Benlog

Thoughts on Technology & People

  • Get Ready to be Depressed about Elections

    I’m at the Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, where I’ll be blogging a few things. Jon Krosnick of Stanford is just wrapping up a fantastic invited talk on how ballot candidate ordering influences elections… and the result is stunningly depressing: it turns out that the impact can be quite large. So large, in fact, that Jon…

  • On Vote-By-Mail and Untimely Death

    A fantastic question: If you vote by mail, but die before Election Day, does your vote count? It depends on where you lived. Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote. Increasingly popular mail-in ballots mean…

  • Blame the Device or the Carrier?

    It’s always interesting to see who gets blamed for consumer-unfriendliness. Take the launch of the latest iPhone “3G”. Brendan Ballou over at Jonathan Zittrain’s blog makes a compelling case about how Apple is monetizing iPhone applications and benefits from locking users into the AT&T network. There’s some truth to that, I think, but I don’t…

  • Bridging the Clickable and Data Webs

    Over the last few years, I’ve been the Creative Commons representative to the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c). This means that I work with a bunch of great folks on web standards, specifically trying to define solutions that will help Creative Commons. Since 2005, I’ve led a w3c task force on RDFa, which is a…

  • Understanding the Freakonomics of the Secret Ballot

    Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, considers the case of the Minnesota teen who tried to sell his vote on eBay: This guy’s hijinks did, however, give us a glimpse into the market price of a vote. The minimum bid was set at $10. Nobody bid on his item. The failure to attract bidders is consistent…

  • Don’t Hash Secrets

    Building secure systems is difficult. It would be nice if we had a bunch of well-designed crypto building blocks that we could assemble in all sorts of ways and be certain that they would, no matter what, yield a secure system overall. There are, in fact, folks working on such things at a theoretical level…

  • Creative Commons Tech Summit

    I’m at the Creative Commons Tech Summit today, where I gave a talk about the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language. Fun group, good stuff, and a bright future for Creative Commons. The CC Interns live-blogged my talk, among others.

  • The Internet is Funny

    I have a couple of very serious and technical posts in progress, but this is too funny to wait: more graph humor and song chart memes more graph humor and song chart memes

  • Thank you, Hillary Clinton

    Thank you, Hillary Clinton, for a very gracious concession speech today. There is sadness in your voice and in your eyes, which is, of course, completely understandable and only human. So thank you for the courage and humility it took to give this sincere speech.

  • What (Who?) Hillary is fighting for

    I was a huge Clinton fan in the 90s. And I was pumped to think that Hillary Clinton might be the first female President, back in 2000, when she ran for the Senate and it was clear she eventually would run for the Presidency. But then came Barack Obama, and I saw in him a…

  • Privacy violations can be so useful

    Have you noticed that, after you visit a web page, links to that web page change color, usually a lighter shade of blue? That’s one of the earliest User Interface wins of the web, a feature that dates all the way back to the first version of HTML. How convenient to be able to tell,…

  • Weezer Culture Mashup

    I’m a fan of Weezer, and their new video is a fantastic example of a culture mashup:

  • Why I’m switching to Yahoo Search

    [Disclaimer: Yahoo supports RDFa, which is a specification I’ve worked on. So, obviously, I’m excited. But hey, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.] Yahoo recently announced SearchMonkey, and for the first time in 10 years, I have a reason to switch search engines, from Google to Yahoo (In fact, I just did that in Firefox.) Most…

  • Translation from Rove-speak to Plain English

    [inspired by John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim.] Karl Rove, ex-Senior Advisor to Bush, in today’s Newsweek giving Obama advice. Four months ago, you took the political world by storm in Iowa. The media were agog. They called your words “gorgeous,” your victory “a message to the world.” You “made history” and Americans could “look at…

  • WWW2008

    I was at WWW2008 last week in Beijing, where I presented a Tutorial on RDFa with Elias Torres and Ivan Herman, and SessionLock, a technique for securing web session used over unencrypted HTTP. The conference was a lot of fun. Spent quite a bit of time discussing security with Collin Jackson and Tyler Close. The…

