On Target: Embedded Systems

More Tales from the Road - VDC at ESC Silicon Valley 2015

ESC Silicon Valley 2015 In case you missed it, VDC’s IoT & Embedded Technology was recently in Santa Clara for the 2015 Embedded Systems Conference – Silicon Valley. We had the opportunity to meet with and get updates from a number of companies, both at the show and several nearby corporate headquarters. Vendors we spoke with were pleased with the volume and quality of the attendees and many training sessions operated at full capacity. As we have for the past decade, VDC Research presented the annual Embeddy Award to the organization judged to have announced the most significant advance in... Read more →

Lingering Thoughts from NIWeek 2015

VDC’s IoT and Embedded Technologies team recently attended NIWeek 2015 in Austin, TX. National Instruments (NI) put on an excellent conference and we had the opportunity to take in a great deal. There were inspiring and informative keynote presentations, great partner stories, the heat, interesting panel sessions, helpful one-on-one meetings with NI executives, the strange layout of the Austin Convention Center (it allegedly has a floor 2, but I’m not buying that), demos on the exhibit floor…and, well, did I mention the heat? The IoT / IIoT Centric Focus of NIWeek Regardless of the format – keynote, panels, demos, 1:1’s... Read more →

IoT Use Cases for Enigma & Homomorphic Encryption

Homomorphic encryption is a method of encryption that allows computations to be performed upon fully encrypted data, generating an encrypted result that, after decryption, will match the result of the desired operations on the plaintext, decrypted data. In other words, homomorphic encryption allows a user to manipulate data without needing to decrypt it first. Daniele Micciancio states the problem that is solved by homomorphic encryption in a 2010 journal article entitled A First Glimpse of Cryptography’s Holy Grail: Using standard encryption technology we are immediately faced with a dilemma: either we store our data unencrypted and reveal our precious or... Read more →

Does Windows 10 violate HIPAA?

According to Microsoft's privacy statement for Windows 10 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx), for the Input Personalization feature, "...your typed and handwritten words are collected to provide you a personalized user dictionary, help you type and write on your device with better character recognition, and provide you with text suggestions as you type or write. Typing data includes a sample of characters and words you type, which we scrub to remove IDs, IP addresses, and other potential identifiers." Some observers have likened this feature to a keylogger, and it is turned on by default in Windows 10. In addition, Windows 10 Input Personalization, "collect[s]... Read more →