- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Data Logs
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 10 Dec '00

10 Dec '00

Jim, The bloke with the extra ventilation notwithstanding, with an open OS and open applications it seems easy to do pretty much whatever you want with disk data and logs regardless of what the letter of the law says. Electronic data is so malleable that its use as evidence seems questionable to begin with. It's not like a gun or a car which has a physical presence and cannot be duplicated or altered *quite* as readily as bits. ( Though I would expect some coarse grit emery run down the barrel and some random prick punch action on the bolt might do wonders for ballistic analysis ). This whole mess of communications and data privacy and copyright will be plaguing us for a long time and the most likely outcome is authoritarian legislation. Unless some Bush SC appointees are libertarians. Seem pretty likely? Mike

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Re: Masks [was: Re: About 5yr. log retention]
by Anonymous 10 Dec '00

10 Dec '00

Ond 12/09/2000, Ray Dillinger wrote: > It is illegal in Georgia, and a number of other Southern states of the > US, to appear in public wearing a mask. > Not that it's usually enforced on anybody but the Ku Klux Klan. > Dunno about other countries and other states. In "Church of the American Knights of Ku Klux Klan v. City of Erie," a federal district judge in the western district of PA held: 1. a provision prohibiting a person from wearing a mask in public with intent to deprive others of equal protection of laws or to prevent or hinder constituted authorities from providing equal protection of laws to others did not violate First Amendment; 2. a provision prohibiting wearing of a mask in public with intent of intimidating others because of their exercise of their rights or to cause others to fear for their own safety did not violate First Amendment; but 3. a provision prohibiting wearing of mask in public "with intent to intimidate" violated First Amendment because it was overbroad. The ordinance was: 733.02 CONCEALING IDENTITY IN PUBLIC PROHIBITED Wearing hoods which conceal the identity by hiding the face or masks in a public place is hereby prohibited. No person shall, while wearing any hood which conceals the identity by hiding the face, mask or device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear in any public place within the City. A "public place" was defined as: "all walks, alleys, streets, boulevards, avenues, lanes, roads, highways or other ways or thoroughfares dedicated to public use or owned or maintained by public authority; and all grounds and buildings owned, leased or operated for the use of organizations enjoying all tax-exempt privileges as charitable use." Section 733.01. There were, of course, exceptions to the ordinance: Section 733.02. Certain persons are explicitly exempted from this general prohibition, including: (a) persons under sixteen years of age; (b) persons wearing a traditional holiday costume in season; (c) persons using masks in theatrical productions; (d) persons lawfully engaged in trades or employment or in a sporting activity where a mask or facial covering is worn for physical safety; (e) persons wearing a gas mask in drills, exercises or emergencies; (f) persons wearing a mask for purposes of protection against cold weather; (g) persons wearing a mask because of any illness, allergy or on the advice of a physician. Section 733.04. And the additional requirements were: (a) With the intent to deprive any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws, or for the purpose of preventing or hindering the constituted authorities of the United States or of this State or any subdivision thereof from giving or securing to all persons within this State the equal protection of the laws; or (b) With the intent, by force or threat of force, to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person because of his exercise of any right secured by Federal, State or local laws, or to intimidate such person or any other person or any class of person from exercising any right secured by Federal, State or local law; or (c) With the intent to intimidate, threaten, abuse or harass any other person; or (d) With the intent to cause another person to fear for his or her personal safety, or, where it is probable that reasonable persons will be put in fear for their personal safety by the defendant's actions, with reckless