My short writeup of the NymIP effort

[Declan McCullagh]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40582,00.html

    Devising Invisible Ink
    by Declan McCullagh (declan at 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 at 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.)

    [...]