Benlog

Thoughts on Technology & People

  • Owning Genes

    At some point in the history of patents, something went a little nutty: it became possible to patent genes themselves. Not “a method for extracting” a gene. Not “a method for synthesizing” a gene. But the gene itself. As a result, a number of biotech companies own human genes. If you want to find out…

  • Google announces support for RDFa

    RDFa is a simple way to add structure to your web pages, for example the text ‘ben adida’ is not just any text, it’s my name, the link to the Creative Commons page is not just any link, it’s the copyright license for my page. I’ve been working on this specification for a few years…

  • Voting Workshop in Israel

    In a couple of weeks, I’ll be in Israel at a voting workshop organized by Ran Canetti, Alon Rosen, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and Assaf Jacob. I’ll be giving a talk on voting security and a second talk on Helios. The workshop will be free and open to the public, and it should be an interesting mix…

  • Swine Flu Source Code

    It blows my mind that, mere days after we discover this new virus, we have its source code.

  • We do (should) not torture

    Major credit goes to Shep Smith of Fox News for this: Fox News is generally right-wing propaganda, but credit is due here, and I completely agree with Shep Smith. It doesn’t matter if it works. We do not torture. Well, we should not torture, because it’s fairly clear now that we did, and that is…

  • Personal health record: it’s about the feedback loop

    In my basic electronics college course, the classic lab that always got the teaching assistants laughing was the robotic arm. The task seems simple: build a circuit that measures the amount of weight carried by a small robotic arm and activates its motor to balance out the weight. Inevitably, within minutes, robotic arms throughout the…

  • Helios @ CodeCon

    I’m at CodeCon presenting my Helios voting system in a little bit. But first, there’s a talk on sequencing your own genome at home using basic kitchen equipment. It’s quite rare for me to be at one conference that combines most of my interests in one afternoon! Should be fun.

  • Warrantless Wiretapping is not OK, even when Obama does it

    I’m a big supporter of Obama, I volunteered for him, and I donated money to his campaign. And I’m proud of just about everything he’s been doing as President so far. But not everything. It seems that the Obama administration is angling to continue warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, as per the EFF’s analysis. It…

  • Does CVS provide a CSV?

    Over the last two years, I’ve spent most of my time on… not elections believe it or not, but rather the personal control of health data over at Children’s Hospital, Boston, with a fantastic crew. And so now it turns out that health data is super cool, what with the Obama recovery plan and the…

  • What Verifying an Election Means

    The election at the Université Catholique de Louvain is over, the winner has been declared. So, what does it mean that this was, supposedly, a verifiable election? It means that you can go to the audit web site. There, you’ll find a detailed specification that describes the file formats, encryption mechanisms, and process by which…

  • UCL Election Round 2: Speak Now or Forever Hold your Peace

    The second round of the UCL Election just wrapped up. The cast votes have been recorded, and here are their fingerprints in PDF form. If you have a problem with the way the election was run, for example if you were a voter and the correct tracking number does not appear next to your voter…

  • Disturbing Apple Trends

    I’ve long been an Apple fan. It is somewhat dissonant with my strong attachment to open-source/free software, but I’ve learned to live with it because I am significantly more productive on Mac OS than on Linux, and I still have to work with plenty of MS Office (and no, Open Office doesn’t cut it.) That…

  • Open-Audit Voting means a Single Vote Counts

    After an incredibly long and busy week of work for my colleagues Olivier Pereira and Olivier de Marneffe, the UCL election, based on Helios, has been verified and tallied. The trustees arrived earlier today and successfully decrypted the result. Students each got approximately 1/10 of a vote, while Faculty got a full vote. 4000 people…

  • 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…

  • Luis von Ahn: make academic reviews public

    Yes! Luis von Ahn says that academic paper reviews should be public (they can remain anonymous.) I agree. I’d go further than Luis. For most computer science conferences, there is no feedback loop. Want to trash a paper? Write a really bad review and argue strongly, and if someone else on the program committee doesn’t…

  • 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…

  • New Slides Posted

    I’ve posted my talk slides from my voting talk at UCL, and my short voting talk at the Harvard College Fund Assembly. I’ve included copies on Slideshare, which is starting to get interesting. I see that I can create synced audio for these slides…. I need to find time to do that for some of…

  • More open-audit voting deployment

    Just as we’re wrapping up the verification for UCL‘s test election (powered by Helios) in preparation for their big election in a few days, we get word that the Scantegrity team is going to be used in a real US democratic election. That is fantastic news for the voting community. I hope we continue to…

  • 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…

  • On Bad-Faith Mocking of Academic Research

    “This is a matter of how we prioritize the money that we spend […] Where does a lot of that money end up, anyways? […] Sometimes these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France.” Sarah Palin, US Vice-Presidential Candidate,…

  • 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.