Benlog

A few weeks ago, I became Tech Lead on Identity and User Data at Mozilla. This is an awesome and challenging responsibility, and I’ve been busy. When I took on this new responsibility, BrowserID was already well under way, so we were able to launch it in my second week on the project (early July). [...]

Google just introduced Google Plus, their take on social networking. Unsurprisingly, Arvind has one of the first great reviews of its most important feature, Circles. Google Circles effectively let you map all the complexities of real-world privacy into your online identity, and that’s simply awesome. You can think of Circles as the actual circles of [...]

The US government has just announced a pilot program to integrate OpenID (and Information Cards) into public government web sites. This is very interesting news, as it will likely catalyze even greater OpenID deployment and use. [I've poo-poo'ed OpenID here and here, because of phishing and privacy concerns. I'm still very worried. I've suggested ways [...]

Building secure systems is difficult. It would be nice if we had a bunch of well-designed crypto building blocks that we could assemble in all sorts of ways and be certain that they would, no matter what, yield a secure system overall. There are, in fact, folks working on such things at a theoretical level [...]

If you’re hooked into the social networking world, you know about Facebook and the Facebook platform, which lets developers create all sorts of applications that make use of your Facebook social network in interesting ways. Flixster, for example, lets you share and compare your movie tastes with your existing Facebook friends. No need to reconnect [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about about how web sites that manage your data should be more open in order to better protect you. Not so surprisingly, I’m not the only one thinking about this issue. Jeremy Keith has a fantastic detailed write-up regarding what he calls the “password anti-pattern.” It gets at the [...]

Facebook launched a platform that lets third-party developers add Facebook applications. This is visionary, and it’s very very cool (though I’m not sure it’s the revolution everyone is talking about.) The problem, of course, is authentication. Take a look at the Zoho Facebook application. Zoho is a separate company. They have their own accounts. So [...]

(There’s always a dilemma between “publishing soon” and “polishing for peer review.” This is my first attempt at blog-based collaborative peer-review. Let’s see how it goes!) The Problem Phishing is a serious issue, and it’s only getting worse. Through various means, Alice ends up at a spoofed web site she thinks she recognizes (usually her [...]

As far as technology goes, 2007 will be about web security. With everyone storing more and more personal data on various web sites, and with the continuing innovation of mash-ups, it’s inevitable. And it won’t be the web security issues of the last few years, either, it will all be about how to do private-data [...]

It turns out, I’m giving another presentation before my defense… well, sort of, I’m on a panel at the Harvard Berkman Center’s Identity Mashup Conference in 10 days. Lots of very interesting folks getting together to discuss online identity. It should be quite interesting.