ICANN's ombudsman is continuing to conduct a confidential investigation into allegations of sexual harassment during ICANN’s meeting earlier this month in Marrakech, Morocco. The group does “not condone any such conduct, and there should be zero tolerance for it within the community,” said acting CEO Akram Atallah in a blog post Friday. “ICANN’s staff and Board takes the issue of harassment or other improper conduct at its meetings very seriously.” The behavior standards that ICANN stakeholders are expected to follow during ICANN meetings don’t specifically address sexual harassment incidents, but they do “provide our global, diverse multistakeholder community with a set of high-level guidelines for interacting with one another, which encompasses harassment and other improper treatment of others,” Atallah said. The ICANN board is “looking at whether it makes sense to enhance this language” in light of the incident in Marrakech, he said. ICANN also wants the community to lead any changes to its policy for handling sexual harassment complaints, Atallah said.

NTIA’s April 8 meeting of its multistakeholder process​ group on vulnerability research disclosure will be at the Westin Chicago River North in Chicago, NTIA said in a notice to be published in Friday’s Federal Register. The meeting, to run 10 a.m.-4 p.m. CDT, “will build on stakeholders’ previous work” on vulnerability research disclosure, NTIA said. Stakeholders further revised the scope of their work during a December meeting, with work to increase adoption of disclosure best practices generating the most debate (see 1512020063).

Hulu’s virtual reality (VR) app will offer surround sound for movies and TV shows via Fraunhofer's Cingo immersive audio headphone rendering technology for mobile devices, Fraunhofer and Hulu said in a Thursday announcement. Immersive audio is “crucial for virtual reality experiences to create a full sense of presence,” they said. Users of Hulu’s VR app will benefit from movies and TV shows streamed using the HE-AAC surround sound audio codec and rendered for headphones through Fraunhofer Cingo, they said. HE-AAC, deployed in more than 8 billion devices, is the native surround sound audio codec for Android, the underlying operating system of Samsung phones paired with Gear VR, the companies said. Android’s HE-AAC implementation includes support for loudness and downmix metadata known from the broadcast TV world, as well as other features that allow the sound to be tailored for an optimum user experience in any environment, they said. Consumers can experience Hulu with surround sound by downloading the Hulu VR app from the Oculus Gear VR Store, and Cingo is available from Fraunhofer as a product-ready software implementation for mobile device manufacturers, chip set vendors and providers of multimedia services, they said.

A National Institute of Standards and Technology analysis of comments on the Cybersecurity Framework indicates stakeholders affirm the framework’s current uses but also indicates that NIST should provide more guidance on framework use, NIST said Thursday in a blog post. Stakeholders disagreed on when NIST should form a multistakeholder process to update the Cybersecurity Framework, though they agreed on the need for a collaborative update process that would be similar to NIST’s original 2013-2014 development process, NIST said in its analysis. Major industry interests had told NIST not to pursue a major framework revamp in the near future (see 1602240065). Parties said they’re comfortable with NIST’s current leadership of framework guidance but continue to believe that a neutral third-party organization should eventually take the reins of framework stewardship, NIST said. “These comments provide strong input for the framework’s future and revealed that the number of organizations using the framework is growing,” Matthew Barrett, NIST program director-Cybersecurity Framework, said in a statement.

ABI Research sees global tablet shipments sinking below 140 million units in 2021, from 207 million in 2015, it said in a Wednesday report. Demand for branded tablets in advanced market economies is decreasing “due to saturation, slow replacement cycles, greater influence of business purchases, and substitution,” the research firm said. China and other Asian markets have decreased demand for white box tablets due to shifts to branded tablets and reliance on smartphones and phablets, it said. "China is evolving, moving away from white box products to support local and global brand manufacturers," it said. "As this behavior continues across other markets in Southeast Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America, the potential for white box tablets to remain viable will all but go away." Though advanced markets had two-thirds of all branded tablets shipped in 2015, “this will soon flip,” ABI said. The firm predicts that by 2021, 57 percent of branded tablet shipments “will come from emerging and developing economies."

