
could be made very easy to use by being almost totally transparent and it
would
make a nice business opportunity for companies to rent such services to
people.
Its much more generalized and effective to just proxy all Web access, like
Anonymizer and JAP.
> Now, this is fairly true, but is anonymity via webmail sufficient?
It's difficult to say. On the technical side, with only access to the IP
address of my proxy and my message itself it might still be possible to
identify me by my apparent relationship with those I contact. Then again, it
might still be possible to do so if I wrote a letter to someone.
If I were really paranoid I'd use something like public key cryptography and
send my messages that way. Whether webmail companies would provide that
service
for free is another matter. Certainly having a protocol which sends e-mail
over
encrypted connections between MTAs might help stop eavesdroppers en route
from
intercepting my message. The technology to do that is readily available.
One issue is that if courts could order anonymiser services to surrender
their
logs then that might be a problem.
These services, like the mixmaster remailers, do not keep/generate logs.
There are many other net address obfuscation techniques. See
http://gray-world.net for a good overview of tunneling, covert channels,
network related steganographic methods.
steve
"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer
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