Benlog

Building secure systems is difficult. It would be nice if we had a bunch of well-designed crypto building blocks that we could assemble in all sorts of ways and be certain that they would, no matter what, yield a secure system overall. There are, in fact, folks working on such things at a theoretical level [...]

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, [...]

[Disclaimer: Yahoo supports RDFa, which is a specification I've worked on. So, obviously, I'm excited. But hey, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.]
Yahoo recently announced SearchMonkey, and for the first time in 10 years, I have a reason to switch search engines, from Google to Yahoo (In fact, I just did that in Firefox.) Most web-savvy [...]

I was at WWW2008 last week in Beijing, where I presented a Tutorial on RDFa with Elias Torres and Ivan Herman, and SessionLock, a technique for securing web session used over unencrypted HTTP.
The conference was a lot of fun. Spent quite a bit of time discussing security with Collin Jackson and Tyler Close. The main [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about about how web sites that manage your data should be more open in order to better protect you. Not so surprisingly, I’m not the only one thinking about this issue.
Jeremy Keith has a fantastic detailed write-up regarding what he calls the “password anti-pattern.” It gets at the same [...]