Thunderbird 3, which should be out in a few months, has a GREATLY eased system for writing add-ons for it (much more like Firefox 2 and 3 has). That should make things easier in that space for people that want to do things with TB.

I hadn’t heard of the Pynchon Gate before. I will have to do a google dig and find information on it

I’m happy to help people with projects by doing QA on stuff. I’m a pretty crappy coder (as I tell people) so I can’t write much of this sort of thing on my own.

The remailer network is still alive and well, but Mixmaster isn’t the easiest thing in the world to configure. The next-generation remailer, Mixminion, has a completed protocol, but I don’t know how close it is to being deployable; Nick Mathewson or Len Sassaman would be good people to talk to about that. I don’t have any idea how to incorporate this into Firefox, but a remailer network plugin for Thunderbird could be cool.

Moving a little farther out into the theoretical space, there’s an excellent design for an information-theoretically secure pseudonymous email system that Len and Nick published with Bram Cohen back in 2005, The Pynchon Gate. The paper has been turned into a protocol spec, and it’s ready to be implemented, but this hasn’t actually been done yet. If you know of anyone who would be interested, let’s talk. (I’d do it myself but I all kinds of do not have the time.) Setting up a Pynchon network and building a Thunderbird plugin to use it would be pretty awesome.

I think you’ve got my email (if not, shout out to me on the noisebridge list and I’ll hit you back); let’s talk.

“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.

Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”