disregard for such probability; or (e) While engaged in conduct prohibited by civil or criminal law, with the intent of avoiding identification. Section 733.05. In Hernandez v. Superintendent, Fredericksburg-Rappahannock Joint Security Ctr., the court found in part that "a detachable mask worn by KKK members was not constitutionally protected symbolic speech." The theory was that said detachable mask was not "an essential part of traditional Klan regalia," but an optional accessory. In American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. County of Bedford, Pennsylvania, the judge struck down as unconstitutional an anti-mask ordinace which he called a "transparent attempt to restrict public rallies of KKK whose organization members are notorious for the hoods that are part of their regalia". Numerous states have "mask enhancements." Florida, for example: 775.0845. Wearing mask while committing offense; reclassification The felony or misdemeanor degree of any criminal offense, other than a violation of ss. 876.12-876.15, shall be reclassified to the next higher degree as provided in this section if, while committing the offense, the offender was wearing a hood, mask, or other device that concealed his or her identity. (1)(a) In the case of a misdemeanor of the second degree, the offense is reclassified to a misdemeanor of the first degree... Oklahoma has a state statute prohibiting mask wearing (note the exceptions): ' 1301. Masks and hoods--Unlawful to wear--Exceptions It shall be unlawful for any person in this state to wear a mask, hood or covering, which conceals the identity of the wearer; provided, this act shall not apply to the pranks of children on Halloween, to those going to, or from, or participating in masquerade parties, to those participating in any public parade or exhibition of an educational, religious or historical character, to those participating in any meeting of any organization within any building or enclosure wholly within and under the control of said organization, and to those participating in the parades or exhibitions of minstrel troupes, circuses or other amusements or dramatic shows. Any person, or persons, violating the provisions of this section of this act, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not less than Fifty Dollars ($50.00) nor more than Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00), or by imprisonment in the county jail for a period of not exceeding one (1) year, or by both such fine and imprisonment. as does Georgia: 16-11-38 Wearing mask, hood, or device which conceals identity of wearer. (a) A person is guilty of a misdemeanor when he wears a mask, hood, or device by which any portion of the face is so hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer and is upon any public way or public property or upon the private property of another without the written permission of the owner or occupier of the property to do so. (b) This Code section shall not apply to: (1) A person wearing a traditional holiday costume on the occasion of the holiday; (2) A person lawfully engaged in trade and employment or in a sporting activity where a mask is worn for the purpose of ensuring the physical safety of the wearer, or because of the nature of the occupation, trade, or profession, or sporting activity; (3) A person using a mask in a theatrical production including use in Mardi gras celebrations and masquerade balls; or (4) A person wearing a gas mask prescribed in emergency management drills and exercises or emergencies. [Don't you think a mask is part of the "nature of the occupation, trade, or profession" of a bank robber, Georgia?] as does Puerto Rico: ' 4433. Wearing disguise It shall be punishable by imprisonment not exceeding six months or a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars, or both, in the discretion of the court, for any person who wears a mask, false whiskers or any other disguise, whether complete or partial, or alters in any way, temporarily or permanently his physical appearance for the purpose of: (a) Evading discovery, recognition, or identification in the commission of any offense. (b) Concealing, fleeting or escaping when prosecuted, arrested for or convicted of any offense. Tennessee has a statute similar to the Erie ordinance as mentioned above. I was unable to locate any other states with statutes addressing "mask wearing" in public (without intent to commit burglary). No doubt the rest of the offending rules are ordinances instead. Ugh.

