Paul Gluckman

Direct negotiations with China are, “at this point, unlikely to yield meaningful results” in curbing Beijing’s unfair trade practices, Emily Kilcrease, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in written testimony at a hearing Thursday. “China has little incentive to commit to binding rules that will require structural changes to a system they believe works for their economic and political objectives,” she said.

“Gaps in readiness” are seriously hampering the ability of many organizations to “manage and recover” from ransomware attacks, a Zerto study found. “The research also underlines the increased risk to mitigation strategies presented by widespread skills shortages and over-reliance on internal resources,” said the Hewlett Packard Enterprise subsidiary Tuesday. In an ESG survey of 620 “qualified respondents” in North America and Western Europe in December, 73% of respondents said their organizations were victimized in the previous 12 months. It said 61% of respondents whose organizations paid a ransom were then subjected to further extortion attempts. Paying a ransom is “no guarantee to getting a business completely back online,” the survey found. Only 14% of respondents said their organizations got 100% of their data back “even after acceding to a ransom demand,” said Zerto. Nearly half of survey respondents (45%) “are struggling with skills issues that will help them respond to a ransomware attack,” it said. Meanwhile, analysts at Skybox Research Lab uncovered a 42% increase in new ransomware programs targeting known vulnerabilities in 2021, compared with 2020, reported the cybersecurity company Tuesday. It unearthed 20,175 new vulnerabilities in 2021, the most ever reported in a single year, it said: “These new vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceberg. The total number of vulnerabilities published over the last 10 years reached 166,938 in 2021 -- a three-fold increase over a decade.”

Pearl TV is "focused" on building “scale” in ATSC 3.0 deployments and consumer adoption, Managing Director Anne Schelle said in an interview, commenting on recent remarks by Sinclair President-Technology Del Parks that the industry needs to begin planning for the shutdown of the “legacy” 1.0 service (see 2203310029). It’s “still the early days” of 3.0 service deployments, said Schelle.

A Nov. 19 complaint alleging Amazon dupes the public by purporting to sell consumers digital movies it owns when it only licenses them temporarily from content owners was transferred Wednesday to U.S. District Court in Seattle and assigned a new docket (2:22-cv-446, in Pacer). The complaint, which seeks class-action status, was originally filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan because lead plaintiff Mary Baron is a Bronx resident. Amazon and the plaintiffs mutually agreed to transfer the case to Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, and where it was assigned to U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, the docket shows. When Amazon’s licensing agreement with the content owner terminates for whatever reason, Amazon is required to pull the movie from a consumer’s “purchased folder,” which it does “without prior warning, and without providing any type of refund or remuneration,” alleged the complaint. Amazon hasn't filed an answer in the case, and didn’t respond to questions Wednesday seeking comment.

With ATSC 3.0-compliant TV sets “beginning to make advances in the consumer marketplace,” the day should come “in the near future” when rising household penetration of 3.0 TVs “will enable us to be able to start phasing out 1.0,” Sinclair President-Technology Del Parks told the TV Tech Summit Thursday. “The question for us is, how soon can we turn off 1.0 and take advantage of all of the capabilities of ATSC 3.0?”

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai denied Thursday in a Senate Finance Committee hearing that the need she identified a day earlier before House Ways and Means to “turn the page on the old playbook” (see 2203300051) meant that the Biden administration was walking away from holding China accountable for its commitments under the phase one trade agreement. The U.S. needs to “stick with” phase one and enforce the agreement’s “dispute resolution” provisions, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told Tai. “If we just say we’re going to forget that and make that part of the old playbook, I think it sends a terrible message,” said Portman, the former USTR under President George W. Bush. “When China makes an agreement with us, in order to fulfill their obligations, we have to exercise our legal rights.” The old playbook, responded Tai, “focused exclusively on pressuring China” to curb its bad trade behavior. “We are not giving up on pressing China,” she said. “All tools remain on the table with respect to dispute settlement and enforcement,” said Tai. “In fact, what I’m saying is we’re committing to doing more work, and our strategy needs to expand.”

The global semiconductor supply chain is “experiencing pressure” due to the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, said Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on an earnings call Tuesday for its fiscal Q2 ended March 3. “The region is an important source for the global supply of noble gases and other critical minerals that are used in semiconductor manufacturing.” Micron's fiscal Q2 mobile revenue grew 4% year over year to $1.9 billion as the 5G transition continues in smartphones, said Mehrotra. “We see some weakness in the China market as the local economy slows, smartphone market share shifts and some customers take a more prudent approach to inventory management,” he said. Demand for Micron’s mobile memory and storage solutions “continues to be supported by content-hungry applications and the ongoing transition from 4G to 5G, which is driving 50% higher DRAM content and the doubling of NAND content,” he said. Micron expects 700 million 5G smartphones will be shipped in calendar 2022, which would be a 40% increase from 2021, he said.

The lack of “any visible cyber activity” from Moscow is one of many “surprises about the campaign that Russia is waging against Ukraine,” Keir Giles, Chatham House senior consulting fellow-Russian and Eurasian affairs, said Friday on a Conference Board podcast. “There are a lot of areas of Russian capability that were expected to be deployed against Ukraine that somehow haven’t materialized.” The impact of major Russian cyber operations against Ukraine would be “huge,” and many experts are speculating “that is actually why Russia is being restrained and is holding off from mounting the campaigns that were expected,” said Giles. “If Russia conducts cyberattacks against Ukraine only, it may be very hard for them to contain the effects to Ukraine only.” Giles worries that in the “later stages of Russia’s war on the West” there will materialize cyberattacks from Moscow that “are far less restrained,” he said. “If and when Russia does move on from Ukraine, and it comes away from Ukraine thinking that at least it had met some of its objectives, then the next stage of the attack on the West will almost certainly include those cyberattacks that are far less discriminating.” If Russia succeeds in removing access to the internet “in large sectors of large countries,” the economic impact obviously will be significant, said Giles. “Everybody that is data-dependent or that manages civilian telecommunications infrastructure needs to be prepared,” he said.

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in Oakland scheduled a June 28 case management virtual conference on the complaint by Finnish inventor Lauri Valjakka alleging the Netflix Open Connect program infringes his July 2013 U.S. patent (8,495,167) on data communications networks (see 2203180053). Tigar is the third judge assigned the case (in docket 4:22-cv-1490) since it was transferred March 9 to Northern California from Waco, Texas. U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia DeMarchi in San Jose immediately recused herself, and a second magistrate judge, Sallie Kim in San Francisco, was removed from the case after Netflix declined Wednesday to have it tried before anyone but a U.S. district judge.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim in San Francisco scheduled a June 6 case management Zoom conference Friday on a complaint by Finnish inventor Lauri Valjakka that the Netflix Open Connect program infringes his July 2013 U.S. patent (8,495,167) on data communications networks. Kim was reassigned the case after U.S. Magistrate Judge in San Jose Virginia DeMarchi recused herself a day after it was transferred from U.S. District Court in Waco, Texas, where it was filed Sept. 13. Netflix lawyers haven’t responded to the merits of Valjakka’s arguments, but asked the Waco court in an improper-venue motion in December to move the case to Northern California. It was transferred there March 9 after Valjakka's lawyers didn't oppose the motion. Netflix describes its Open Connect program as providing opportunities for internet service provider partners to improve their customers' Netflix user experiences “by localizing Netflix traffic and minimizing the delivery of traffic that is served over a transit provider.”