Facebook removed 51 accounts, 36 pages, seven groups and three Instagram accounts linked to subversive Iranian groups, Cybersecurity Policy Head Nathaniel Gleicher announced Tuesday. The groups misrepresented their location in the U.S. and Europe and impersonated Middle Eastern news organizations. They also “represented themselves as journalists or other personas and tried to contact policymakers, reporters, academics, Iranian dissidents and other public figures,” Gleicher said. Some authentic Instagram accounts posted some of their content.
A draft implementation guide for the Cybersecurity Framework Manufacturing Profile Low Security Level is available for comment until July 8, the National Institute of Standards and Technology said Tuesday. It provides general implementation guidance and “example proof-of-concept solutions demonstrating how currently available open-source and commercial off-the-shelf products can be implemented in manufacturing environments to satisfy” the framework requirements.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., suggested Amazon misrepresented the control Echo smart speaker users have in deleting audio data from interactions with Alexa. According to a letter Coons sent CEO Jeff Bezos Thursday, the company told Coons and then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in July that users can review and delete audio recordings from Alexa interactions, removing them from company servers. Coons cited recent reports claiming Amazon indefinitely retains transcripts of the audio interactions, meaning user control over audio is meaningless. “The inability to delete a transcript of an audio recording renders the option to delete the recording largely inconsequential and puts users’ privacy at risk,” Coons wrote. He asked Bezos if the claims are accurate, why users can’t delete such transcripts and what purpose the transcripts serve. The company is reviewing the letter, a spokesperson said Friday. Customers have "complete control over" the voice recordings, and can manage and delete recordings online: "When a customer deletes a voice recording, we also delete the corresponding text transcript associated with their account from our main Alexa systems and many subsystems, and have work underway to delete it from remaining subsystems.”
One video rebuffering incident could result in more than $85,000 in lost revenue, blogged Alex Balford, senior product marketing manager at Akamai Thursday. There's no set industry standard to measure online video quality of experience, but rebuffering consistently “resonates in every conversation,” Balford said. He quoted an executive at a major broadcaster who said customer engagement drops when viewers see the spinning wheel “more than a couple of times.” The broadcaster’s target is to keep that rate below 0.5 percent; when it achieves that level, 90 percent of viewing sessions are completed, he said. At 0.5 percent-1 percent, the session completion rate falls to 80 percent, and at 1 percent, it plummets to 50 percent. Causes can be traced to the ISP, content delivery network, playback device or browser, Wi-Fi configurations, available bandwidth, network traffic and content itself, Balford said, quoting a broadcast executive calling video delivery “a complicated process with many loopholes and rabbit holes.” Audiences, Balford said, are becoming increasingly sophisticated in communicating about and identifying service issues. A video aggregator said users became upset when the company experimented with transcoding, leading to an apology and assurances it wasn’t trying to reduce quality or costs. Based on video traffic for a major U.S. network June 2017-June 2018, one rebuffer translates to 496,417 hours lost, or 10.7 million advertising impressions, assuming 11 minutes of ad time hourly at an average of 30 seconds per ad, Balford said.
IHS Markit will transfer most of its technology, media and telecom research operations to Informa in return for latter’s “aribusiness intelligence group,” said the companies Wednesday. IHS will keep its RootMetrics “benchmarking” operation, they said. The deal is expected to close in July.
Analog Devices, Inc. expects a roughly $120 million revenue hit in its quarter ending Aug. 3 from the Trump administration’s “recently announced export restrictions on a large communications company,” said the chipmaker Wednesday after such a crackdown on Huawei (see 1905160081). “We have ceased shipments of products to that company, and we are currently reviewing our ability to resume shipments under the recently announced temporary general license” (see 1905210013), said ADI. It's forecasting Q3 revenue of $1.45 billion, plus or minus $50 million, compared with $1.57 billion in the year-earlier quarter. This accounts for "these restrictions, including no revenue from that customer for the remainder of the quarter,” said Chief Financial Officer Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah on the Q3 call. “ADI has an extremely diverse business.” Despite the “short-term impact on our communications business, our business is global, broad and robust, and we’ll manage through this,” said CEO Vincent Roche. The chipmaker is in a very "gray situation here," said Roche when asked about ADI's ability to recoup from other communications customers the business lost through Huawei. ADI sees 5G as a "transcendental technology," said Roche. "We're seeing trials in Japan and Korea at this point in time, but it's really yet to begin in earnest in any volume. That's probably going to come in the 2020 time frame."
The FTC Tuesday extended the comment deadline to Aug. 2 for proposed changes to the Safeguards Rule 60. The rule “requires financial institutions to develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive information security program.”
About one-third of internet users “never” read the fine print and another 39 percent only sometimes read it when agreeing to terms of service from online companies, the Brookings Institution reported Tuesday. Brookings polled some 2,000 adult internet users May 8-10. Nearly 70 percent said online privacy is “very important” to them. About half said there should “definitely” be one consistent standard for handling of data, and 73 percent said companies should “definitely” be required to get consumer consent to collect personal data.
U.S. antitrust authorities won't oppose tech company Xilinx's buy of software company Solarflare Communications, said an FTC early termination notice dated Friday and released Monday. That ends the deal's Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period.
Take advantage of granular broadband availability information available through some statewide mapping projects (see 1905010089), Connected Nation told aides to all FCC members, Chief Data Officer Steve Rosenberg and Wireline Bureau officials. On plans to modernize Form 477, Connected Nation cited projects in Kansas and Minnesota that have used granular polygons contained within shapefiles to demonstrate network availability (see 1905030060). The maps are based on provider network capabilities, both where standard wireline installations are available and using propagation modeling for wireless services. "Implementing a system based on shapefile reporting would most likely result in the creation of a new more granular National Broadband Map in the shortest amount of time so that Federal agencies can more quickly utilize the map to guide funding decisions and support broadband buildout to the places that still desperately need it," said the filing posted Monday to docket 11-10.