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приглашение на Знаток.Ru от Василия
by NOSPAM 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

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by betterlife＠juno.com 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

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Re: Masks [was: Re: About 5yr. log retention]
by Peter Capelli 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

Hot dayum, we got the ATF on that one!!! -p "Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Greg Broiles <gbroiles(a)netbox.com>@cyberpass.net on 12/09/2000 05:34:17 PM Please respond to Greg Broiles <gbroiles(a)netbox.com> Sent by: owner-cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net

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Systems
by Tim May 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

The debate about "fractal dimensions" and "geodesic networks" and what characterizes them is part of a much larger analysis of systems in general. Minsky once said that most of AI is about people applying their own names to previously studied concepts and phenomena. This applies to _systems_. Agents, actors, self-organizing systems, bionomics, geodesic networks, agoric systems, markets, connectivity, hierarchies (and lack thererof), swarms, multi-agent systems, distributed systems, disintermediation, and economics in general are all part of this Big Picture. Several books have been written about this stuff, including Kevin Kelley's "Out of Control" and the various burblings of Huber, Gilder, the Santa Fe Institute, and so on. (Speaking of the Santa Fe Institute, I could add to the above list various other terms like: computational ecologies, swarms, emergent behavior, artificial life, etc.) In my view, such terms are only shorthand labels meant to trigger associations in the mind of the listener. Thus, when I see Hettinga prattling on about "geodesic fractionally-cleared bearer markets," it just means "oh, the stuff Cypherpunks advocate." That is, free markets, markets free of top-down centralized control. For example, the trade practices of Pacific Islanders, the spice and silk caravans of the Silk Road (ergo "Digital Silk Road," of Tribble, Hardy, and others), the agora of Athens, the bazaars of Baghdad and Damascus (ergo Eric Raymond's "cathedral and the bazaar" metaphor), and on and on. Or physicists could speak of spin glasses. And they could natter on about correlation lengths, long-range order, phase transitions, etc. (People would find it quite confusing if every time I referred to "fractionally-settled spin glasses" as a metaphor for free markets. Thank your lucky stars. Though I do occasionally draw on phase transitions as a metaphor.) Ditto for throwing in junk about "fractals." ("Everything is fractal! Like, wow, like, farm out!") What these _are_ all related to is to systems made up of bits and pieces and interactions which share many similarities. But also some important differences, so care must be taken not to extrapolate from one domain to another. The tendency of the mathematician is to abstract out all of the domain-specific junk and to invent a terminology which isolates only the important features. So instead of talking about students in a classroom passing notes, or talking about positions of atoms in a crystal, we end up with language like: "A ring is defined to be a .... over a set of elements in a subfield...satisfying associativity...but not pairwise-commutable." This cuts out the "intuition" about how students behave, how crystals actually are composed, how hands of poker appear in real life, etc. etc. This abstraction is the beauty of mathematics. Of course, this beauty does not come without a downside. Anyone who has read the hyper-technical, hyper-pure books of "Bourbaki" (an anonymous collection of mostly-French mathematicians who issued a series of math books in the 50s to the 70s), or anyone who picks up nearly any advanced math book, knows that the symbols are mostly meaningless without some intuition or deep immersion in domains using the notation. While not all mathematicians have a _spatial_ imagination, they still "visualize" their domains. Math is a lot more than just formal manipulation of meaningless symbols. Thus it is in our domain, that of "systems made of many parts." Anyway, I have my own views, and calculations, of things like dimensionality and connectivity, and how they are related. And of why many such systems are "self-organizing." (For example, self-interest. Given a set of N farmers and/or fishermen, no one needs to sit down and figure out all of the prices and terms for a market to develop. Self-interest, local actions, are enough for markets to develop, for ecologies of economic actors, for "geodesic networks" (barf) to form. Even for "bearer-instrument settlement" (shells, beads, dollars, cargo). Likewise, there are sociological, economics, and psychological views of these systems. All kinds of views, all kinds of terms, all kinds of similarities. When I was in college, more than 25 years ago, one of my friends was a real fan of Ludwig von Bertanllanfy (sp?) and his "general systems theory." To my friend Alex _everything_ was an example of general systems theory. Everything. Perhaps he moved on later to viewing everything as an example of chaos, or fractals, or bionomics, or geodesic networks. And to others, everything was a branch of ecology (recall that in Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky," written in the 1950s (!), ecology was the big thing to study. Ditto for "everything is a branch of physics," "everything is a branch of economics," etc. The worm turns. I advise folks not to concentrate on either Gilder's "telecosm" (or whatever) or Hettinga's "fractional geodesic networks" (or whatever) or even my own "crypto anarchy" (or whatever). The interesting stuff is not in the terminology. By the way, the more interesting thing about these systems is NOT that they are locally-connected, nearest neighbor, as a geodesic dome is connected, but that they are _multiply-connected, high-dimensionality_ systems. (Hint: All 270 million Americans live in an N-cube of just 5 units on each side...but with a bunch of dimensions. Geodesics are not the interesting thing. Communication, bandwidth, connectivity, auction systems, etc., are far more important. ) --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)

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(no subject)
by Kessler Thompkins 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

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Feds Win "Child Porn" Case
by Eric Cordian 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

