Benlog

Thoughts on Technology & People

  • The Internet is not a Truck

    Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska, is at it again, this time arguing against Net Neutrality. The sad thing is, I’m sure he’s being totally honest about his opinion… he just doesn’t get the problem, thanks to the misinformation spread by the telcos. an internet [I think he means email] was sent by my staff at…

  • You can’t photocopy money

    Tim Berners-Lee has a brilliant summary of why Net Neutrality matters. Yes, it is regulation, but it’s the basic regulation necessary to maintain the fair play rules of the Internet, where any little guy can put up a web site that is just as good as the big guy. If you’re allergic to regulation, consider…

  • Viva la Defense

    My thesis defense, aka “viva voce”, aka “soutenance” is next Thursday, 9am. It’s open to the public, so if you’re really interested in cryptographic voting systems, you can come on over to the Stata Center. Now back to my slides….

  • So, I lied….

    It turns out, I’m giving another presentation before my defense… well, sort of, I’m on a panel at the Harvard Berkman Center’s Identity Mashup Conference in 10 days. Lots of very interesting folks getting together to discuss online identity. It should be quite interesting.

  • My Letter to the Boston Globe

    Dear Boston Globe Editors, Jeff Jacoby, in his column on June 7th, takes issue with Senator Kennedy for calling proponents of the FMA “bigots.” Sometimes, however, some opinions are indeed proof of bigotry. Some laws, like the FMA. are indeed discriminatory. That religious leaders have signed on to the FMA, or that a majority of…

  • Return of the Cross Domain AJAX

    So I’ve found that the cross-domain AJAX meme just won’t die, with folks writing articles that seem to miss the issue of firewalled content, at least at first (in that article, a reader comment eventually brings it up, though the crux of the article is focused on far less important issues.) Somehow, the point is…

  • Shame

    If this is true, then I am truly and deeply ashamed to be represented by this administration: The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to knowledgeable military officials. — Baltimore Sun, June 5, 2006 “The overall thinking,”…

  • Perspective and Pettiness

    I was shocked today to learn that Alan Kotok passed away. I knew Alan a bit from my work with the W3C. I only knew his latest accomplishments, like running W3C operations, including all web sites, repositories, member administration interfaces, and such. So I can’t help but feel like a petty idiot. A couple of…

  • Talks Galore!

    I’ve given far too many talks over the last 2 months. You’d think I wasn’t defending my PhD thesis next month. All of my slides are available under a Creative Commons license, of course: Introduction to Cryptographic Voting, a lecture I gave in Kevin Fu‘s Applied Cryptography class at UMass Amherst. (Kevin was a classmate…

  • RDFa Web Site Launched

    For about 18 months now, I’ve been chairing the W3C’s Task Force on embedding RDF in HTML. In simpler terms, this means my little group is defining how you can add extra structure to your HTML, so that, if you announce a talk, your contact information, a document license, or any other metadata, a small…

  • Interoperable Metadata @ WWW20006

    This week, I’m at WWW2006, giving two talks on Interoperable Web Metadata: on Wednesday, at 4pm, for about 20 minutes, focusing on the developer’s view of embedding interoperable metadata in HTML. Location TBD. on Friday at 11am, for about 20 minutes, focusing on the W3C/RDF issues of embedding interoperable metadata in HTML. Location TBD. What…

  • W3C AC Lightning Talk on Interoperable Metadata

    I’m giving a lightning talk at the W3C AC Meeting in Edinburgh on Sunday, at around 1500 GMT about RDFa for 3 minutes . UPDATE: The slides for the talk are now available online.

  • How much Kool-Aid do you have to drink?

    How much Kool-Aid do you have to drink before you come up with a slogan like: Carbon Dioxyde: they call it pollution, we call it life. No, it’s not a joke. We breathe out the carbon dioxyde, and plants breathe it in, so obviously it can’t be bad for us, right? Notice one important detail…

  • Freakonomics could use some CC

    The Freakonomics guys find it interesting that some guy downloaded their book from a P2P network and now wants to send them money. They lecture him about the publisher/distributor costs, etc… How about, instead, realizing that there’s an interesting development here: lots of people will pay after they’ve sampled the content if they find it…

  • I agree with the Religious Right

    It’s not often that I agree with the likes of James Dobson, but when they’re right, they’re right. Richard Viguerie, a “conservative direct-mail pioneer” says: There is a growing feeling […] that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall. Precisely my thought. Though, somehow, I…

  • Let’s Not Kill the Next Web

    Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, explains how, if network neutrality had not been the norm in the early 1990s, the web would never have happened. I can’t think of a more powerful example of why network neutrality is so crucial. Once again, it’s about the economics of platforms: to allow Internet-based innovation to…

  • People Ought to Learn English

    Bush today: I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English […] Fantastic.

