Benlog

Last week, I was in Amsterdam for the Theory of Cryptography Conference, where I presented my work (joint with Douglas Wikström) on How to Shuffle in Public. The conference was exhausting, intense, and extremely interesting. And, minus a last-minute A/V problem due to a broken pin in the VGA connector, my talk went well.
If you’re [...]

Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has just started a blog. I’m impressed and, given my interest in health technology, I didn’t hesitate long to add this blog to my newsreader. This should be fascinating. That said, my first comment is a bit tangential to Paul’s post regarding a Medtronic [...]

Too many people in the US are property addicts. They see “property” as the natural state of a free society, where things must be owned if they are going to be economically viable. Houses, cars, TVs, pots and pans, etc… All of these must clearly be owned by someone. This also extends to music, movies, [...]

(There’s always a dilemma between “publishing soon” and “polishing for peer review.” This is my first attempt at blog-based collaborative peer-review. Let’s see how it goes!)
The Problem
Phishing is a serious issue, and it’s only getting worse. Through various means, Alice ends up at a spoofed web site she thinks she recognizes (usually her bank). She [...]

Microsoft Vista has speech recognition, so it’s conceivable that a malicious web site could play a sound that orders your computer to delete a file, at which point Windows might respond as if you’d given the order. I don’t blame Microsoft for this one, because it’s really an attack channel I doubt many people had [...]