The “mid to high tier” in smartphones “is the place to be” in the test solutions business, said Teradyne CEO Mark Jagiela on a Q3 investor call Wednesday. “These phones are seeing disproportionate growth and complexity related to multiple high-density camera arrays and the associated processing power and storage to manage this data.” The company supplies test and automation equipment to semiconductor makers and smartphone OEMs, with Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung among top customers. The migration to 5G is a big “complexity driver” in smartphones, said Jagiela. “These high tier phones are early adopters of the extra silicon needed to enable these features.” Fewer than 250 million phones will be 5G-enabled in 2020, “and only a fraction of those” will support millimeter-wave, he said. “So despite the bump in 2020, we are still in the very early stages of 5G adoption.”

The concept of the attention economy, where people's attention can help measure aspects of technology, may have merit for government and industry, stakeholders told the Technology Policy Institute. The FTC could "look at how someone" is giving attention as the agency uses various alternative metrics, said Competition Bureau Director Ian Conner in Q&A with TPI President Scott Wallsten. Connor, noting he was speaking only for himself, said he "would never typically define books" as in direct "competition with social media" and with movies, which could compete for a person's attention at "any given moment." The attention economy could be a way to measure markets that lack prices for consumers in the typical sense, he said in a video released Tuesday. "We’re trying to look for different metrics when we don’t have our normal price or revenue measures." Attention can be "kind of like a price" for a product or service, and "it has a price that is very subjective" to each person, said Brown University associate professor of economics Kareen Rozen. "There’s more complementarity between the services than we’re giving them credit for" sometimes, she said of technology. Because consumers can use multiple tech services at once, spending attention may not be a zero-sum game, said participants including Comscore Senior Director-Product Management James Muldrow.

Three consumers had their “unique, biometric voiceprints” collected without their consent when they contacted call centers using Amazon Web Services and Pindrop Security voice authentication technologies, violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), alleged a complaint (in Pacer) Friday in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. The suit seeks class-action status on behalf of others who made similar call center contacts. Plaintiffs suffered “significant damage” because their biometric data was “intercepted, collected, and disseminated without their knowledge or consent," substantially increasing the likelihood "they will suffer as victims of fraud and/or identity theft,” said the complaint. It seeks $5,000 in statutory damages for each “intentional and reckless” BIPA violation. AWS and Pindrop didn’t respond to questions Monday.

A working group of the FCC Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment will host a virtual tech supplier diversity opportunity showcase Oct. 23, said a public notice Friday. The showcase is intended to provide information and resources to diverse communications businesses on doing business with tech companies and government agencies, the PN said. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Internet Association interim President John Berroya and National Urban League CEO Marc Morial will speak. Panels will focus on traditional and alternative sources of capital and on running a diverse communications business during and after the pandemic, the PN said.

The Copyright Office will recommend readopting “all existing exemptions” under Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201, the agency announced Thursday with an NPRM in the eighth triennial proceeding (see 2006220041). The CO based the decision on a “lack of meaningful opposition” amid renewal petitions. The notice includes 17 proposed classes of exemptions, for which there will be three rounds of comment. Supportive and neutral comments are due Dec. 14, oppositions Feb. 9, and replies from the first group March 10.

AT&T questioned a CableLabs study that argued the FCC can safely make additional changes to its 6 GHz rules proposed in a Further NPRM (see 2008270021). The study “suffers from significant flaws and mischaracterizations and provides no sound legal or engineering basis for Commission decisions in this docket,” said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 17-183. “The use of low-power indoor radio local area network devices without Automated Frequency Control constitutes a serious threat of harmful interference to 6 GHz Fixed Service at the power levels permitted in the 6 GHz Order -- a threat that would be exacerbated by the doubling of power proposed in the 6 GHz FNPRM,” AT&T said.

Twitter’s alleged censoring of a New York Post article on Hunter Biden is “unusual intervention that is not universally applied,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote CEO Jack Dorsey Wednesday. "I find this behavior stunning but not surprising from a platform that has censored the President of the United States,” he wrote, saying it raises questions “about the applicability” of Twitter policy. Twitter didn’t comment by our deadline. Hawley also cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ recent statement urging the high court to consider reviewing Communications Decency Act Section 230’s language (see 2010130044), during SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s Wednesday confirmation hearing session. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Barrett, which began Monday, hasn’t touched much on telecom and tech issues. Hawley’s Section 230 citation came as a reference in a question about courts’ authority to expand statute. Hawley noted Thomas’ assertion that courts had dramatically rewritten Section 230 in decisions since 1996. Barrett noted she hadn’t ruled on any Section 230 cases but said generally she sees a “danger” in courts substituting their own judgment in place of statutory language, which would subvert “the will of the people.” Hawley said he believes that's what courts have done in the case of Section 230.

The FBI detected more than 200 unmanned aerial systems flying in restricted national security airspace October 2019-September, DOJ announced Tuesday. The FBI monitored dozens of events, including the Super Bowl, World Series and Rose Bowl and took corrective action, the department said. Officials expect an “increase in enforcement activity in response to the misuse of UAS,” Justice said. The bureau has seized about a dozen UASs violating flight restrictions at events in fiscal 2020.

Twitter won’t allow anyone to use the platform “to manipulate or interfere in elections,” blogged the company Friday. People on Twitter, including candidates for office, will be barred from claiming an election win “before it is authoritatively called,” it said. “We require either an announcement from state election officials, or a public projection from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls.” Starting this week, when someone tries to retweet a post labeled as containing “misleading information,” they will see a prompt “pointing them to credible information about the topic before they are able to amplify it,” said the company. “Tweets with labels are already de-amplified through our own recommendation systems and these new prompts will give individuals more context.” Facebook announced its own election safeguards earlier in the week, stipulating its policy for contested races. If the candidate declared the winner by major media outlets “is contested by another candidate or party, we will show the name of the declared winning candidate with notifications at the top of Facebook and Instagram, as well as label posts from presidential candidates, with the declared winner’s name and a link to the Voting Information Center,” it said. If a candidate declares “premature victory,” Facebook will add to the notifications that “counting is still in progress and no winner has been determined.”

The Office of Justice Programs can procure and operate drones only in a manner “that promotes public safety, protects individuals’ privacy and civil liberties, and mitigates the risks of cyber intrusion and foreign influence,” DOJ said in a revised policy issued Thursday. It applies to grants for the purchase and operation of foreign-made unmanned aircraft systems. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen cited risks from “foreign-made UAS and the potential for related data compromise.”