A Texas couple who ran two very well known and popular age-verification services for Adult Web content have been convicted over the contents of two foreign Web sites which were illegal in the United States, one hosted in Russia, and the other hosted in Indonesia. Age-verification services are a popular method of financing web sites. Subscribers purchase a code for a small fee on a credit card, which proves that they are adults, and gives them access to thousands of web sites which use the particular vendor's codes to admit only adults to pornographic material. Part of the money for the subscriptions is used to make a micropayment to the visited sites Apparently, age-verification services will now be responsible for verifying all content which their codes are used to access, a humongous task. Apparently, providing an access code for content legally hosted in another country now makes one subject to US laws as if one had provided the content from within the US on ones own server. (Cypherpunks beware, while it is child porn that is being run up the flagpole to support this interpretation of the law, bomb-making instructions and seditious speech could easily be next on the list. I imagine Eterity Service operators could easily be characterized as "madams" for their content as well, particularly if they took small payments for accessing the system.) When this story first came out, the news reports mentioned the real issues involved. Now that a conviction has been obtained, one needs a microscope to even determine that the couple did not distribute any underage pornography themselves, that anyone could sign up to use their service, and that the vast majority of the material their codes could be used to access was perfectly legal. Their mistake, it seems, was in allowing revenues from people seeking to access a couple of popular overseas child porn sites, legal in the host country, to become a major source of income for their business. This destroyed their plausible deniability over the content hosted by their clients, and in spite of expensive legal opinions they had gotten which told them they had no legal exposure as mere age-verifiers, permitted the Feds to convince a jury that they functioned as "madams" for the "child-porn warehouse." Of course, because they dared to take the case to trial, and didn't plead, they will face an extremely harsh toilet-plungering by the judge at their sentencing. Here's one article on the case, from something that calls itself the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Note the use of terms like "The Child Pornography Business" and no mention of age-verification at all. But then, when you're "saving the little children," you are permitted to suspend ordinary journalistic ethics in a very Kirkegaardian way. ----- By Toni Heinzl Star-Telegram Staff Writer FORT WORTH -- Thomas Reedy gave himself the email name "Houdini," but even the legendary escape artist could not have wiggled out of the net of evidence of child pornography that authorities built against Reedy's Fort Worth Internet company. After deliberating 6= hours Friday, a federal jury convicted Reedy, 37, and his company, Landslide, on all 89 counts of an indictment accusing him of distribution of child pornography, sexual exploitation of minors and related charges. His wife, Janice Reedy, 32, was convicted on 87 of the 89 counts. The two counts on which she was acquitted had to do with 70 pornographic images on two of the couple's home computers, which were used mainly by Thomas Reedy, according to trial testimony. The Reedys were accused of giving Landslide subscribers access to Internet sites displaying child pornography for fees ranging from $14.95 to $29.95 per month per site. The sites were maintained by foreign Web masters. Landslide was the only gateway to the child-porn sites, prosecutors said. On its Web site a "click here for child porn" link directed customers to the sites. Landslide gave its subscribers user names and passwords after verifying their credit cards. The Reedys could face sentences of life in prison based on the number of counts, the money involved and the violent content of the Web sites they marketed and provided access to. U.S. District Judge Terry Means will sentence the Reedys. He did not set a sentencing date, but federal sentencings typically occur a few months after conviction. The Reedys played a high- stakes gamble taking the case to trial, despite the self- incriminating statements they gave investigators during a raid on their home last year and the mountain of evidence gathered. Thomas Reedy had admitted to a postal inspector that 30-40 percent of his business came from child pornography. Prosecutors had offered Reedy a plea bargain of 20 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea and his wife five years in a package deal, but the couple refused to take it, prosecutors and defense attorneys said. Prosecutors and investigators who worked for more than a year on the Landslide case said they hope the verdict will put other Internet merchants of child pornography on notice. "I hope this verdict might scare other companies into stopping what they're doing," Assistant U.S. Attorney Terri Moore said. "Police and prosecutors get smarter about this stuff and we're going after them." Dallas Police Detective Steve Nelson, who signed on undercover as a subscriber to Landslide and bought access to more than 20 child- pornography sites, said he was relieved after the verdict. Nelson, a member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force in Dallas, had unearthed evidence of child pornography on sites called "Child Rape," "Children Forced to Porn," "I am 14" and more. He and other investigators saved and documented images that included scenes of children being raped by adults. "This was the tip of the iceberg," he said. "Other companies should be put on notice that they will be dealt with if they exploit children." [Translation. We will be fucking with other age-verification services in the very near future.] Attorney Wes Ball, who defended Thomas Reedy and Landslide, said he will appeal. He reiterated to a reporter what he told the jury in his final argument: "We don't think the responsibility trickles down this far from the Web masters. The Web masters are absolutely responsible." The Reedys were charged in a conspiracy with two Indonesian Web masters, R.W. Kusuma and Hanny Ingganata, and Russian Web master Boris Greenberg, who have not been arrested. The Reedys netted more than $1 million with their porn business between 1997 and 1999 and paid about 60 percent to the foreign Web masters, federal prosecutors said. The child porn business provided a comfortable lifestyle for the couple. They lived in a $425,000 Lakeside home, and each drove a new Mercedes. That abruptly ended last year when federal agents raided their company and home. The business was shut down. The cars were seized along with $130,000 in bank accounts and a few thousand dollars in stocks. Since then, the bank foreclosed on their home. Moore reminded jurors in her closing argument that the Reedys had gotten rich off the misery of children. After Ball compared what they did with ticket takers at a movie theater who are not responsible for the movies, Moore gave jurors another analogy to think about. "They're not the ticket takers, they're like the madam in a whorehouse," she said. "You can't see the girls without the madam." [blah blah etc snip] --- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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Re: ip: Chaos Theory
by auto110413＠hushmail.com 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

