Apple sponsors San Francisco BSides security conference

BSides, a two day "open forum for discussion and debate for security engineers and their affiliates" being held today and tomorrow in San Francisco, received a public contributing sponsorship from Apple, underlining the increasing efforts of the company to participate in academic research and publishing related to security, privacy and other research goals.

Apple contributing sponsorship of the conference included direct funding— incidentally at a tier above other "supporting sponsors," including Google and Dropbox— although it was not one of the two "leading sponsors" of the event (HackerOne and Fitbit). The company was also listed as sponsoring breakfast and lunch for attendees.

The conference is billed as two days of technical and academic presentations, "given in the spirit of peer review and advanced knowledge dissemination," according to the nonprofit running the event. "This allows the field of Information Security to grow in breadth and depth, and continue in its pursuit of highly advanced scientifically based knowledge," the group noted on its website.

Apple has recently appeared more ready to open up its public collaboration efforts with other industry firms than in the past, shedding some elements of his notorious secrecy and largely solo research efforts.

In December, the company announced that its scientists would be allowed to publish and collaborate with the larger research community for the first time, then sent speakers to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference to detail specific goals for its artificial intelligence developments.