The future of Forensic Focus - have your say!

[The following is for non-members or members who have not received the email which went out earlier today]

Over the past six years the Forensic Focus website (http://www.forensicfocus.com) has grown steadily to meet visitors' needs but input from our membership has been fairly informal, with suggestions typically being posted to the forums or sent to me directly. Now that the site is well established, I'd like to take a more rigorous approach to finding out exactly what it is that everyone wants, what aspects of the site they find important, what areas they feel are less useful and what they would like to see added in the future.

With this in mind I have put together a very short survey (10 questions) in an attempt to "take the pulse" of those who use Forensic Focus. I'd also like to make this a regular occurrence, probably at the start of every new year so that I can plan for the coming twelve months and make sure that everyone's needs are met (as far as possible!)

I would be very grateful if you could take the time to complete the survey. There is no need to provide any personal or contact information and I will, of course, treat all information received in the strictest confidence.

The survey, which should take no more than 2 or 3 minutes to complete, can be found here.

Thank you very much in advance, your responses will have a direct influence on the future of Forensic Focus.

Kind regards,

Jamie

SIM PIN Challenge

As regular forum members may already be aware, Greg Smith has posted a SIM PIN Challenge in the new Mobile Forensics forum. Full details can be found here.

I think this is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to start learning more about the technical challenges of mobile phone forensics. It's also an opportunity to learn from a world-renowned expert in this field.

For those who are unfamiliar with this side of forensics work and don't know Greg, I hope to be able to interview him in the very near future and bring that to you. In the meantime, good luck with the challenge!

The year ahead

Happy New Year, everyone, I hope those hangovers are starting to wear off!

2008 was a good year for Forensic Focus with solid growth in visitor numbers and a significant increase in those registering new accounts (presumably to allow posting to the forums or subscription to the newsletter) towards the end of the year.

There won't be any resting on our laurels for 2009, though, and there are already one or two additions to the site in the pipeline (in fact, a few have been implemented already without much fanfare - more about those in a later post). In addition, I'd like to stress that Forensic Focus remains very much a community effort - if there's something you want to see, or something you're not happy with, by all means let me know. I can't promise to accommodate every request but I'll try my best!

To all our members and everyone else in the wider computer forensics world, all the very best for 2009!