  • Secure, scalable storage of personal genomic data

    Woohoo, I’m now a published genomics scientist. My work from last summer with Zak Kohane of the Harvard Medical School is now available as a preliminary abstract at BMC Genomics. We built the GenePING software, which extends the existing PING system to provide secure storage of large genomic data sets. So now you can get…

  • WOTE 2006

    Peter Ryan, Ronald Rivest, and David Chaum are organizing the Workshop On Trustworthy Elections – 2006. I’m on the program committee. Send in your research! There’s much exciting work left to do in the voting field, and as the press begins to understand that neither touch-screens nor paper-trail machines are panaceas, there will emerge an…

  • My Hopeless, Repetitive Talk

    A few weeks ago, I gave a talk on interoperable metadata at the Semantic Technologies conference. I give a number of talks about various technology topics covering web, semantic web, crypto and voting, but this is one of the few times that I actually received formal, written feedback and ratings. Feedback is a fantastically useful…

  • Smoking vs. Genetically-Modified Crops

    So the French are opposed to genetically modified crops. And to some degree, I understand the concerns they have regarding the unknown consequences of genetic manipulation of the food supply. It’s a complicated issue, of course. Genetically modified crops could help stem serious issues of famine in Africa, reduce the use of harmful pesticides in…

  • VVPAT is a placebo

    Dan Tokaji points to a recent opinion by Black Box Voting’s Bev Harris and concludes that we may be converging on the idea that VVPAT is a placebo. This is a very interesting development. One has to be very careful when making statements like “VVPAT is a placebo,” because the folks pushing VVPAT have the…

  • Sadness and Anger

    In case my previous post a week ago didn’t make it clear, the situation in France makes me incredibly sad and angry. I’m sad that not enough of the French youth understands that, without an economic incentive to hire young employees, companies simply will not do it when they might be stuck with someone who…

  • Patents are so French

    Netflix is suing Blockbuster for “stealing their idea” of online DVD rentals for a fixed monthly price. Nothing like a business method patent to throw a wrench into this whole idea of competition and free markets, eh? So it got me thinking about the patent system again, and how patents are so French. Allow me…

  • The Clooney Attack

    George Clooney is upset at the Gawker Stalker web site for tracking celebrities by collecting information from the public. Clooney suggests Data Poisoning their site by submitting hundreds of bogus celebrity sighting reports. I’m a big fan of Clooney’s latest films, but I didn’t realize he was this savvy about the Internet: its greatest strength…

  • On French Employment Law and Incentives

    The French are protesting Villepin’s CPE plan to reduce employment guarantees for first-time employees. This law would give employers the right to lay off young workers (under 26) within their first 2 years of work without cause. Protesters believe this special regulation will result in young employees being treated as second-class citizens in the workforce,…

  • Cryptography and American Idol

    The Fox TV show American Idol receives in excess of 30 million votes per week. Every Tuesday night, contestants sing, then people vote, then every Wednesday night, the results are announced. No doubt that tens of millions of people watch on Wednesday night just to hear the results, announced with great dramatic emphasis by the…

  • My First Podcast – on Digital Identity

    A few weeks ago, I attended Berkman’s Digital Identity gathering where we discussed the technical, legal, and business aspects of the Identity Metasystem, this new, meta approach to online identity promoted by Kim Cameron of Microsoft. I need to write up my thoughts in greater detail, but in the meantime, Aldo Castaneda interviewed me and…

  • DRM stands for Incompatibility

    Ben Laurie finds that the disc shipped by Amazon does not conform to the audio CD standard. Why? Because the music publisher, EMI, is trying to prevent copying by shipping a disc that doesn’t quite behave like an audio CD, so that, for example, perfectly compliant audio CD players in computers aren’t able to read…

  • The French Courts on Law vs. Technology

    From Le Monde today, the French Cour de Cassation (more or less the Supreme Court), declared that making copies of a DVD for personal use violates authors’ rights. On the other hand, the rights of the consumer who legally purchased the DVD and may want to watch it on his laptop or ipod video… those…