Category Archives: personal

Don’t Hash Secrets

Posted on June 19, 2008 by ben

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, identity, personal, security, web | 24 Comments

Translation from Rove-speak to Plain English

Posted on April 30, 2008 by ben

[inspired by John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim.] Karl Rove, ex-Senior Advisor to Bush, in today’s Newsweek giving Obama advice. Four months ago, you took the political world by storm in Iowa. The media were agog. They called your words “gorgeous,” … Continue reading →

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A Witness to History

Posted on March 18, 2008 by ben

I’ve always wondered what my parents felt when they heard the great political speeches of their generation. Now I know.

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Hope

Posted on March 4, 2008 by ben

In anticipation of tonight’s results, I was going to try to write something that captures my incredibly hopeful and enthusiastic state of mind, but my good friend Oliver beat me to it: Doesn’t some part of you still believe that … Continue reading →

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Health Records and Me

Posted on September 17, 2007 by ben

This summer, I joined the faculty at Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. My work is focused on security and privacy of health data. One of the projects I’m contributing to was just announced in the press: Dossia was established by major … Continue reading →

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New Things

Posted on July 3, 2006 by ben

So I defended successfully. I have a bit more writing to do, and I have a number of projects to wrap up cleanly here at MIT, but by end of August I’ll be done. It’s a bit crazy, really. My … Continue reading →

Posted in personal | 3 Comments

Viva la Defense

Posted on June 15, 2006 by ben

My thesis defense, aka “viva voce”, aka “soutenance” is next Thursday, 9am. It’s open to the public, so if you’re really interested in cryptographic voting systems, you can come on over to the Stata Center. Now back to my slides….

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Perspective and Pettiness

Posted on June 2, 2006 by ben

I was shocked today to learn that Alan Kotok passed away. I knew Alan a bit from my work with the W3C. I only knew his latest accomplishments, like running W3C operations, including all web sites, repositories, member administration interfaces, … Continue reading →

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My Hopeless, Repetitive Talk

Posted on April 20, 2006 by ben

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk on interoperable metadata at the Semantic Technologies conference. I give a number of talks about various technology topics covering web, semantic web, crypto and voting, but this is one of the few … Continue reading →

Posted in personal, web | Leave a comment

New Blog Software and URL

Posted on February 11, 2006 by ben

As fantastic as the Berkman Center’s hosting has been, I can’t handle the userland software anymore. The UI doesn’t cut it, and the server is too slow for me to really explore it fully. I looked into WordPress, but it’s … Continue reading →

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