Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amQuote from: LouisCyphre on August 01, 2012, 08:39 amQuote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 01:15 amI disagree with you, in the sense that you do not need to control the venue in which your messages are posted. Rather, what is needed is a publicly-available venue which contains a large amount of anonymized, strongly-encrypted message traffic. Such a venue already exists, and has for almost two decades -- the cypherpunks referred to it as an anonymous message pool. I am, of course, referring to the Usenet newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages (or a.a.m. for short). I haven't used AAM for a while, probably should again soon.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 01:15 amA large number of anonymized, encrypted messages appear there each day. As the Subject: lines of the articles posted there are encrypted, one has to use software to retrieve one's messages from the anonymous message pool, such as AAMFetch. Got any software suggestions that don't rely on Java and/or BCPG libraries? Nothing wrong with AAMFetch, even though it is written in Java. After all, you're running the .jar file from the command line on your own machine, e.g. java -jar aamfetch.jarThat's a good point, but I do wonder about how much of the BCPG stuff it uses. I haven't seen much that's particularly impressive there.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amI know you're not crazy about Java,A bit of an understatement.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 ambut it works... hard to argue with that.It's always hard to argue with that.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amEssentially, what it's doing is determining which messages in the anonymous messge pool (i.e. AAM) belong to you, based on the Subject: lines you've chosen. The remailer esub function encrypts the Subject: lines with the IDEA cipher. (I think there's a salt involved, as the encrypted Subject: lines constantly change.)Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amSome people don't like the fact that IDEA is used;IDEA is fine. It hasn't been broken. Sure, it's only 128-bit, but we're talking about encrypting subject lines which should just be something like "ATTN: Guru" or "ATTN: LouisCyphre" and not anything really sensitive or relating to the content of the encrypted message.The only real problem with IDEA has been the patent on it, which drove it out of use in PGP and GPG in the first place. That patent has now expired, so we're back to not having a problem with it. Apparently it will be restored to GPG officially at some point in the future too.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amsome variants of esub (i.e. esub-bf) use the Blowfish cipher instead. Other schemes (e.g. hsub) use hash algorithms instead of block ciphers like IDEA, blowfish, etc. I like esub, because it's the original, and it's supported by the most remailers; hsub is supported by only one or two, and esub-bf by even fewer. Makes perfect sense to me.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amYou run AAMFetch, fetch your messages, then close it out. It saves your messages in mbox format, which you can then read with Thunderbird/Enigmail.Nice, mbox format makes it very easy. It should play well with CLI clients too, like Mutt.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amMight need to use a conversion utility first, to get them into Thunderbird, but once it's done, it works like a charm.Thunderbird should be able to handle mbox files, but you might want to convert it to IMAP folders anyway. It depends on how much mail you're obtaining that way.Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amI know for a fact that it works on both Linux and Windows... haven't tried it on Mac yet, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work -- just run it from a terminal in all 3 OSes, and you should be good to go. It shouldn't make a difference. Although there may be an advantage in running it from a Linux server and then accessing that from whatever workstation OS you happen to be using (or using SSH to access that server from your phone and using Mutt and/or Mixmaster from there).Quote from: Guru on August 01, 2012, 10:25 amQuote from: LouisCyphre on August 01, 2012, 08:39 amThat's always been one of the more appealing aspects of AAM. There's really no telling how many completely concealed and untrackable transactions, whether it be for drugs, information, other contraband or other services have gone through there over the years.If SR makes politicians and LE worry, AAM should make them shit bricks (even if it is almost certainly being used by spooks too).Precisely. AAM has been making them shit bricks since 1994, when it was newgrouped. I've been using it for more than 10 years. I started using it sometime in the mid to late '90s. I can't quite recall when, but I didn't really dive into it as much as I probably should have. Given the state of the world I think I should fix that.