Monthly Archives: December 2008

Helios x 25K @ UCL

Posted on December 30, 2008 by ben

I’m really excited to announce that Helios will power the Recteur election at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), in Belgium. I’ve been working with their team, led by Olivier Pereira and Jean-Jacques Quisquater, for the last 4-5 months to … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, voting | 2 Comments

Dan Wallach on Internet Voting

Posted on December 29, 2008 by ben

Dan Wallach strikes again, putting the Estonians on notice regarding their plans to go from bad to worse with mobile-phone-based voting. It’s fascinating to me how most of the world regards Estonia’s high-tech elections as further proof of how technologically … Continue reading →

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Trusting Trust and JavaScript

Posted on December 19, 2008 by ben

About 2 years ago, I tried to come up with a way to make OpenID and similarly single-sign-on systems less phishing-prone. That turned into BeamAuth (note to self: must publish the source code! Argg, so little time.) Minutes before I … Continue reading →

Posted in press, security, web | 1 Comment

“You can get the ballots and count them yourself”

Posted on December 15, 2008 by ben

My friend Oliver points me to Humboldt County’s initiative to post publicly all of its cast ballots. The article includes a video of Mitch Trachtenberg explaining how his open-source software package counts scanned images of ballots. “You can get the … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, security, voting | 2 Comments

CC Tech Summit – December 2008

Posted on December 12, 2008 by ben

I just finished my presentation on “RDFa: Life after W3C Recommendation” at the Creative Commons Tech Summit held at MIT (photographic evidence). Fun to chat about RDFa, as always, and a good crowd with some good questions.

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Dan Wallach on teaching open-audit voting

Posted on December 6, 2008 by ben

Dan Wallach writes about how hard it is to explain the cryptography of verifiable elections: My big question is whether we have a research challenge to invent progressively simpler systems that still have the right security properties, or whether we … Continue reading →

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OpenID and Creative Commons

Posted on December 5, 2008 by ben

Creative Commons recently launched the Creative Commons Network, including OpenID support. I wrote up an introduction to OpenID, its risks, and how Creative Commons is addressing them.

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The Crisis on Wall Street

Posted on December 2, 2008 by ben

A fantastic article forwarded to me by my good friend Greg. Amazingly clear and frightening. Choice quote: I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial … Continue reading →

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