  • Lessig on Obama

    Lessig knocks one out of the park:

  • An Inconvenient Truth about the Left

    For the last few years, Bush and others within the Republican Party have ignored and distorted scientific evidence because the evidence didn’t match their ideology. The latest example this weekend is the administration’s attitude on the Endangered Species Act, but of course the most glaring example is the pseudo-controversy they fan regarding global warming. I’ve…

  • Change Congress

    Lessig launches the Change Congress movement. This is supremely important if you want the government to actually work for the People. There are four issues on which you can voice an opinion regarding your preferred candidate’s beliefs: not accept contributions from lobbyists an Political Action Committees abolish of earmarks increase transparency publicly finance elections I’m…

  • Trusting the Machine

    Though I don’t think paper-trail voting machines will fully solve our voting problems, I agree with many voting activists that today’s unverified voting machines are a potential security disaster waiting to happen. That said, it’s become clear to me (and many other voting researchers) over the last few years that non-computer-scientists see the world very…

  • A Witness to History

    I’ve always wondered what my parents felt when they heard the great political speeches of their generation. Now I know.

  • Bad and Good News on the “just give me your password” front

    I’ve written about how it’s a really bad idea to have web sites asking for your gmail password, “just to load your contacts!” I like the name Jeremy Keith gave it: the Password Anti-Pattern. Sure, Facebook likely isn’t going to do naughty things with your data, but once you’re used to giving sites your gmail…

  • Hope

    In anticipation of tonight’s results, I was going to try to write something that captures my incredibly hopeful and enthusiastic state of mind, but my good friend Oliver beat me to it: Doesn’t some part of you still believe that there are special moments in the world? Special people who catalyze and give a voice…

  • My Day as an Election Clerk in Santa Clara County

    On election day for the last 4 years, I try to put aside my political preferences and my incessant blabbing about voting equipment, and I work as an election clerk at a polling station. In 2006, I worked as a precinct warden in Boston, and before that as an election clerk in Boston and Cambridge.…

  • The Carrot, the Stick, and Obama.

    I support Barack Obama for President, with more enthusiasm and excitement than I’ve ever had for any politician. Those who know me know this already, but I’ve been asked “why?” enough times that I thought it worthwhile to write up. Politicians use two methods to achieve their goals: the carrot and the stick. Need Iran…

  • Make it Spicy

    The governator on how to improve voter turnout. Thanks to the interesting site Why Tuesday?

  • McLovin and Ed Helms Vote

    How can I not link to this?

  • You know it’s election season when…

    … the New York Times publishes a huge story on voting machines. To their credit, this is one of the best pieces I’ve seen to date, assuming you accept that these major publications simply refuse to talk about open-audit voting. Some great lines that mirror what I’ve said in my own talks: Part of the…

  • Voting @ Google

    Just before Christmas, I was invited by my friend and colleague Steve Weis to give a talk about voting with cryptography at Google. I’ve done about 10-15 talks of this kind, but this was a fun challenge: a very talented audience with an introductory understanding of cryptography (Steve had given 3 prior lectures on cryptography).…

  • The Turning Point Zinger?

    Those who know me know I’m a big fan of Obama. I think we’ll look back on this exceptionally timed zinger as the symbolic turning point in the race for the Democratic nomination: Yeah, so I’ve got Obamania. What can I say, it’s good to be deeply excited about and impressed by a presidential candidate,…

  • Privacy vs. Omnipotence, Mashups and your browser.

    Facebook is in hot water again, this time for “Facebook Beacon” which posts your activity at various partner sites to your Facebook newsfeed. Buy a self-help book at Amazon? Your friends will know. Browse some recipes at Epicurious? Your girlfriend might get some idea of what you’re cooking for Valentine’s Day. The fuss is mostly…