Benlog

Category: policy

  • The Beautiful Magic of Cryptography

    An election just wrapped up a few hours hours ago [public radio, le soir, RTL info]. The encrypted votes are stored in a redundant database, tied to each voter’s identifier, signed by the voting system, and available to all election participants for auditing. Each voter has a receipt of their encrypted vote they can compare…

  • Enough with Secrecy in Research

    If you do security research, say to make sure voting machines are secure, you could get sued because of the way copyright law is written. That’s insane. That’s why I enthusiastically signed on to Alex Halderman’s request for Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies. And if you’re a…

  • Hotel Facebook and Tethered Data

    After writing yesterday about the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco — Facebook just reverted their Terms of Service due to user outcry — I remembered that Mark Zuckerberg has talked about data ownership before. So I did a little bit of Googling. Here’s what he said in March 2008: If you export your friends list,…

  • Facebook: “we’re keeping your data for your friends’ sake!”

    So Facebook changed their terms of service so they can keep and distribute your data forever, even if you delete your account. It seems that they will factor in your privacy preferences, but I’m not a lawyer and I’m not sure how ironclad that provision is. What seems to be clear is that they keep…

  • The Bar of Public Understanding

    I’m in Louvain-la-Neuve at the Université Catholique de Louvain where Helios Voting is being deployed to 25,000 voters, and I just had dinner with Olivier Pereira, the guy who’s doing a fantastic job leading the project here at UCL. We discussed the issue of activists and how they often seem to believe that they know…

  • Pinker on Personal Genomics

    As some folks know, I’ve spent the majority of my time over the last 1.5 year as a member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School in the Informatics group, thinking about security and privacy of web platforms for managing personal health data, including genomic data. I’ve had trouble blogging about it, because I’m still…

  • 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…

  • European Projections of Prejudice

    I grew up in France, so it’s fascinating to see what’s going on on the other side of the Atlantic now that Obama has been elected and, just as importantly, now that Obama has chosen Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff. It’s amazing how a number of Europeans are projecting their own biases and…

  • Pride and Shame

    Obama wins solidly, and I am incredibly proud of my country today. More on that in a later post. Meanwhile, I am ashamed of my new State, California. It looks like Prop 8 has passed, against my every expectation. Prop 8 modifies the State Constitution to redefine marriage according to strict religious beliefs, rather than…

  • Policy from Evidence

    bias explanation: Every now and then, folks are surprised that an election technology guy like me expresses his political opinion in the open. They think: ‘how can I trust this guy on election technology if he’s shilling for the Obama campaign?’ Here’s my take. I’m not getting paid by the Obama campaign, so I’m not…

  • Putting the “End” in EndNote.

    EndNote is a tool used commonly by a number of academics for adding endnote references to their papers. You keep an EndNote library of references, and you can easily add them to your Word document as you type your paper. So, this is a classic example of a file format that becomes vastly more useful…

  • Stop, Drop, and Register

    You need to register to vote. Not later today, not tomorrow, now. go register Oh, you think you’re already registered? verify that you are. Oh, and a fun little video:

  • Children vs. Anonymity

    I’m a member of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force‘s Technical Advisory Board, at the Harvard Berkman Center. We’re writing a report on technologies that protect kids online. Today, at the open meeting, we’ve been hearing short presentations from 15 companies. I won’t comment much on the individual proposals, since the TAB has been jointly…

  • You Wanted Details?

  • More of This, Please.

    Obama calls out Republicans on their immature rants: Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’” The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because…

  • I Agree with Pat Buchanan

    How often can you say THAT, eh?

  • Blame the Device or the Carrier?

    It’s always interesting to see who gets blamed for consumer-unfriendliness. Take the launch of the latest iPhone “3G”. Brendan Ballou over at Jonathan Zittrain’s blog makes a compelling case about how Apple is monetizing iPhone applications and benefits from locking users into the AT&T network. There’s some truth to that, I think, but I don’t…

  • Thank you, Hillary Clinton

    Thank you, Hillary Clinton, for a very gracious concession speech today. There is sadness in your voice and in your eyes, which is, of course, completely understandable and only human. So thank you for the courage and humility it took to give this sincere speech.

  • What (Who?) Hillary is fighting for

    I was a huge Clinton fan in the 90s. And I was pumped to think that Hillary Clinton might be the first female President, back in 2000, when she ran for the Senate and it was clear she eventually would run for the Presidency. But then came Barack Obama, and I saw in him a…

  • Translation from Rove-speak to Plain English

    [inspired by John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim.] Karl Rove, ex-Senior Advisor to Bush, in today’s Newsweek giving Obama advice. Four months ago, you took the political world by storm in Iowa. The media were agog. They called your words “gorgeous,” your victory “a message to the world.” You “made history” and Americans could “look at…

  • Lessig on Obama

    Lessig knocks one out of the park:

  • An Inconvenient Truth about the Left

    For the last few years, Bush and others within the Republican Party have ignored and distorted scientific evidence because the evidence didn’t match their ideology. The latest example this weekend is the administration’s attitude on the Endangered Species Act, but of course the most glaring example is the pseudo-controversy they fan regarding global warming. I’ve…

  • Change Congress

    Lessig launches the Change Congress movement. This is supremely important if you want the government to actually work for the People. There are four issues on which you can voice an opinion regarding your preferred candidate’s beliefs: not accept contributions from lobbyists an Political Action Committees abolish of earmarks increase transparency publicly finance elections I’m…

  • A Witness to History

    I’ve always wondered what my parents felt when they heard the great political speeches of their generation. Now I know.

  • Hope

    In anticipation of tonight’s results, I was going to try to write something that captures my incredibly hopeful and enthusiastic state of mind, but my good friend Oliver beat me to it: Doesn’t some part of you still believe that there are special moments in the world? Special people who catalyze and give a voice…

  • The Carrot, the Stick, and Obama.

    I support Barack Obama for President, with more enthusiasm and excitement than I’ve ever had for any politician. Those who know me know this already, but I’ve been asked “why?” enough times that I thought it worthwhile to write up. Politicians use two methods to achieve their goals: the carrot and the stick. Need Iran…

  • Make it Spicy

    The governator on how to improve voter turnout. Thanks to the interesting site Why Tuesday?

  • The Turning Point Zinger?

    Those who know me know I’m a big fan of Obama. I think we’ll look back on this exceptionally timed zinger as the symbolic turning point in the race for the Democratic nomination: Yeah, so I’ve got Obamania. What can I say, it’s good to be deeply excited about and impressed by a presidential candidate,…

  • Old Man Sarkozy

    Sarkozy, France’s new President, was hailed, upon arriving into Le Palais de L’Elysee (the French White House), as the first French President born after World War II, the one who would bring a sense of youth and innovation back into French Politics. Because I think France can use a bit of a shift away from…

  • 10 Years

    I read Richard Stallman’s The Right to Read in 1997, when I was an undergrad at MIT. If you haven’t read it, go read it, now. It’s classic Stallman: clear, crisp, and chilling. At the time, I thought “okay, I’m a free software developer, and Richard is brilliant, but this seems a bit over the…