So this is interesting, but you do understand that from a strictly logical perspective it's completely inconsistent and makes no sense whatsoever?? Mr. Murphy complains that Gaza does not meet this "requirements" for being an anarchy - I would then respectully ask "what does???".. If Gaza is not anarchy, has there EVER been an anarchy in all of recorded history? The "State," as a structure of social organization, exists even in communities of animals that are of substantial sub-human intelligence (e.g., wolf packs, lion prides, dophins, ants, most primates and most other social, intelligent animals all exhibit some form of "pecking order" that can loosely be interpreted to be power structures that self-organized out of "random chaos" (so to speak) so as to further the chances of survival for the species as a whole..) human governments are very similar, except they attempt to inject some degree of "civil procedures" into this otherwise life/death Darwinian drama.. If Mr. Murphy seeks a system where people own property and where other people respect this property, then what exactly, I ask, is wrong w/ Northern California?? Defining anarchy to be such a system (where people own property and other people respect this property) is a complete and total breakdown of all logical, rational reasoning.. I hope you also understand that from the perspective of a business man, perhaps the most important role that governments provide is not necessarily "an organized system of corrupt thugs to whom we pay protection money in the form of taxes" (to paragraph Mr. Murphy's arguments); instead, government most importantly provides business with an institution upon which businesses may pass on risk (if necessary).. ALL business is about minimizing risk, and the more that businesses are able to pass on risk to government (the "State", so to speak), the happier they are.. You need look no further than the DoD bailout of Iridium to see what I mean.. (there are MANY other such examples too..) If Mr. Murphy believes that it is possible to run a business absent government (i.e., in an anarchy), I suggest he quit the pot-smoking grad school scene, get a REAL job (preferabbly in Northern California) and see firsthand how the world REALLY works.. (perhaps AFTER he spends several months in Russia, so he can compare and constrast..) the word "anarcho-capitalist" has no reality for me.. nor should it for any rational, sane human being.. its substantially less than an oxymoron and makes NO SENSE whatsoever.. if you want to live in a world that sustains "anarchy-capitalism", you may as well live in a world where two people can eat the same piece of pizza or a person has the freedom to jump over the Moon (to cite examples from the article) > >A nice rant, below, from a fellow anarcho-capitalist lapsed conservative >apparently Hillsdale College grad. > >[I swear, folks, I *tried* snipping this to relevant bits. :-). I mean, >there's a URL in it and all, and, admittedly, he's preaching to the >choir >around here, but this is nicely done that I couldn't bring myself to >premasticate it for cypherpunk consumption.] > >Cheers, >RAH > > > >--- begin forwarded text > > >Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 20:35:04 -0600 >To: believer(a)telepath.com >From: "S. Hunter" <quailrun(a)centex.net> (by way of believer(a)telepath.com) >Subject: ip: Chaos Theory > > >http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy/murphy19.html > >Chaos Theory > >by <mailto:robert_p_murphy@yahoo.com>Bob Murphy > >Throughout history, there have been countless arguments advanced to >support >the State. None of them has been valid. This essay will address a certain >class of these arguments, whose sleight-of-hand consists in a definitional >trick. My purpose here is not to make the positive case for pure >laissez-faire, but merely to show that each pro-government argument >is a >non sequitur. > >Anarchy is the absence of government, both in political science and >everyday usage (it is the first definition given by Websters, e.g.). >Chaos, in the context of social science, refers to lawlessness, or the >absence of a relative degree of regularity in human affairs. (I say >a >"relative degree" because, obviously, virtually all humans will always >obey >the rule of, e.g., avoiding someone with leprosy or not slaughtering >every female in sight. The laws to which lawlessness is opposed are >generally meant to imply the sometimes irksome rules necessary for a >civil >society.) > >[...]

