Benlog

The governator on how to improve voter turnout.

Thanks to the interesting site Why Tuesday?
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Those who know me know I’m a big fan of Obama. I think we’ll look back on this exceptionally timed zinger as the symbolic turning point in the race for the Democratic nomination:

Yeah, so I’ve got Obamania. What can I say, it’s good to be deeply excited about and impressed by a presidential candidate, for [...]

Sarkozy, France’s new President, was hailed, upon arriving into Le Palais de L’Elysee (the French White House), as the first French President born after World War II, the one who would bring a sense of youth and innovation back into French Politics. Because I think France can use a bit of a shift away from [...]

I read Richard Stallman’s The Right to Read in 1997, when I was an undergrad at MIT. If you haven’t read it, go read it, now. It’s classic Stallman: clear, crisp, and chilling. At the time, I thought “okay, I’m a free software developer, and Richard is brilliant, but this seems a bit over the [...]

Vote By Mail in California

While we’re struggling to secure voting machines, a number of States are deploying “Vote By Mail Permanently!” Here’s a picture on a bus in the San Francisco Bay Area. What a nightmare.
I suspect that, for some election officials, the appeal of vote-by-mail is a bit [...]

I’m an advisor to Harvard Law’s Berkman Center, where I work specifically with StopBadware, a group of talented folks who are helping to identify and report on software that does bad stuff to your computer. Malware, spyware, adware, badware, whatever you want to call it, the issue is control and notice: do you control your [...]

[With apologies to my grandmothers, some of the most insightful people I've known.]
When you want to build a publicly accountable secure system, must you build to the lowest common denominator? The key example is, of course, voting. It’s clear that you have to build the user interface to the lowest common denominator: given minimal direction, [...]

Creative Commons is an organization that helps individuals share and remix their songs, videos, writings, etc. under appropriate licenses. Need a picture for a blog posting? Search Flickr, Google, Yahoo, all of which now have Creative Commons search options. With a CC license, you know ahead of time which rights you have. Don’t forget to [...]

In the last few weeks, friends of mine — savvy friends of mine — have been hit by sites that ask for your gmail, yahoo, or hotmail password just so they can “check to see if your friends are using the site!” Quechup, the so-called “social network that’s sweeping the globe” is accomplishing that grand [...]

The “surge” is working. That is, if you count the number of deaths in the “right” way:

a body found with a gunshot to the front of the head is classified as an ordinary crime, while a body with a gunshot to the back of the head is attributed to sectarian violence.

Bill Maher mentioned this last [...]