Benlog

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 [...]

In cryptographic protocols, we talk about “the adversary”, this entity that’s trying to screw up the security goals of your protocol. Applied security folks also talk about adversaries, though they talk more often about “threats” and “threat models.” In any case, there’s some dark, shadowy, evil figure fighting against you. In a well architectured system, [...]

My wife and I were discussing Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons Quarterback who is admitting he set up dog fights and killed some dogs by drowning and hanging. The people defending Vick are a bit out of line, in my opinion, especially those claiming that “dogfighting is just a sport.” Uhuh, right. The guy committed [...]

Republicans in California are trying to split the electoral votes proportionally in time for the 2008 elections. They say it’s “more fair.”
Are you kidding me? Seriously? Is this the level of lying that we’re dealing with now? Obviously, it’s only fair if all states do this. If only “blue states” do this, or if only [...]

In 2004, I appeared on a panel at Harvard alongside Debra Bowen, who was then a California State Senator. I found her to be extremely sharp, and particularly insightful about voting issues at a time when most of the public debate was thoroughly confused (it’s gotten a little bit better since).
Ms. Bowen has since become [...]