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My short writeup of the NymIP effort
by Declan McCullagh 09 Dec '00

09 Dec '00

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40582,00.html Devising Invisible Ink by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Dec. 9, 2000 PST WASHINGTON -- An ambitious effort to protect online anonymity will kick off this weekend. A working group of about a dozen technologists, called NymIP, is gathering before the Internet Engineering Task Force's meeting to take the very first steps toward devising a standard that will foster untraceable communications and Web browsing for Internet users. Currently, commercial products such as Anonymizer.com and Zero Knowledge's Freedom client permit anonymous or pseudonymous Net-surfing. The NymIP effort aims to create standard protocols that would be more widely adopted and not tied to one company's product or service. Zero Knowledge, a Montreal firm, began the project last month, but the working group is now headed by Harvard University's Scott Bradner, an IETF veteran. Quips Zero Knowledge engineer John Bashinski: "I've been heard enough as it is, and am trying to moderate my natural big-mouthed tendencies and let others speak for a while." One probable topic of discussion: The tradeoffs between bandwidth and security. Absolute security requires scads of cover traffic to mask the communications that a user wants to conceal, but it also eats up bandwidth. "Scalability isn't too bad if you're looking at scaling the number of users," writes Bashinski in a post to the NymIP mailing list. "Where scaling seems to bite you is with the size of the anonymity group, defined as the set of users that, given the information the recipient or an eavesdropper has, could have sent a given message. In high-security systems, more or less those with meaningful resistance to traffic analysis, scaling in the anonymity group size seems to be superlinear, maybe even N^2." Translation: That's enough to clog a lot of T-3 lines. [...] http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,40583,00.html New Film 'Dungeons' Drags On by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 7:00 p.m. Dec. 8, 2000 PST Too many films based on a tale with origins far from Hollywood suffer from that irksome flaw of not being true to the original, leaving fans to gnash their teeth and moan like an orc with gastritis. Not so Dungeons & Dragons, which is afflicted with the related but equally vexing ailment of hewing too closely to the awesomely popular role-playing game that gave it life. To wit: The 100-minute flick from New Line Cinema is less a story of love and adventure than a convenient vehicle for some occasionally-phenomenal light shows in dungeons and hordes of swooping dragons flapping around the Empire of Izmer looking like nothing so much as oversized pterodactyls equipped with +5 fireballs and terribly bad attitudes. But successful real-life D&D games require far more -- well-drawn heroes and convincing antagonists are not at all optional. And in devising this wide screen adaptation that opened Friday, director-grand-poobah Courtney Solomon has failed repeated saving throws against the chaotic-evil forces of blandness and blah. By itself, the story shows promise. A vaguely medieval society is sharply divided between the Mages -- an elite and somewhat stuffy breed of magic users who skulk around their towering stone fortress -- and everyone else. Izmer's teen empress (an unremarkable Thora Birch) wants everyone to be "equal," a vague but unobjectionable idea, while the evil Mage Profion (Jeremy Irons) has successfully convinced the legislature otherwise. A power struggle ensues that makes the Florida election look like an endearing display of bonhomie, and the winner is the side that can find the fabled Rod of Savrille and thus command the mighty red dragons. Enter two thieves, Ridley (Justin Whalin) and Snails (Marlon Wayans), who join a cute young female mage, a grumpy dwarf, and an aloof elf -- your classic D&D traveling companions -- to trounce the bad guy, help the good one, and perhaps encounter a love interest or two along the way. It's a good start, but not much more. The director, Solomon, can't seem to decide whether to take the film seriously or allow it to spoof itself -- and neither can the actors. The performance by Academy Award-winning Irons is remarkable only in how lackluster it is, and Wayans' inner-city slang is as out of place as he would be in any believable Thieves' Guild. Note to Solomon: Thieves should be lithe and sneaky, not bumbling trolls. (At least -- spoiler alert -- this Jar Jar Binks stand-in is slaughtered halfway through the movie.) [...]

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