Benlog

Thoughts on Technology & People

  • A National Vote?

    I should be working on finishing up my submission to CRYPTO 2006, but I just heard about National Popular Vote, an initiative to start electing US presidents by popular vote rather than Electoral College. What’s brilliant about this plan is that it has a realistic transition phase that I haven’t seen before. So it might…

  • Free Markets and Your Health

    Eric Raymond is a leader of the open-source movement, and, from what I gather, a self-proclaimed libertarian. He believes in the free market economy so much that he is upset that Massachusetts is forcing Walmart to sell the morning-after pill. Not because he thinks the pill is bad, but because he thinks “free enterprise” means…

  • Freedom of Expression

    David Irving, a UK historian, is accused of being a Holocaust denier. He is about to be sentenced by a Vienna court. In my continued attempt to fight what’s wrong in my own backyard, I want to point out that David Irving is a despicable idiot, but being a despicable idiot does not a criminal…

  • It’s hard to help people

    So I tried to help the discussion over at Lucas’s blog this week, given my fairly extensive experience with enterprise web apps and security. The reaction was far from positive. Even though my point eventually got across, it was mostly dismissed as inconsequential. Instead, Lucas found a variant of the well known cross-domain attack, and…

  • Cross Domain AJAX 2

    Lucas has posted an update that confirms the two points I made in my previous post: Safari does not allow cross-site AJAX. (It allows it only when it loads a local file, but that’s a good thing for prototyping.) Cross-site AJAX would be a huge problem for intranet issues. I’m not sure that Lucas’s discovery…

  • Cross Domain AJAX

    AJAX is all the rage, but it can’t do everything people want it to do. For example, AJAX code from one site can’t access another site. The limitation is related to security… but recently Lucas Carlson set out to debunk cross-domain AJAX security myths. Lucas Carlson does a good job of debunking some of the…

  • A Tree Falls in the Woods, Lawyer Style

    At lunch, I attended a talk at Harvard’s CRCS, given by a senior partner from a Boston law firm. The talk was about the use of copyright and trade secrets to protect “intellectual property.” I found it fantastically enlightening… not because there was any interesting copyright lesson, but because I gained further insight into the…

  • Meeting of the Bens

    A couple of days ago, I had lunch with Ben Laurie and Ben Hyde. Great discussion about identity infrastructures and standards bodies. So I just read BenL’s post about the BenL+BenH idea of load-balancing a distributed hash table using logarithmic load hand-off… fantastic. The only downside I see is that this inherently increases the number…

  • New Blog Software and URL

    As fantastic as the Berkman Center’s hosting has been, I can’t handle the userland software anymore. The UI doesn’t cut it, and the server is too slow for me to really explore it fully. I looked into WordPress, but it’s not compatible with PostgreSQL, which is, for many reasons, my preferred DB platform. So I’m…