Benlog

Thoughts on Technology & People

  • 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…

  • Privacy Advocacy Stunts

    Deborah Peel, a well-known patient privacy advocate, and EPIC have joined forces to ask Google some questions about Google Flu Trends. Google is analyzing its search logs to detect flu outbreaks by region, which is super nifty. Peel and EPIC ask: There are, however, privacy concerns surrounding this new tool. […] In the aggregate, the…

  • Interlab 2008

    I gave a short talk on RDFa at Interlab 2008, a gathering of DOE labs on web technology. Good group, fun interactions, and a panel discussion with Ben Ward and Ryan King from the microformats effort. Good discussion, an agreement that microformats and RDFa are complementary, and no street fight. Thanks to Joseph Lewis for…

  • 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…

  • Kathie Lee wants to verify her ballot!

    My friend and colleague Arjun apparently watches Kathie Lee on television. He points me to this fantastic clip: Did I hear that right? It is weird, when you show up at the polling place and they stuff your vote in an envelope… you wonder where it goes! Exactly. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could…

  • Some More Election-Day Anecdotes

    I’m remembering more after a few hours of sleep. An elderly Russian man brought in his vote by mail envelope. “Dropping off your vote-by-mail envelope, sir?” I ask. “No! I vote here in person!” It took a few rounds to explain, and then he added “what, you didn’t check my ID? Why not?” “Well, sir,…

  • 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…

  • My Day At the Polls

    I don’t know how Avi Rubin has enough energy to recount his poll-working day. But I’ll try, at least in brief form. Woke up at 4:50am to make it to the poll by 6am. I was the Precinct Inspector, i.e. the California term for what Bostonians call “Precinct Captain.” I had a great team of…

  • The Real Issue with Touch-Screen Voting Machines

    I’ve said this before, but not as explicitly or as eloquently as Avi Rubin recently did: I’m very concerned about the impact a high turnout will have on an already stressed voting system. In Maryland, for example, we use touchscreen DRE machines. Precincts only have a handful of these machines, and they create a tight…

  • Genomic Records & Voting

    So part of my research is on voting. And another part is on the privacy of genomic medical records (which, admittedly, I haven’t spoken about much on this blog yet). It’s not often that I find an article that combines both. But I guess it was inevitable: In the coming era of personal genomics —…

  • I Voted

    I voted for Obama. And against Proposition 8. And against Proposition 4. I voted early, in person, not by mail. So my ballot is still secret. Which means, maybe I didn’t vote for Obama. You’ll never know. That’s the power of the secret ballot. I can tell you how I voted, but I can’t prove…

  • Open-Audit Elections featured in Documentary

    Richard Drury recently completed his documentary “Challenges for Democracy”, which covers a number of voting issues. His work is available for sale, so if you support this kind of in-depth reporting, please go buy his DVD! Richard has graciously agreed to release my segment on Open-Audit Elections under a Creative Commons license. Here it is,…

  • 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…

  • Salon on Voting

    T’is election season, so the press is covering voting. Cyrus again, this time on Salon, and with a fantastic article, and not just because it mentions Helios.

  • The Economist Covers Voting

    The Economist covers voting with cryptography, including some of my work. Good to see folks like the Economist paying attention… although the article misses the big point. Voting with cryptography is not about making your vote more secret. It’s about making your vote more verifiable. For those who advocate traditional paper ballots, the point is…

  • 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…

  • Helios Voting being used for real elections

    From my Helios Blog: The Information Card Foundation is using Helios for its board election. Perfect use case: 50 people who will likely never all meet in person, but who need to vote on some issues. Helios provides them with a feature they literally could not achieve otherwise today: a secret ballot combined with real…

  • 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…

  • Resig on Chrome: it’s the Process Isolation, Stupid!

    So Google launched their own browser, Chrome, and in the words of a friend “this looks like an operating system to my MBA eyes.” Exactly. John Resig, of jQuery fame, has the smartest comment so far: The blame of bad performance or memory consumption no longer lies with the browser but with the site. By…

  • I Agree with Pat Buchanan

    How often can you say THAT, eh?

  • CRYPTO Rump Session

    The best part of the yearly CRYPTO conference is the Tuesday evening rump session, where I’m at right now. There was the Jean-Jacques Quisquater inimitable spoof presentation on attacking Enigma machines by putting them in the microwave, a fantastic Lessig-presentation-spoof by Hovav Shacham, and much more. It’s easy to forget that most cryptographers have a…

  • Off to CRYPTO

    I’m off to CRYPTO, where I’ll be listening to some fun talks and presenting Helios on Tuesday.

  • Where we’re going, we don’t need SSL

    Read a funny thing on DaringFireball: AppleInsider reports that the MobileMe web apps supposedly do use SSL, even though you don’t see “https:” URLs or the “secure” lock icon in your web browser Hmmm, sounds awfully fishy. If the page is over plain HTTP, then it will have a lot of trouble making requests over…

  • Helios Voting Blog launched

    Helios Voting is taking on a life of its own, and it needs its own blog for updates and such. I’ll still mention the major milestones here, but if you’re following Helios more closely, you’ll want to subscribe. blog.heliosvoting.org

  • Helios Voting System — Launched!

    I just gave my talk at Usenix Security on Helios, my new web-based voting system that supports cryptographic auditing. Since it’s web-based, you don’t want to use this for elections where coercion is a serious concern. But if you’re running an online election for your club, software community, etc.., it’s perfect. Just go to: http://www.heliosvoting.org…

  • Adam & Collin strike again

    I’m now at Usenix Security, which I’m micro-blogging over at Identi.ca. Sometimes, though, one talk merits more than a micro-blog. Currently, I’m listening to Adam Barth presenting his web-security paper (joint with Collin Jackson) on subtle but huge issues with frame navigation and communication. Top-notch stuff. What’s fascinating to me about Adam & Collin’s research…

  • Benaloh strikes again

    Since I haven’t had the time to write up every talk, I’ll just highlight one talk today that I particularly enjoyed: Josh Benaloh’s paper on achieving both administrative and public verifiability in elections [PDF]. I’m a big fan of Josh’s work. My upcoming voting system implementation, Helios, is based on one of Josh’s earlier protocols.…