Benlog

My friends and colleagues might soon wonder if they’re witnessing a kind of metamorphosis in me lately: what’s with the Apple criticism, Ben the Apple Fanboy? It’s true, I work exclusively on Macs (often with Linux running inside VMware for development), and I’ve converted many family and friends to Macs. I use the original iPhone. [...]

The New Scientist points out a case of genotyping error by one of the consumer genomics companies, where a software bug caused a genotype to appear non-human. The article attempts to be reassuring:

Before other deCODEme customers get too irate about errors in data for which they have paid almost $1000, the bug affects only a [...]

When people criticize RDFa without much experience really working with it, I tend to ignore the comments, because they’re usually out to prove some subjective point about what they think the Web should be like (“prefixes are ugly!” “Yahoo’s RDFa support was broken once so clearly RDFa sucks!”…). But when Jeni writes about RDFa, given [...]

Bruce Schneier pens another great article on how certain protocols between people who do not trust one another can be set up to prevent cheating without third-party oversight. Of course, the gem of the article pertains to voting:

Modern voting systems are rife with the potential for cheating, but an open show of hands in a [...]

I gave an invited talk on crypto voting. Ran out of time, as usual. I need to find a way to describe this stuff more efficiently. Later, I also presented MarkPledge2, joint work with Andy Neff.
Olivier de Marneffe presented the UCL/Helios implementation. So much material to present there, he did a fantastic job of focusing [...]

I had to miss the first afternoon session of EVT/WOTE to attend WOOT (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) where Adam was presenting a paper Collin and I co-authored on hijacking bookmarklets (I wrote about this work a few months ago).
Sadly, I missed what I hear were two great talks. Oh well, hopefully they’ll be on video.
I’m [...]

I’m at the Electronic Voting Technology / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections get-together (in Montreal). A few thoughts about the day and talks.
Keynote
Larry Norden from the Brennan Center is proposing a few ideas about what the voting community should focus on. Voting machine security, including forensics. Thinks statistical analyses to detect fraud is going to become [...]

For more than 10 years now, I’ve used custom email addresses when I log in to a web site I don’t fully trust, e.g. ben-SITENAME at adida.net. Until recently, the only time I’ve actually been able to trace emails to their source is when I saw how Democrats reused some of their mailing lists during [...]

Some thoughts about the recent Associated Press / Creative Commons story:

When Creative Commons launched in 2002, we were often asked “is Creative Commons a form of DRM?” Our answer: no, we help publishers express their rights, but we don’t dabble in enforcement, because enforcement technologies are unable to respect important, complex, and often subjective concepts [...]