Benlog

Thoughts on Technology & People

  • Know your Supreme Court Justices

    The Supreme Court recently ruled that high-school students’ free speech rights do not extend to allowing them to post drug-related banners. I’m all for free speech, but I guess I don’t have too much of an issue with this decision, because you have to give school administrators some power to control the classroom learning environment.…

  • Get Over It, The Web is the Platform

    I have to be careful sometimes when posting about Apple’s latest stuff, because I am, to a certain degree, what some call an Apple fanboy. I don’t like everything Apple does, but I am certainly receptive to their designs and their approach to consumer technology. I think they generally “get it right” whereas so many…

  • Voting: Things are Not Always What They Seem

    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…

  • Web 2.0 Security & Privacy Workshop

    Today, I was at the IEEE Web 2.0 Security & Privacy Workshop, where I presented a short position paper on extending the web browser to enable secure private-data mashups. I started the day not sure what to expect: maybe a day-long complaint about how web 2.0 concepts are insecure and we need to stop and…

  • Voting à la Française

    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…

  • It’s True “for Me”

    Richard Dawkins spoke with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News last night. I thought it would be more explosive, but it remained extremely quiet and civilized. That said, the crux of the issue was addressed: O’Reilly: well, it’s true for me, you see I believe… Dawkins: you mean “true for you” is different from “true for…

  • Why Boston ran out of Ballots in the Last Election

    Last Friday, Professor David King presented the results of his review of the Boston Election Department at a meeting of the MIT Voting Technology Project. His work has been mentioned in the press, but this is the first time that David has been able to publicly comment on his recommendations. There are number of interesting…

  • Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society (WPES)

    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…

  • Privacy Skills and DRM for healthcare

    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…

  • Google, the Desktop, and Privacy

    Google just released Google Desktop for Mac, and that got me thinking again about the Google and Privacy issue I wrote about here and here. I said that Microsoft might have an interesting privacy advantage, because your data lives on your computer, and their software doesn’t need to send much info to the mothership. By…

  • A Talk at the Boston Latin School

    Yesterday, I gave an introductory lecture to high school juniors and seniors in Ms. Reiner‘s AP Computer Science at the Boston Latin School. Ginger (Reiner) is an old friend who became a high school teacher after a fast-paced software engineering career: the world needs more people like her. It was a fantastic experience, in large…

  • Time to Rethink the Cross-Domain Javascript situation

    Joe Walker worries about Operator Overloading in Javascript. Though I’m not sure I see an immediate attack, I think Joe is worried about the right thing: since cross-domain execution is dependent on whether the file is well-formed according to the Javascript language, and since the Javascript language is changing over time, we’ve got a real…

  • The Coercion Issues of Vote By Mail

    There isn’t much hard data on the coercion issues of vote by mail, though with states adopting new absentee voting policies, that may change, and we may start to see some interesting things. In the meantime, there’s a very interesting collection of vote-by-mail fraud incidents reported regularly on the No Vote By Mail blog. I…

  • Google & Privacy

    (Thanks to Joe for the pointer.) Google just announced a notable improvement in their privacy practices, which reinforces the opinion I expressed in a post a few days ago. Could it be that Google is starting to feel consumer demand for privacy? I think it’s happening, and the most promising aspect of Google’s move is…

  • Responding to Ronald

    In response to my recent post regarding open-audit voting, Ronald Crane expresses a number of doubts regarding cryptographic auditing of elections, concluding “I don’t see that crypto voting solves much.” I am responding in detail here because Ronald is deeply misinformed. There are certainly points regarding open-audit techniques that merit in-depth discussion, but the points…

  • Microsoft’s Competitive Advantage: Privacy

    Today, I attended a lunch at the Berkman Center with Microsoft’s Ira Rubinstein. Ira talked about privacy and how it is built into the Microsoft development model. He mentioned Microsoft’s new layered approach to privacy policies, where a simple front page gives you the highlights, and you can drill down on any point. A bit…

  • I Stand with Avi (regarding American Idol)

