Benlog

Vote By Mail in California While we’re struggling to secure voting machines, a number of States are deploying “Vote By Mail Permanently!” Here’s a picture on a bus in the San Francisco Bay Area. What a nightmare. I suspect that, for some election officials, the appeal of vote-by-mail is a bit like a magnified version [...]

I’m an advisor to Harvard Law’s Berkman Center, where I work specifically with StopBadware, a group of talented folks who are helping to identify and report on software that does bad stuff to your computer. Malware, spyware, adware, badware, whatever you want to call it, the issue is control and notice: do you control your [...]

The Swiss have implemented quantum cryptography to transfer votes to a central tallying authority. This is pretty cool, and I applaud the Swiss for trying new technologies to improve election security. However, marketing this as “unbreakable encryption” is troubling. I can’t help but see this as a version of Gene Spafford’s warning writ large: SSL [...]

[With apologies to my grandmothers, some of the most insightful people I've known.] When you want to build a publicly accountable secure system, must you build to the lowest common denominator? The key example is, of course, voting. It’s clear that you have to build the user interface to the lowest common denominator: given minimal [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about about how web sites that manage your data should be more open in order to better protect you. Not so surprisingly, I’m not the only one thinking about this issue. Jeremy Keith has a fantastic detailed write-up regarding what he calls the “password anti-pattern.” It gets at the [...]

Creative Commons is an organization that helps individuals share and remix their songs, videos, writings, etc. under appropriate licenses. Need a picture for a blog posting? Search Flickr, Google, Yahoo, all of which now have Creative Commons search options. With a CC license, you know ahead of time which rights you have. Don’t forget to [...]