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition raised concerns Monday about now-former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé's “farewell” letter to the ICANN board. The i2Coalition said in a letter to board Chairman Steve Crocker that Chehadé's messaging indicated ICANN should become more “aggressive,” which could “lead towards moderating content online.” Chehadé, who left ICANN earlier this month, told the board in his letter that ICANN “must remain engaged, and … shape the discussion and debate.” ICANN “cannot fabricate an instrumental role for itself within IP matters,” i2Coalition Executive Director Christian Dawson said in the letter. The i2Coalition “firmly supported the inclusion of language limiting ICANN's activities to those that further its mission” and supported the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability's recommendation that ICANN's mission statement be revised to place limits on the nonprofit corporation's ability to extend its role, Dawson told Crocker. “Statements that move the organization into a role it was not created for and that curtail the effectiveness of its existing processes are concerning and reflect a step back from the achievements of the organization” under Chehadé, Dawson said.

Amazon’s “critical” update for early-generation Kindle e-readers, which the company first notified registered owners of March 2, was trending online and on social media Monday, the day before non-updated devices were to lose connections to the cloud. Kindles, starting with the first-generation model launched in 2007 and running through the fifth-gen Paperwhite model, “require an important software update by March 22, 2016 in order to continue to download Kindle books from the Cloud, access the Kindle Store, and use other Kindle services on their device,” Amazon said. Kindle e-reader models introduced in 2013 and later don’t require the update. Customers who don’t upgrade their software by Tuesday by connecting through the Amazon wireless can resume access by visiting the Kindle help page, Amazon said.

Data localization and other constraints on data flows would have negative impacts on the global digital economy and would increase security risks, consequences that need to be addressed, said the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC) to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in a paper released Monday. It said cross-border data flows will accelerate as roughly 10.2 billion IoT devices come online over the next five years, resulting in nearly 4 billion people -- more than half the world's population -- connected to the Internet. But "forced localization policies" in the manufacturing and services sector "are a disproportionate response and more trade restrictive than necessary" and would reduce global trade by $93 billion annually, the paper said. "Limiting data movement will increase costs, reduce the business competitiveness across the globe and fragment the internet." Companies can work with governments to take "reasonable steps" to protect personal data, with governments providing a "proportionate response" through laws and regulations that strike a balance between fundamental individual rights and cross-border data flow, the paper said. BIAC issued a half dozen recommendations to OECD such as collecting more evidence about the impact of forced localization and other measures on cross-border data flows, documenting the impact of localization policies on trade and investment, and providing guidance on how governments can enforce existing trade rules against the proliferation of data localization.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging President Barack Obama to listen to academics, mathematicians, security engineers and his own advisers who say a back door to unlock encrypted data can't be used only by the "good guys." "You can’t put a key under a doormat that only the FBI will ever find," wrote EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman in a blog post Friday, referring to the legal fight between Apple and the U.S. government over unlocking the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, mass shooters (see 1603010013). She wrote that it's "not possible" to secure encryption back doors that can be accessed by "the smallest number of people possible," which Obama recommended in a talk at the South by Southwest festival in Austin (see 1603110082). She said "crypto-critics like FBI Director James Comey, the attorney general, and others" don't appreciate the technical consequences of what they're proposing, which could be exploited by hackers, identity thieves, authoritarian governments and corporations, compromising everyone's security. "The public debate we’re having over the security of our devices boils down to a question of math versus politics," she added.

The FTC issued warning letters Thursday to 12 app developers whose apps appear to the FTC to include the code for Silverpush software that can detect audio signals via a device's microphone as a way of monitoring consumers' TV use. Silverpush software can monitor TV use by detecting “audio beacons” that TVs emit, the FTC said in a news release. App developers can use Silverpush software to produce a detailed log of TV usage habits as a way of targeting specific ads at a consumer, the FTC said. Silverpush has said its software isn't currently in use in the U.S., but app developers should still notify consumers if their apps contain the software, the FTC said. Apps that include Silverpush typically ask consumers for permission to access their microphone without providing a reason and don't warn consumers that the software can be used to monitor TV use, the FTC said. App developer claiming falsely that their apps don't collect information on TV use via the Silverpush software may be in violation of FTC Act Section 5, the FTC said in a sample version of the letters.