I again started to register my time 

For a long time I recorded my work time to get some hard data about how I spend my time and to review if I spend my time on the things I like to. I took a one year break from time recording when I transitioned from HiG to HTWG, and I started again in […]

bwSyncAndShare is not ready for primetime 

Storage is a scarce resource and has always been an issue for me to discuss with the IT department. I usually want to use more storage than they are willing to grant. I recognize that there are different service levels for storage provided as part of the IT of the organization I work for and […]

Mobile Malware 

We had two experts from Avira presenting on mobile malware this week. Close to 80 students and staff attended a FirmenForum presentation given by Alexander Vukcevic, Director Virus Labs, and Marcus König, Manager Advanced Research and Technologies. Smartphone operating systems are attractive targets for cyber criminals. Not all mobile operating systems are equal, and the […]

You do not have permission to access the server we say you should use 

For various reasons not being discussed here, I use an account with a bank that belongs to the Cashpool network for withdrawing cash from ATMs. They are far from offering a large number of ATMs, so I need to look up the location of an ATM once in a while when I am away from […]

Distributing notifications over the whole day 

T-Mobile offers to notify customers when a new invoice is ready to be printed by the customer. The order in which the notifications arrive is peculiar. 00:43 in the middle of the night the invoice is sent as an email attachment. Good. The PDf file comes together with an electronic signature so that you can […]

CTF team of HTWG participates in hack.lu CTF 2015 

Almost thirty computer science students from HTWG Konstanz formed a team to participate in the hack.lu CTF competition. The goal of this competition in applied IT security was to solve tasks related to web application security, IT forensics, reverse engineering, cryptography etc. The team from HTWG included students from my classes in IT-Security (Master) and […]

Microsoft, please improve search on the Windows phone 

I am a loyal user of Windows phones. My first mobile phone was a Siemens C25. When I was no longer able to find replacement batteries on Ebay many years after the manufacturer stopped selling them, I switched to Nokia. And years after student had adopted smartphones I switched from a simple „can make phone […]

Public displays should be configured to run unattended 

I have a habit of taking pictures of public electronic displays that have failed or that show error messages. The point is that the people looking at the displays cannot act on these messages. There is no use case for showing a message to someone that might only be irritated by an error. These displays […]

First COINS summer school completed in Metochi 2015 

The first COINS summer school on cloud security is over. It was held successfully at the Metochi Study Centre on the Greek island of Lesvos, operated by University of Agder, one of the consortium members of COINS. The topic of the summer school – cloud security – was chosen by poll among COINS students. The […]

Stunning similarities 

At eQ-3/ELV, we developed equipment for time and attendance management. You could buy tags, terminals, and software to record and evaluate time spent at work. Some competitors were admired, because they had managed to create good products and sell them with healthy margins. ELV was good at creating good enough products for cutomers with smaller […]