[tor-relays] T-shirts and Confirming Relay Control

[Markus Hitter]

Am 04.05.2015 um 04:33 schrieb Matthew Finkel:
> Our current solution using Printfection
> is neither ideal nor cheap, but it is convenient. Tor pays Printfection
> a bunch of money and Printfection creates the t-shirts, gives us
> one-time links, and takes care of the shipping and handling. If we crowd
> sourced creating bags with stickers in them we would need someone who
> can organize all the volunteers, ship the bags and stickers around the
> world, pay the return shipping for the filled bags, and then ship them
> again to the relay operators.

This sounds rather complicated. I run a small business which involves shipping stuff to customers and that's what I do:

- Get the goods (t-shirts), envelopes/bags and a set of postage stamps in batches large enough for a few months. Larger numbers allow lower prices.

- Stuff these goods into these bags.

- Put address and postage stamp onto the envelope.

- Throw the result into the post box of our postal services.

Works fine for everywhere from the neighborhood to Russia, China, India.

Now, if you could get the t-shirt provider into stuffing the t-shirts into bags already (1 shirt per bag), you'd just have to put the address stickers on. You'd get a box with 100 or 1000 enveloped shirts and once a week you'd print the accumulated addresses onto stickers, place them onto these envelopes and forward this to the postal services. "Handling shipping" isn't much in such a simple case.

The more demanding part of this is to collect the addresses, especially the software to do so. An application which formats them ready for printing, calculates the stamp required, perhaps also prints some customs stickers depending on destination. Here volunteers can easily help and there's no need to hide such discussions, because such software doesn't require the real data, can be written/tested with dummy data instead. All the trusted person (you) has to do is to run this software on the real data and hit the "print" button.


Markus