http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40582,00.html Devising Invisible Ink by Declan McCullagh (declan@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@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.) [...]