Blog Posts

2025

Revisiting Silent Coercion
Last week I presented a paper at E-Vote ID: “Revisiting Silent Coercion” — This was joint work with a large team, and it took years. While I presented it and all of the authors had significant contributions, Jeremy Clark deserves the most credit for getting this paper published. 🙏


2024

Worldcoin grant for xx network traffic anonymizer
This collaborative project between xx network and WorldCoin focuses on the integration and enhancement of WorldCoin’s WalletKit using xx network’s cMixx technology. Our goal is to enable Worldcoin’s WalletKit to communicate efficiently across multiple platforms while maintaining a high level of sec…


2023

MIT Bitcoin Expo 2023
This weekend was the #MITBitcoinExpo. Attendance was down from last year, but it was filled with interesting people and talks.


2020

Repost: My Day as an Election Judge in the 2008 Election
2008 was a historic US election year, with turnout at historic highs. I think this year may be another such year, so I decided to repost my experience as an election judge so people can glimpse what it was like for an election judge at that time. Unfortunately, due to personal issues I won’t be abl…


2019

Progress at Flow Pharma
“In order to make a personalized therapeutic cancer vaccine, you have to know the genomic information of the patient’s tumor as well as that of the patient. Speed and accuracy are both critical. Once we have these gene sequences, we can use AI-augmented bioinformatics tools to quickly identify tumo…


2018

On Defining Proof of Stake
The current definition of Proof of Stake is too broad and generic to be useful. It does not imply any information about the security or insecurity of a platform. This definition does a disservice to all parties—the users, the systems, the experts—because instead of discussions addressing the issues…


The Elixxir Technical Brief
This week the Elixxir team released a technical brief on the project, a first look into the design of the Elixxir platform. After months of preparation, we were thrilled to be able announce the project to the world, and to give everybody and look under the hood. In the coming months, we will be rel…


How blockchains can actually help elections
This midterm election season, some in the press are calling blockchain the next big thing, enabling online voting and generally being a key part of solving all election security and transparency problems. I caution everyone to be exceptionally skeptical when a single technology is touted to solve s…


How secret is your secret ballot?
We rely on the secret ballot to prevent vote selling and voter intimidation, but the “secret” ballot is not very secret. In this post I will discuss problems that very few people know about or understand—problems that allow us to give ourselves away using the very choices we make!


Java CMYK HOWTO
Lately, I’ve been playing with printers-trying to control the amount of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black printed by the printer. For various reasons I’ve been doing it in Java, and I ran up against some brick walls. There is no good HOWTO available, so I decided to write my own…


A return to blogging, on Steem!
From 2008 to 2010, I ran a blog that had a small following with 1-2 thousand hits a month. I stopped only due to my employer’s publication and social media restrictions. While the restrictions had always been in place, I had justification to post due to my academic research. Unfortunately, that jus…