Benlog

security, privacy, transparency.

Archive for December, 2010

privacy icons

Posted: Monday, December 27th, 2010 @ 8:16 pm in privacy, web | No Comments »

Aza Raskin has posted alpha 1 of the proposed Mozilla Privacy Icons. I was at the Mozilla-sponsored get-together where this was first discussed, and I’m really happy to see this moving forward. A few quick thoughts: the least useful of the icons is the “used only for intended use.” I don’t think that icon can [...]

Crisis in the Java Community… could they have used a secret-ballot election?

Posted: Thursday, December 9th, 2010 @ 3:06 pm in crypto, privacy, security, voting | No Comments »

There is a bit of a crisis in the Java community: the Apache Foundation just resigned its seat on the Java Executive Committee, as did two individual members, Doug Lea and Tim Peierls. From what I understand, the central issue appears to be that Oracle, the new Java “owner” since they acquired Sun Microsystems, is [...]

The Health IT report is very good; some opinionated suggestions

Posted: Wednesday, December 8th, 2010 @ 3:24 pm in data, health, privacy | 2 Comments »

“Oy,” I thought, when I received a copy of “REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT REALIZING THE FULL POTENTIAL OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE FOR AMERICANS: THE PATH FORWARD” [PDF]. I worried this would be a lot of vague, easy-to-agree-with advice with little actionable material. I was wrong. Hats off to the team that wrote [...]

Wikileaks — not ideal, but a force for good in the end

Posted: Saturday, December 4th, 2010 @ 7:18 pm in policy | 7 Comments »

I’ve found myself quite conflicted over the latest Wikileaks “dump”, specifically the hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the mainstream press is failing miserably in its role of investigating and breaking stories about illegal secret activities. We’ve seen numerous high-profile publications delay stories for fear [...]