Today I am proud to announce that another paper of my former colleagues from Heilbronn University and me was published in one of the journals with the highest impact factor for Medical Informatics research called JMIR mHealth and uHealth. There is a reason why we published in this journal besides its informatics focus. The journal is an open access journal. That means that readers are not charged on a pay-per-view basis or other business models to access the full text of the paper. In return, the authors need to pay publication fees. In my opinion restricting access to academic research is not a way to go. I think this isn’t a thing we see in the security community often anyway. But this is and was the standard in academia for years.
Continue readingPrivacy
Introduction & CCS’16 – Day 1 – 24th October 2016
I am Andrei Costin (at http://firmware.re project), and this is the first post from a series of guest postings courtesy of ERNW.
Between 24th and 28th October, I had the pleasure and the great opportunity to attend ACM CCS 2016 in Vienna, Austria, where I also presented at the TrustED’16 workshop my paper titled “Security of CCTV and Video Surveillance Systems: Threats, Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Mitigations”.
My attendance throughout the entire ACM CCS 2016 week and my presentation at TrustED was possible thanks to generous support from Enno Rey and ERNW, and I thank them again for this opportunity!
Continue readingScal(e)ing down Privacy
As you might know we are continuously doing research on medical devices. I presented some of the new results at Power of Community 2014 last week and we thought we would share some of the details with you here. The focus of the previous work was testing medical devices that are used in hospitals like patient monitors, syringe pumps or even MRIs. This time we looked at a device that every user can use at home and which is available to anyone on the market: A smart scale.
Continue readingGanz Gallien?
“Nein! Ein von unbeugsamen Galliern bevölkertes Dorf hört nicht auf, dem Eindringling Widerstand zu leisten.”
This is a famous quote pretty much every German kid used to know. Not sure if this still applies though, my three haven’t touched Asterix comics so far. Anyhow, you might ask why I cite this.
Simple answer: see this recent article from the Guardian on a Utah-based ISP “resisting some pressure”. That’s the spirit…
Have a great Sunday everybody,
Continue readingImpressions from the Google I/O Con
From 15th – 17th of May, the sixth Google I/O conference took place in San Francisco, California and I was one of the lucky guys attending. More then 5500 people, primarily web, mobile, and enterprise developers, attended this annual event. A lot of presentations included announcements of new and exciting technologies, APIs as well as of two new devices.
During the first minutes of the keynote some of Google’s managers announced that by now over 900 million Android devices are activated and that 48 billion apps are installed, which demonstrates that this market is still heavily growing. As the major part of the audience were (app-) developers, these numbers were received quite greatfully and euphoric.
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