http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben crypto and public policy Sat, 11 Feb 2006 18:41:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Benlog is moving to its now-permanent URL: http://benlog.com More details there.... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2006/02/11/benlog-is-moving/ Just when I thought I was going to be in complete agreement with George Bush on at least one issue, he manages to surprise me, yet again. I am truly confused. The Danish cartoon story is baffling to me in so many ways. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2006/02/05/freedom-of-speech/ Last night, I attended, in Boston's Faneuil Hall, an ACLU "Emergency Townhall Meeting" regarding Bush's domestic spying program. The participants were top notch, particularly Marc Rotenberg of EPIC and Representative Ed Markey. The arguments were calm, composed, and focused, only rarely straying into the anti-Bush diatribe one might expect from ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2006/01/31/pedalling-in-the-mud/ I spent this past Thursday and Friday meeting with Andy Neff of VoteHere. We discussed the details of his latest ideas for verifiable voting, and he asked me to help him with the write-up and framing of the issues. These will all be published in the near future, just like ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/12/11/voting-the-beginning-of-a-revolution/ A professor who was going to teach a course debunking the "sicence" of Creationism (aka Intelligent Design) has cancelled his plans. No doubt, his words ("fundies") were poorly chosen. But how does the University President get away with such strong condemnation of this professor's words, without any condemnation of the ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/12/02/sick-of-fundamentalism/ Just a quick thought I just had about voting, inspired by a recent brainstorm within our research group. In an election, your ballot remains secret, so that you cannot be unduly influenced by others. When elected representatives vote on laws, however, their voting record is supposed to be public (let's discount ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/11/22/voting-accountability-and-secrecy/ A couple of days ago, Mitt Romney, our Massachusetts Governor, joined the Bash-France club. Meanwhile, the right-wing movement RightMarch has just released a song called "Bush Was Right," whose lyrics include (PDF), out of nowhere, the line "France was wrong." My Litmus Test continues. If you bash France for no particular ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/11/18/france-the-wingnut-litmus-test-continues/ People are in shock that Sony is effectively installing spyware to help them in their DRM effort. How dare Sony surreptitiously install a program on your computer that effectively overrides the operating system's default behavior when reading CDs? Haven't they gone too far? Yes, of course they went too far. But ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/11/11/the-two-laws-of-drm/ Voting is terribly hard to administer. I voted yesterday in Boston. I was handed voting lists by partisans about 50 feet outside the voting location, which is technically illegal. Once I came into the voting location, the overeager voting administrator confiscated my "voting paraphernalia," even though it's technically perfectly okay for ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/11/09/voting-is-hard/ Jason Matusow, Director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, is a smart guy. I've heard him speak in person. He's managed to keep his job for a few years while weathering unfriendly crowds and debates with the likes of Larry Lessig. So, clearly, when he says the following, I can only ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ben/2005/11/08/macrosoft/