Benlog

I’m on the Program Committee for a new conference being held at MIT in the Fall, the Engaging Data Forum. A number of fascinating topics around the issues of managing personal electronic information. Of course I’m focused on the security, privacy, and interoperability aspects, but there’s more, including geolocation, collection from portable devices, etc… Send [...]

Creative Commons is holding its third technology summit on June 26th. The previous two have been lots of fun, very productive, with a unique mix of policy-oriented tech folks. Plus, it’s in Italy! How can you go wrong?

At some point in the history of patents, something went a little nutty: it became possible to patent genes themselves. Not “a method for extracting” a gene. Not “a method for synthesizing” a gene. But the gene itself. As a result, a number of biotech companies own human genes. If you want to find out [...]

Major credit goes to Shep Smith of Fox News for this: Fox News is generally right-wing propaganda, but credit is due here, and I completely agree with Shep Smith. It doesn’t matter if it works. We do not torture. Well, we should not torture, because it’s fairly clear now that we did, and that is [...]

I’m a big supporter of Obama, I volunteered for him, and I donated money to his campaign. And I’m proud of just about everything he’s been doing as President so far. But not everything. It seems that the Obama administration is angling to continue warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, as per the EFF’s analysis. It [...]

Over the last two years, I’ve spent most of my time on… not elections believe it or not, but rather the personal control of health data over at Children’s Hospital, Boston, with a fantastic crew. And so now it turns out that health data is super cool, what with the Obama recovery plan and the [...]

I’ve long been an Apple fan. It is somewhat dissonant with my strong attachment to open-source/free software, but I’ve learned to live with it because I am significantly more productive on Mac OS than on Linux, and I still have to work with plenty of MS Office (and no, Open Office doesn’t cut it.) That [...]

An election just wrapped up a few hours hours ago [public radio, le soir, RTL info]. The encrypted votes are stored in a redundant database, tied to each voter’s identifier, signed by the voting system, and available to all election participants for auditing. Each voter has a receipt of their encrypted vote they can compare [...]

If you do security research, say to make sure voting machines are secure, you could get sued because of the way copyright law is written. That’s insane. That’s why I enthusiastically signed on to Alex Halderman’s request for Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies. And if you’re a [...]

After writing yesterday about the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco — Facebook just reverted their Terms of Service due to user outcry — I remembered that Mark Zuckerberg has talked about data ownership before. So I did a little bit of Googling. Here’s what he said in March 2008: If you export your friends list, [...]