Benlog

I’m now at Usenix Security, which I’m micro-blogging over at Identi.ca. Sometimes, though, one talk merits more than a micro-blog. Currently, I’m listening to Adam Barth presenting his web-security paper (joint with Collin Jackson) on subtle but huge issues with frame navigation and communication. Top-notch stuff.
What’s fascinating to me about Adam & Collin’s research is [...]

Since I haven’t had the time to write up every talk, I’ll just highlight one talk today that I particularly enjoyed: Josh Benaloh’s paper on achieving both administrative and public verifiability in elections [PDF].
I’m a big fan of Josh’s work. My upcoming voting system implementation, Helios, is based on one of Josh’s earlier protocols. Not [...]

I’m at the Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, where I’ll be blogging a few things.
Jon Krosnick of Stanford is just wrapping up a fantastic invited talk on how ballot candidate ordering influences elections… and the result is stunningly depressing: it turns out that the impact can be quite large. So large, in fact, that Jon [...]

A fantastic question:

If you vote by mail, but die before Election Day, does your vote count? It depends on where you lived.
Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote.
Increasingly popular mail-in ballots mean voters can now [...]

It’s always interesting to see who gets blamed for consumer-unfriendliness. Take the launch of the latest iPhone “3G”. Brendan Ballou over at Jonathan Zittrain’s blog makes a compelling case about how Apple is monetizing iPhone applications and benefits from locking users into the AT&T network. There’s some truth to that, I think, but I don’t [...]

Over the last few years, I’ve been the Creative Commons representative to the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c). This means that I work with a bunch of great folks on web standards, specifically trying to define solutions that will help Creative Commons. Since 2005, I’ve led a w3c task force on RDFa, which is a [...]

Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, considers the case of the Minnesota teen who tried to sell his vote on eBay:

This guy’s hijinks did, however, give us a glimpse into the market price of a vote.
The minimum bid was set at $10. Nobody bid on his item. The failure to attract bidders is consistent with the [...]