Benlog

If you do security research, say to make sure voting machines are secure, you could get sued because of the way copyright law is written. That’s insane. That’s why I enthusiastically signed on to Alex Halderman’s request for Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies.
And if you’re a physician [...]

After writing yesterday about the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco — Facebook just reverted their Terms of Service due to user outcry — I remembered that Mark Zuckerberg has talked about data ownership before. So I did a little bit of Googling.
Here’s what he said in March 2008:

If you export your friends list, does their [...]

So Facebook changed their terms of service so they can keep and distribute your data forever, even if you delete your account. It seems that they will factor in your privacy preferences, but I’m not a lawyer and I’m not sure how ironclad that provision is. What seems to be clear is that they keep [...]

I’ve posted my talk slides from my voting talk at UCL, and my short voting talk at the Harvard College Fund Assembly. I’ve included copies on Slideshare, which is starting to get interesting. I see that I can create synced audio for these slides…. I need to find time to do that for some of [...]

Just as we’re wrapping up the verification for UCL’s test election (powered by Helios) in preparation for their big election in a few days, we get word that the Scantegrity team is going to be used in a real US democratic election. That is fantastic news for the voting community. I hope we continue to [...]

I’m in Louvain-la-Neuve at the Université Catholique de Louvain where Helios Voting is being deployed to 25,000 voters, and I just had dinner with Olivier Pereira, the guy who’s doing a fantastic job leading the project here at UCL. We discussed the issue of activists and how they often seem to believe that they know [...]