Benlog

security, privacy, transparency.

Archive for February, 2010

What the Oscars teach us about voting

Posted: Saturday, February 27th, 2010 @ 11:42 am in voting | No Comments »

This year, the voting process for the Oscars has changed. Rather than indicating a single choice as they have done since 1946, members of the Academy will provide a first choice, a second choice, etc.. potentially ranking all 10 nominees for Best Picture if so desired. Some are speculating that this will affect the results. [...]

For deniability, faking data even the owner can’t prove is fake

Posted: Friday, February 26th, 2010 @ 5:29 pm in crypto, privacy, voting | No Comments »

I was speaking with a colleague yesterday about Loopt, the location-based social network, the rise of location-based services and the incredible privacy challenges they present. I heard the Loopt folks give a talk a few months ago, and I was generally impressed with the measures they’re taking to protect their users’ data. I particularly enjoyed [...]

Taxing Human Transactions – Part 1

Posted: Thursday, February 18th, 2010 @ 2:53 pm in data, health, policy | 1 Comment »

The worst part of my job is dealing with the mess of document formats and coding systems in healthcare. The acronym soup is insane: HL7, CCD, CCR, CDA, Green CDA (which I just heard about from John Halamka’s blog but… no link!), and that’s just the document formats. Then there are coding systems like LOINC, [...]

Buzz Kill

Posted: Saturday, February 13th, 2010 @ 9:20 pm in policy, privacy | No Comments »

Everyone is talking about the privacy disaster that was the Google Buzz launch, and oh my goodness it was. I’ve never been so thankful that I don’t use gmail. I’m frankly surprised that they didn’t do a smaller beta first, or that there isn’t a group at Google charged with thinking about the privacy implications [...]