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In their own words: Chris Dyl, CTO, Turbine Inc.
There are a lot of people who have good reasons to keep their identity secret on the Internet. Not all of them are trading in stolen credit cards or lurking in Internet chat rooms.
Some are reporting the truth about repressive governments in Africa. Others wear law enforcement uniforms while patrolling those same Internet chat rooms, trying to keep them safe. Some are corporate lawyers trying to keep a lid on their searches of other company’s patents.
For those cases, and any other reason to maintain anonymity online, a Boston-based group of software engineers maintains Tor. At its core, Tor is an encryption device called onion routing, spun out of the Naval Research Labs in the late 1990s. When you connect to the web using a free client downloaded from torproject.org, it prevents traffic analysis of your IP address.
The Tor Project Inc., a nonprofit founded in 2001 by MIT graduate student Roger Dingledine, operates much like a software company — except, “You don’t actually know who your users are,” said executive director Andrew Lewman. “People will come up to us at conferences and say, ‘Hey, here’s what I do, but don’t use my name.’”
To protect itself from subpoena, the Tor Project maintains no servers. Users’ information gets routed through 2,000 machines run by volunteers, worldwide. The Tor client application doubles as a server, Lewman explained.
Yes, the Tor Project may make it easier for Internet predators, pornographers and hackers to elude capture, but Lewman said he believes the good uses outweigh the bad. The mission is to give users control over their online identity, he said. All the organization can do is promote the good uses.
“Do bad people use Tor? Sure,” Lewman said. But that doesn’t set Tor apart from any other resource, he said. “I hear criminals use highways to rob banks. They use digital cameras to do bad things.”
Game to try
Boston game developers are on the map — at least as far as the Independent Game Conference is concerned. The annual get-together for game makers picked up stakes after three years in the gaming hub of Austin, Texas — running dual conferences on the East and West Coasts this spring. Guess where they decided to locate IGC East?
Boston has been in the hunt for the West Coast’s game business, so what’s it like to start a game company here?
I asked Brad Myers, who’s seeking funding for Galactic Village, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) strategy game he’s been working on part-time since 1998. Last week, Myers was at IGC East — a boost, he said, since it’s hard for a small player to get noticed at bigger shows like the Electronic Entertainment Expo or the Game Developers Conference.
His game makes the player a demi-god. Using artificial intelligence, the game translates the player’s natural-language commands into complex chains of actions for the player’s “tribe” — allowing lapsed gamers to get back into the MMO world without playing six hours a day.
The back end is all Boston. Leaning on the region’s natural strength in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Myers, by day a technical solutions architect for FirstBest Systems Inc., brought in Elizabeth Hinkelman, who came to Boston to work on AI with Ray Kurzweil, then moved to military contractor The Analytic Science Corp. Inc. to work on serious games.
But Myer’s first steps into the enormous quantity of art and 3-D imaging required outsourcing to China and Russia. “Boston hasn’t established the tipping point of those kinds of skills,” he said.
Another gaming skill lacking in Boston is investing, according to Myers and Hinkelman. “VCs in Boston say, ‘Gaming is a hits-driven business,’” Hinkelman said. “They don’t understand it.”
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