IP: Anonymity working group starting; Dungeons & Dragons movie review

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2000 10:46:08 -0500
>To: politech@politechbot.com
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>
>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.)
>
>    [...]
>
>
>
>
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