The White House this week eliminated its top cyber policy adviser position in a move a National Security Council spokesman said will "improve efficiency, reduce bureaucracy" and promote accountability. “The National Security Council’s cyber office already has two very capable Senior Directors. Moving forward, these Senior Directors will coordinate cyber matters and policy,” he emailed. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel tweeted: “This does not seem like a good idea.” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called the decision “mind-boggling”: “Our adversaries are investing heavily in 21st century cyber warfare capabilities, and if we only view national security through a conventional 20th century lens, we’re going to find ourselves unable to respond to increasingly asymmetric cyber threats down the road.”
Consumers are ready to embrace connected devices and use IoT technology to make daily lives easier, CSG reported Tuesday, based on a survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 64. Forty-five percent own at least one wearable device, seen as the most important IoT item. Twenty-three percent use smart home devices, and 36 percent are interested in testing connected home applications. While many IoT devices offer technology advancements or entertainment features, consumers want the IoT to have practical application, with 60 percent seeing the biggest value of the IoT in making life easier.
Facebook content moderation technology for hate speech is lagging compared with systems for flagging adult and violent content, the company said Tuesday. Facebook took down 21 million pieces of adult content in Q1, took down or applied warnings to about 3.5 million pieces of violent content and removed 2.5 million pieces of hate speech. Only about 38 percent of hate speech was flagged by Facebook technology, the platform said. Its technology identified about 96 percent of adult content before it was reported and 86 percent of violent content.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday aimed at modernizing government IT systems. The order focuses on defining roles and authorities of agency chief information officers. The federal government spends about $90 billion annually on IT. Trump "is drawing on the best practices from the private sector and empowering CIOs to lead the technology transformation at their agencies,” White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner told reporters. “This executive order is a critical foundation to delivering a more efficient, effective and accountable government.”
The FTC should investigate Google’s potentially “deceptive” collection of Android users’ sensitive location data, Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said Monday. The lawmakers cited an investigation by Quartz, alleging Google gathers Android user location data when location services are disabled. Google’s privacy settings allow “an intimate understanding of personal lives as they watch their users seek the support of reproductive health services, engage in civic activities, or attend places of religious worship,” the lawmakers wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai. Google and the FTC didn’t comment.
Nvidia sees autonomous driving as a $60 billion “addressable market opportunity” by 2035, said Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress on a Thursday earnings call. “We believe that every vehicle will be autonomous one day. By 2035, this will encompass 100 million autonomous passenger vehicles and 10 million robo taxis.” Nvidia’s Drive Constellation virtual reality platform will help autonomous-driving developers “test and validate their systems in a virtual world across a wide range of scenarios before deploying on the road,” she said. “Each year, 10 trillion miles are driven around the world. Even if test cars can eventually cover millions of miles, that's an insignificant fraction of all the scenarios that require testing to create a safe and reliable autonomous vehicle.” More than 370 companies and research institutions are using the platform, she said. CEO Jensen Huang sees driver-less taxis going to market starting next year and self-driving cars “probably somewhere between 2020 and 2021,” he said in Q&A. The size of the market opportunity “is fairly well-modeled,” he said. “I believe that every single everything that moves someday will be autonomous or have autonomous capabilities.” The estimate of 100 million autonomous vehicles on the road by 2035 includes passenger cars and “the countless taxis, all the trucks, all the agriculture equipment, all the pizza delivery vehicles, you name it,” he said. ”Everything is going to be autonomous, and the market opportunity is going to be quite large, and that's the reason why we're so determined to go create that market.”
The Copyright Office is asking for zero-cost, or “exceptionally low-cost,” contractors to modernize the department in exchange for visibility that comes with building a digital platform, Program Manager George Thuronyi said Thursday. The work will support the CO’s new web-based, cloud-hosted Enterprise Copyright System. The Copyright Modernization Office issued a request for information May 4 and is soliciting feedback until July 16, with a request for proposal to follow. “Instead of the government soliciting and then paying a vendor, the vendor will volunteer and craft a solution for the government,” Thuronyi said, adding the work allows the vendor a “large, highly visible platform upon which to build a cutting-edge, fully functioning, high-profile, symbiotic solution.”
A lawsuit challenging searches of electronic devices at the U.S. border can proceed, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said Thursday. Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Massachusetts sued the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of 11 travelers. The individuals’ smartphones and laptops were searched without warrants, the groups said. “EFF and ACLU can move ahead to prove that our plaintiffs’ Fourth and First Amendment rights were violated when their devices were seized and searched without a warrant,” EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope said.
Amazon Alexa leads in consumer awareness of smart home platforms at 28 percent, but “consumers want robust user experiences,” said Parks Associates analyst Dina Abdelrazik. “They are not going out to buy platforms but products." She said interoperability is key to enabling a working ecosystem of devices. Citing a Parks survey of U.S. broadband households, Abdelrazik said 75 percent of U.S. broadband households planning to buy a smart home product consider interoperability to be important.
Individual privacy, specifically protection for personally identifiable information, is emphasized in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s updated draft cybersecurity Risk Management Framework (RMF). The update integrates the RMF with NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework. It “provides cross-references so that organizations using the RMF can see where and how the CSF aligns with the current steps in the RMF,” NIST Computer Scientist Ron Ross said. “Conversely, if you’re using the CSF, you can bring in the RMF and give your organization a robust methodology to manage security and privacy risks.”