President Donald Trump signed an executive order on strengthening the federal government’s cybersecurity workforce. Thursday's EO includes a rotational program for federal employees to “expand” cybersecurity expertise via temporary assignments at other agencies. Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency staffers can trade positions with employees in similar roles elsewhere. The President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition will be an annual cybersecurity competition for federal civilian and military employees. Trump's comments here.

Facebook on Thursday banned Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Paul Nehlen, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer and Infowars from the platform and Instagram, labeling them “dangerous” individuals and organizations, a spokesperson said. Company policy prohibits individuals and organizations that “promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” the spokesperson said. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”

Lawmakers, academia and media often mistakenly suggest that big tech is the only group that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects, Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties Director David Greene wrote Wednesday. The safe harbor protects a wide variety of internet users and publishers like news media, nonprofits, anyone who maintains a website and those who post to classified sites like Craigslist, he said. The ultimate beneficiaries are everyday internet users, “so that we can post things online without having to code it ourselves, and so that we can read and watch content that others create,” he said.

Comments are due May 31 on a National Institute of Standards and Technology request for information on developing technical standards for artificial intelligence, said Wednesday's Federal Register. A February executive order directs NIST to create a plan for federal engagement in developing technical standards. The agency said it will consult with federal agencies, the private sector, academia, nongovernmental entities and other stakeholders.

U.S. antitrust authorities cleared the way for SoftBank Vision Fund to buy food delivery service Doordash, said an FTC early termination notice dated Monday and released Tuesday.

U.S. home entertainment content spending increased 6.4 percent in Q1 to $6.04 billion, reported the Digital Entertainment Group Tuesday, despite a tough comparison with a year earlier when the Easter holiday fell in March. Easter season is “traditionally a strong sales period,” it said. Subscription streaming was the engine that drove the truck in Q1, rising 20.7 percent to $3.59 billion, it said. Physical media sell-through dropped below the $1 billion mark, falling 22.4 percent to $822.3 million, though Ultra HD Blu-ray player penetration increased 63 percent to 14 million homes. DEG estimates 53.4 million homes in Q1 owned Ultra HD hardware products, a 55 percent increase.

Microsoft will categorize user data as required or optional, document it publicly and submit a biannual report describing changes to required data collection, Corporate Vice President Julie Brill blogged Tuesday. Required data collection will include data “necessary to making our products and services work as expected by the customer, or to help ensure their security,” Brill said. That includes search query terms, IP addresses, device types and diagnostic data, and consumers have the option to opt out of collection in certain instances. Optional means collection of data not “essential to the product or service experience,” she wrote. That includes, for example, data about photos inserted into Word documents. The biannual report defining data collection will be published at privacy.microsoft.com.

Amazon is “ahead of schedule and on pace” to create 400 new jobs this year at its HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, blogged Ardine Williams, vice president-workforce development, Monday. Its goal is to hire 25,000 in Arlington “over the next decade plus,” she said. “We’ve enjoyed a warm welcome from the community and the strong support from state and local government has allowed us to make significant progress towards establishing our presence here.” Williams was among several Amazon executives who faced tough questions during a confrontational Jan. 30 New York City Council hearing from several members skeptical of Amazon’s plans, under her watch, to recruit Queens public-housing tenants for customer service jobs at its other planned HQ2 in Long Island City (see 1901300048). Amazon scrapped the project two weeks later, citing lack of local government support (see 1902140054). Monday was “an important step” for Amazon in Arlington “as we lease office space and begin hiring,” said Williams. “We will welcome our new employees to our temporary office space on Crystal Drive in June while we work toward opening our first building this fall.” Amazon posted its first job listings Monday, and “while the number is small, these employees will help build the foundation of our workforce and workplace,” she said.

Ford will factory-install modems in all new vehicles it sells in the U.S. by year-end, and in 90 percent of the cars it sells globally by 2020, said CEO Jim Hackett on a Q1 call Thursday. It’s in keeping with the “Smart Vehicles for a Smart World” theme of his CES 2018 keynote, in which he said “cities are going to be communicating back to the vehicles and vice versa,” he said. “We have the opportunity to help create a better transportation system that will improve lives.” Ford plans to “leverage this connectivity to continuously improve our vehicles and services and create better experiences for our customers,” he said. “We know this will build loyalty and deliver recurring revenue streams.” Ford has picked a third U.S. city for test-deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) to follow Miami and Washington and expects to announce the location later in 2019, said Hackett. “We're testing in some really challenging areas,” he said when asked to explain why Ford is expanding AVs to more cities when other automakers are cutting back. “I don't want to pick on any competitor because it's not my purpose, but you could put these vehicles in places where the weather never changes,” he said. “We’ve opted into some really difficult settings” to prove AVs’ “capability,” he said. If AVs were “only destined for the L.A. freeways, you don't have to deal with dogs and baseballs running across them,” he said. General Motors also is testing AVs in big cities (see 1904260002).

Businesses worldwide will spend nearly $1.2 trillion this year on “digital transformation” as they seek a competitive edge, said IDC Tuesday. “Discrete manufacturing” ($221.6 billion) and “process manufacturing” ($124.5 billion) are the two industrial sectors expected to invest the most in digital transformation. Each will pursue “a different mix of strategic priorities, from omni-channel commerce for the retail industry to digital supply chain optimization” for the logistics industry, it said. It estimates hardware and services investments will be more than 75 percent of 2019 digital transformation spending.