    First, I need to express solidarity with Avi, who went out on a limb and professed his love of American Idol. I, too, am a closet American Idol fan, and I completely agree: if only the voting were verifiable! I personally think Jared should have qualified for the final 12. But on to the immediate…

  • On Fully Informed Decisions and the Role of Academics

    Professors Avi Rubin and Ed Felten are renowned computer security experts. Their work has made the press numerous times, and they’ve testified to various Congressional Committees on many issues, including voting. But when it comes to voting, their statements tend to leave out an entire category of voting systems for no clear reason. It’s as…

  • JSON Safety: It’s about the unwitting servers

    I’ve always thought that the JSON hack was a truly weird happenstance. For those who don’t quite know it, it goes something like this. A web page you download can run limited code inside your browser. For example, it can animate certain transitions when you click, it can sum up the price of your 3…

  • Privacy and Social Networks

    I worry a lot about privacy. The first half of this short video about the privacy policy of Facebook.com is great (the second half is a bit too much of a six-degrees-of-separation game to associate Facebook.com with the CIA). What’s particularly interesting is that, when Facebook.com is discussed in the press, there is rarely any…

  • On Voting, Banking, and Bad Analogies

    Estonia is running online elections, where anyone with a national ID card and Internet Explorer can vote online. As usual, the article forgets to mention the single biggest issue with remote voting, whether online or by mail: voter coercion. The point of supervised voting—i.e. voting in a controlled location, inside a private voting booth—is to…

  • My Talk at TCC 2007

    Last week, I was in Amsterdam for the Theory of Cryptography Conference, where I presented my work (joint with Douglas Wikström) on How to Shuffle in Public. The conference was exhausting, intense, and extremely interesting. And, minus a last-minute A/V problem due to a broken pin in the VGA connector, my talk went well. If…

  • Advertising Controlled Substances

    Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has just started a blog. I’m impressed and, given my interest in health technology, I didn’t hesitate long to add this blog to my newsreader. This should be fascinating. That said, my first comment is a bit tangential to Paul’s post regarding a Medtronic…

  • Property Rehab

    Too many people in the US are property addicts. They see “property” as the natural state of a free society, where things must be owned if they are going to be economically viable. Houses, cars, TVs, pots and pans, etc… All of these must clearly be owned by someone. This also extends to music, movies,…

  • BeamAuth: Two-Factor Web Authentication with a Bookmark.

    (There’s always a dilemma between “publishing soon” and “polishing for peer review.” This is my first attempt at blog-based collaborative peer-review. Let’s see how it goes!) The Problem Phishing is a serious issue, and it’s only getting worse. Through various means, Alice ends up at a spoofed web site she thinks she recognizes (usually her…

  • Is that You speaking, or is it just an evil web site?

    Microsoft Vista has speech recognition, so it’s conceivable that a malicious web site could play a sound that orders your computer to delete a file, at which point Windows might respond as if you’d given the order. I don’t blame Microsoft for this one, because it’s really an attack channel I doubt many people had…

  • The End of Bananas

    For some reason, I’m fascinated by a story I’ve been following for a few months: bananas as we know them may disappear in 10 years: Two fungal diseases, Panama disease and black Sigatoka, are cutting a swath through banana plantations, just as blight once devastated potato crops. But unlike the potato, and other crops where…

  • Election Season is Over… It’s time to design the next Voting System

    You can’t design a voting system in the few months that precede an election. That’s why the year in between elections should be the most productive in designing new voting technology: no one from the press is paying attention, no one is rushing to merely patch their existing system, and opportunity abounds! And so, if…

  • Setting Expectations

    Even if you take political preference aside for a second, and ignore the craziness of George Bush’s speech last night, if you just take it at face value, something is really really wrong. The President admitted that he made mistakes, that there’s tons of violence, that we’re not “winning.” Then he said that winning the…

  • Scheduling Poll Workers

    Thad Hall wonders if Poll Workers could be scheduled like Walmart employees. Thad’s ideas are generally fantastic, and I find his out-of-the-box yet highly-informed viewpoint to be refreshing in this field. In this case, though, I don’t think this suggestion would work. It’s all about training and complexity. Consider what a well-oiled machine Walmart is,…