New feature thoughts

[Colin Tuckley]

Ideas for thought and discussion.

I've been thinking about doing a GUI front end for Mixmaster, probably on
Windows. Either as a stand alone application or possibly as a plug in for
Mozilla-Mail.

The biggest problem with this is maintaining an up to date stats source. If
we want remailers to be used a lot by non-technical people then they need
to "just work". Even older applications like Jack-B-Nymble need the user to
understand quite a lot about maintaining stats. It seems the biggest hurdle
for a new user getting something like this running is configuring the stats
retrieval side of the application. We don't want the problems that
currently exist with an application being shipped with a list of dead stats
sources.

It occurred to me that if pingers maintained list of other pingers as part
of their stats it would give any client application a better chance of
keeping running.

At present, when a client is shipped it might have 4 or 5 pingers
configured, after a few months/years the last of those might die and the
user is left with the problem of finding a new stats source to keep the
application running.

If the pingers provided lists of other working pingers as well as lists of
remailers then the client could reconfigure it's stats source in the same
way that it configures it's list of active remailers.

Hopefully it would always be able to find a working stats source.

Comments?

regards,

Colin

--
Colin Tuckley      |  colin@tuckley.org
+44(0)1903 236872  |  +44(0)7775 900262

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