Benlog

Some thoughts about the recent Associated Press / Creative Commons story:

When Creative Commons launched in 2002, we were often asked “is Creative Commons a form of DRM?” Our answer: no, we help publishers express their rights, but we don’t dabble in enforcement, because enforcement technologies are unable to respect important, complex, and often subjective concepts [...]

The second round of the UCL Election just wrapped up.
The cast votes have been recorded, and here are their fingerprints in PDF form. If you have a problem with the way the election was run, for example if you were a voter and the correct tracking number does not appear next to your voter ID [...]

Yes! Luis von Ahn says that academic paper reviews should be public (they can remain anonymous.) I agree.
I’d go further than Luis. For most computer science conferences, there is no feedback loop. Want to trash a paper? Write a really bad review and argue strongly, and if someone else on the program committee doesn’t want [...]

I gave a short talk on RDFa at Interlab 2008, a gathering of DOE labs on web technology. Good group, fun interactions, and a panel discussion with Ben Ward and Ryan King from the microformats effort. Good discussion, an agreement that microformats and RDFa are complementary, and no street fight. Thanks to Joseph Lewis for [...]

I’m off to CRYPTO, where I’ll be listening to some fun talks and presenting Helios on Tuesday.

I’m at the Creative Commons Tech Summit today, where I gave a talk about the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language. Fun group, good stuff, and a bright future for Creative Commons. The CC Interns live-blogged my talk, among others.

I’ve written about how it’s a really bad idea to have web sites asking for your gmail password, “just to load your contacts!” I like the name Jeremy Keith gave it: the Password Anti-Pattern. Sure, Facebook likely isn’t going to do naughty things with your data, but once you’re used to giving sites your gmail [...]

I presented BeamAuth at CCS 2007 near Washington, DC, last week. I’ve posted the slides, and I’m trying out Slideshare so you can quickly check it out. Feedback is always welcome!

I’m a big fan of Apple. However, they just announced a new offering that, although small in scope, seems to be a big departure from their usual approach, and it worries me. They announced that, for an extra 99 cents, you can take a song and turn it into a ringtone for the Apple iPhone. [...]

It turns out, there is a gene that predisposes to left-handedness. Fascinating stuff. But this is the kind of article where you wish you could ask more questions:

Australian research published last year found left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport.

interesting!

And French researchers concluded that being [...]