North Carolina will direct $40 million to fund internet for students’ remote learning, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) said Wednesday. It includes $30 million to distribute 100,000 wireless hot spots; $8 million for wireless access points in school parking lots, municipal areas, state parks, museums and historic sites; and $2 million for remote-learning training. West Virginia activated 848 free Wi-Fi hot spots through the state’s Kids Connect initiative to set up internet access points at pre-K-12 schools, libraries, higher education facilities, state parks and National Guard armories, Gov. Jim Justice (R) said Tuesday. “We’re going to have over 1,000 of these sites very soon.”
The Z-Wave Alliance announced a specification enabling quadruple the range and 10 times the devices that can operate on a network. Z-Wave Long Range is in testing by three companies and expected to be in beta in late Q4 or early Q1, alliance Executive Director Mitchell Klein told us Tuesday. General availability is expected late Q1, he said. The alliance, which was a subsidiary of Silicon Labs, announced its status as a nonprofit standards development organization Aug. 18. That opens development for the platform, Klein said: The alliance is “aggressively recruiting” for working groups “to take things beyond what one company could do in terms of resources.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology wants comment by Oct. 8 on a paper on IoT device security, said the agency Tuesday. The paper focuses on “trusted IoT device network-layer onboarding and lifecycle management.” It discusses how to prevent “unauthorized devices from connecting to the network” and protecting devices from “being taken over by unauthorized networks.”
Walter Ji, president of Huawei Europe’s consumer business group, spent the bulk of his 45-minute prerecorded IFA 2020 news conference speech Thursday trumpeting his company’s stature as a good corporate citizen. Independent studies show Huawei supports 223,000 jobs on the continent, said Ji. Huawei will expand its retail presence in Europe, “creating more jobs and economic growth at a critical time,” he said. It will open eight “flagship stores” by year-end across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. The flagship stores were “designed by Europeans for Europeans,” he said. The expanded “retail footprint will employ hundreds more people,” he said. “We are proud of what we are doing in Europe, and we are committed to doing more.” Ji made no mention in his talk of the U.K.’s July decision banning Huawei from its 5G network (see 2007140023).
About one-third of U.S. employees, 51 million, worked remotely in 2019, NTIA said Thursday in initial results on internet use. The survey was done in November.
Silicon Labs hardware and software got IoT security certifications from PSA Certified and the ioXt Alliance, said the company Wednesday. Its Secure Vault, a set of security features designed to guard against IoT security threats in connected devices, will be available in the company’s multiprotocol wireless SoCs, due Sept. 9, it said. The EFR32MG21B SoC is the first radio to get PSA Certified Level 2 accreditation for providing protection against scalable software attacks, said Andy Rose, chief system architect. Silicon Labs' xG22 Thunderbird and EFR32MG21B development kits got SmartCert security certification status from the ioXt Alliance. IoT security threats are “continuously evolving, and the demands on IoT product developers to keep up can be difficult -- particularly in low cost, resource-constrained IoT products,” said Matt Johnson, senior vice president-IoT. Customer data and cloud-based business models are “increasingly targeted for costly hacks, and IoT security requirements are quickly becoming law.”
Customs and Border Protection should update and make privacy notices available for its face-scanning technology, GAO recommended Wednesday. CBP’s privacy notices aren’t always available where the technology is used or online, GAO said, noting CBP deployed the equipment in at least 27 U.S. airports. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with the recommendation.
A new family of integrated power management ICs from Dialog Semiconductor is designed to meet power and thermal efficiency requirements of in-cabin automotive electronics systems, including infotainment, navigation, telemetry and advanced drive assistance systems, said the company Monday. The DC-DC converters are said to require fewer external components than competing systems.
President Donald Trump’s social media executive order violates platforms’ First Amendment protections “to curate and fact-check content and ensure that accurate information ... is not undermined by misinformation on their platforms,” advocates argued in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Thursday (see 2008040059). Common Cause, Rock the Vote, Voto Latino, Free Press and MapLight filed the lawsuit. “Users have rights to receive accurate information without this kind of government interference,” Common Cause Special Adviser Michael Copps said. DOJ didn’t comment.
Instacart charged Washington, D.C., residents “millions of dollars in deceptive service fees” and failed to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars in District sales tax,” D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine alleged in a lawsuit Thursday. For 18 months, the grocery delivery app “failed to clearly disclose to consumers that optional service fees were added on their bills and led them to believe these fees were tips for their delivery workers,” Racine alleged in a D.C. Superior Court filing, noting the fees didn’t increase employee pay. Customer transparency is “incredibly important,” an Instacart spokesperson emailed, saying service fees are clearly marked. Racine’s complaint is without merit, the company said: “We’re disappointed with today's action by D.C. Attorney General Racine’s office and we welcome the opportunity to continue an open dialogue on these matters.”