Benlog

Have you noticed that, after you visit a web page, links to that web page change color, usually a lighter shade of blue? That’s one of the earliest User Interface wins of the web, a feature that dates all the way back to the first version of HTML. How convenient to be able to tell, [...]

Facebook is in hot water again, this time for “Facebook Beacon” which posts your activity at various partner sites to your Facebook newsfeed. Buy a self-help book at Amazon? Your friends will know. Browse some recipes at Epicurious? Your girlfriend might get some idea of what you’re cooking for Valentine’s Day. The fuss is mostly [...]

Facebook just launched a targeted advertising platform. Suddenly, all that data you entered about yourself will be used to target advertising to you. Were you expecting it?
This is worse than Gmail, because when gmail launched, they told you upfront that they were using your mail content to target ads. You could make the conscious choice [...]

The StopBadware Project and the Berkman Center (disclaimer: I’m affiliated with both) just announced the winner of the “Cookie Crumbles” video contest to help explain web cookies to the world: Clayton Miller. Here’s his video:

It is 99% correct, and for a 1.5 minute film, that’s quite impressive. Good video to share with friends and family [...]

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 [...]

The No-Vote-By-Mail blog cites me again, and in so doing points me to a a note by King County in Washington about how they are ensuring that vote-by-mail preserves ballot secrecy.
Okay, let’s say I believe everything they say. The ballot is double-enveloped, there are no traces of who the voter is on the ballot, there [...]

It’s interesting how Voting often comes up in so many discussions, and how often folks believe that Voting is a well established, stable process that is usually fair, except for those pesky touchscreen voting machines that are corrupting a process that has long been well managed. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like unverified touchscreen [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy just won the French Presidential Elections by a sizeable margin. In case my fellow US liberals are worried about a “Conservative” victory in Europe, it’s important to note that the US Republican Party and the French UMP are by no means the same. Sarkozy used his first speaking opportunity to declare France “a [...]

The Call for Papers for the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society 2007 is out:

ACM Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society (WPES’07)
The need for privacy-aware policies, regulations, and techniques has been widely recognized. This workshop discusses the problems related to privacy in the global interconnected society and their possible solutions. The 2007 Workshop, held [...]

My wife is about to start her medical residency, and as she was filling out a survey sent to all graduating medical students by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), she called me over with a chuckle. One question asked her to express her level of agreement with the following statement:

I am confident that [...]