“This will change your mind,” reads a Thursday email blast offering a one-month free trial subscription to DirecTV Now’s $35 monthly bottom-tier, 60-channel “Live a Little” content package. Consumers who act on the offer through Jan. 1 by entering a “unique” promo code will have their accounts auto-billed for $35 a month after the free trial lapses, unless canceled, said the email.

Google agreed to extend the commitments it made to the FTC in 2012 to resolve a years-long antitrust investigation, including continuing to allow third-party search engines to access its AdWords application programming interface. The agreement, which the FTC announced in early 2013, expired Wednesday (see 1301040038). The extension came amid increasing criticism and scrutiny in the U.S. and the EU of major tech sector firms' practices. “We believe that these policies provide continued flexibility for developers and websites, and we will continue them as policies after the commitments expire,” said Google Senior Competition Counsel Michael Lawrence in a letter published Wednesday. The voluntary extension also means Google agreed to continue to abide by a pledge to stop “scraping” its rivals' content. Yelp Vice President-Public Policy Luther Lowe tweeted that the company provided “hard evidence to the FTC” in September “that Google was violating its 2012 promises 500k times per hour.” Google didn't immediately comment. "As soon as we learned of Yelp's claim we took immediate steps to look at and address any issue, as we would have had they come to us directly," a Google spokesman said. "We continue to stand by our commitments to the FTC."

Roku’s first Christmas Day as a public company had its glitches. “We are aware that some Roku users report seeing an error code 001 on the TV during the Roku activation screen,” said a Roku customer support “service interruption” bulletin posted Monday at 9:50 a.m. PST. “Try disconnecting and reconnecting the power adapter,” said the bulletin. “You should be able to continue after restart. We are working diligently to address this issue and we will update this article with any changes. You will not need to do anything, or contact support. Please just try again later. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.” Less than an hour later, at 10:45 a.m. PST, customer support reported that “systems look good and all should be working normally now.” Roku is “not commenting on the specifics” of the service interruption, including whether it came under the crush of a high volume of Christmas Day activations, said spokeswoman Tricia Mifsud.

“Bit rot,” the progressive self-corruption of stored data (see 1709270048), “can manifest on any storage device, from floppy discs to hard drives,” Maureen Pennock, head of digital preservation at the British Library, told us. The library’s policy “is that content to be preserved is transferred to approved storage locations or workflows after acquisition and its bit-level integrity established so that it can be monitored thereafter,” said Pennock. The library recognized the challenges of digital preservation, and in the early 2000s “began developing our own purpose-built digital repository for long-term storage and management of our collection content,” she said. She described it as a “four-node replication system,” with copies of content and metadata packages placed in repository “nodes” located in Yorkshire, London, Wales and Scotland. The nodes undergo regular “fixity checking to ensure files have not become corrupt,” she said: “If fixity checks indicate a problem with a file on one node it can be replaced from one of the other nodes.”

Smart speaker household penetration surged 40 percent between June and November, according to comScore data, and comScore predicts 15 percent penetration by January after holiday gifts have been connected. That’s considered an inflection point for the end of a product’s “early adopter phase, said analyst Susan Engleson on a webcast last week, predicting smart speaker demographics will shift after the holiday season to a wider customer based on broader product selection and dropping prices. American households with smart speakers, currently about 13 percent of internet homes, are significantly more likely to be using other smart home devices, said Engleson. Smart speakers are the largest IoT device category in the home, with substantial growth and “more growth ahead,” she said.

Congress is unlikely to pass "meaningful" privacy or data breach legislation in a midterm election year, blogged Davis Wright. States may revive efforts to pass online privacy laws targeting ISPs as some attorneys general challenge the FCC's order eliminating net neutrality rules (see 1712210034), the firm said. Updates to state data breach notification laws also could be expected in 2018, it said, and outlook for security is grim as the firm sees data breach and ransomware threats likely to grow, putting pressure on legal and IT departments to develop coordinated defense strategies. Palo Alto Networks warned that the dangers of hackers skillfully manipulating data rather than just stealing it "are only just becoming clear," in a blog. Widespread denial-of-service attacks to block access to systems are fairly commonplace now, but the new -- and harder to manage -- threats come when intruders penetrate a system and modify data to cause reputational damage, invalidate data or steal for financial gain, said Palo Alto security expert Sean Duca. Every organization needs to inspect and verify who is accessing data and applications, said Duca. "Based on recent events, it’s foreseeable that someone will come looking for your information, but it’s up to you to manage the risk," he said.

Samsung announced Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) 1.3 certification for its Artik 05x series of system-on-modules. Artik 05x enables companies to build Wi-Fi-enabled edge products that meet OCF interoperability standards, ensuring they will work with other OCF-certified IoT devices regardless of form factor, operating system or service provider, Samsung said. The pre-certified Artik modules include processors, memory, communications, security and software to enable companies to “jump start development” of products ranging from sensors and controllers to home appliances, healthcare monitors and smart factory gateways, it said.

Google is trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services, a Google spokeswoman said. “But Amazon doesn't carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn't make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest's latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and Fire TV," she said. "We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.” The statement was in response to questions on Amazon’s Wednesday announcement (see 1712200047) it's adding Firefox and Silk browsers to Fire TV. Amazon warned Fire TV owners they won’t have access to the YouTube app as of Jan. 1. Users are expected to be able to access YouTube via browser. The companies have gone back and forth for months denying customers access to the other’s products. An Amazon spokeswoman said it hopes to resolve the YouTube app issue with Google “as soon as possible.”

NPD plans to launch a subscription video tracking service in May that will measure consumers’ “actual TV and movie viewing behavior at the title and episode level” on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, said the company. The service will offer insights into what subscribers are watching on various devices, including the viewers of specific content, how valuable individual titles are to overall viewing rates and “longitudinal viewing trends,” said NPD.

The move toward platform neutrality regulation "is anything but neutral," and what's emerging are rules to force companies to behave in ways that achieve policy goals, blogged American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Roslyn Layton Wednesday. Sens. Al Franken, D-Minn, and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., "brandished" platform neutrality principles, which Layton sees spanning a "grab bag of concepts such as hate speech, fake news, safe spaces, brand safety, content take down, the right to be forgotten and market power." Another goal of platform neutrality regulation is preventing users "from consuming information that leads them to make the 'wrong' choice at the ballot box." Complexities of regulating tech markets are illustrated in the recent Amazon-Google spat over connected devices and YouTube streaming (see 1712060013 and for related news Wednesday 1712200060 and 1712200061), AEI visiting fellow Bret Swanson wrote earlier this month.