Benlog

Month: December 2008

  • Helios x 25K @ UCL

    I’m really excited to announce that Helios will power the Recteur election at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), in Belgium. I’ve been working with their team, led by Olivier Pereira and Jean-Jacques Quisquater, for the last 4-5 months to help them evaluate Helios and think about their customization needs. The UCL team is working…

  • Dan Wallach on Internet Voting

    Dan Wallach strikes again, putting the Estonians on notice regarding their plans to go from bad to worse with mobile-phone-based voting. It’s fascinating to me how most of the world regards Estonia’s high-tech elections as further proof of how technologically advanced Estonia is, while most computer security experts are absolutely petrified. The gap is another…

  • Trusting Trust and JavaScript

    About 2 years ago, I tried to come up with a way to make OpenID and similarly single-sign-on systems less phishing-prone. That turned into BeamAuth (note to self: must publish the source code! Argg, so little time.) Minutes before I presented BeamAuth at CCS, Adam and Collin cornered me and found a subtle but significant…

  • “You can get the ballots and count them yourself”

    My friend Oliver points me to Humboldt County’s initiative to post publicly all of its cast ballots. The article includes a video of Mitch Trachtenberg explaining how his open-source software package counts scanned images of ballots. “You can get the ballots and count them yourself,” he says. Yes! Fantastic! Nice work Mitch, and nice work…

  • CC Tech Summit – December 2008

    I just finished my presentation on “RDFa: Life after W3C Recommendation” at the Creative Commons Tech Summit held at MIT (photographic evidence). Fun to chat about RDFa, as always, and a good crowd with some good questions.

  • Dan Wallach on teaching open-audit voting

    Dan Wallach writes about how hard it is to explain the cryptography of verifiable elections: My big question is whether we have a research challenge to invent progressively simpler systems that still have the right security properties, or whether we have an education challenge to explain that a certain amount of complexity is worthwhile for…

  • OpenID and Creative Commons

    Creative Commons recently launched the Creative Commons Network, including OpenID support. I wrote up an introduction to OpenID, its risks, and how Creative Commons is addressing them.

  • The Crisis on Wall Street

    A fantastic article forwarded to me by my good friend Greg. Amazingly clear and frightening. Choice quote: I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall…