Google cancelled white supremacist website The Daily Stormer’s attempted domain registration transfer to the company’s Google Domains service Monday after original registry GoDaddy cancelled the website’s registration. GoDaddy told The Daily Stormer Sunday to move its registration to another registry after the website published an article disparaging Heather Heyer, who died in a Saturday attack on counterprotesters at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The story “violated our terms of service,” GoDaddy tweeted. Google believes The Daily Stormer’s registration is “violating our terms of service,” a spokesperson said. Google Domains says “making available of content that ... glorifies violence, inciting, racist or radical right-wing content” as one violation of its terms of service.

Equifax bought identity theft protection company ID Watchdog for $63 million, the buyer announced Thursday.

Nvidia’s autonomous-driving “road map” will include “development partnerships” it forges this year and next with a “growing number of car companies” on nonrecurring engineering and artificial intelligence projects, said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on an earnings call. Beginning in 2018, he expects “robot taxis.” Huang expects fully autonomous “branded cars will start hitting the road around 2020 and 2021." He thinks cryptocurrency “is here to stay,” he also said Thursday: "This is a market that is not likely to go away anytime soon, and the only thing that we can probably expect is that there will be more currencies to come. It will come in a whole lot of different nations."

Facebook prevailed in a lawsuit against a country-rap artist who sought removal of pages, and the musician said he'll continue the suit. The Court of Appeal of California, 1st Appellate District Division 2, decided last week that Mikel Knight's allegations were insufficient to defeat an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) motion. The opinion, posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that filed an amicus brief for Facebook, reversed in part a lower court ruling. In Cross v. Facebook, Knight, whose real name is Jason Cross, sued because some users created "Families Against Mikel Knight." In a statement, Knight said Friday: "I'm a Texan! A place historically known for fighting big battles and winning. We will see them in the Supreme Court." The page was created after independent album-selling contractors hired by Knight's marketing company were involved in auto crashes. Knight alleged comments incited "violence and death threats" against him and members of his label. Facebook refused to take down the pages. Its anti-SLAPP motion said the suit's claims were barred by the Communications Decency Act and not viable under California law. The trial court said CDA barred three claims but let stand the others including the right of publicity, which protects a form of IP. Knight alleged Facebook continued to place ads on the unauthorized pages and generated revenue using his name or likeness, but the appeals court said he didn't show the ads appearing next to the pages used his name or likeness or were created by Facebook: "Evidence demonstrates that Facebook has not used Knight‘s identity, and any right of publicity claims fail for this reason alone. Likewise for failure to show appropriation." EFF said if the superior court ruling were allowed to stand, it "would have threatened a huge range of online expression."

Microsoft developed a framework aimed at faster commercial adoption of blockchain technology by streamlining complex development techniques, said a Thursday news release. Microsoft said it will launch the Coco Framework on GitHub in 2018 as an open source project. It said the framework integrated with a blockchain network offers speeds of more than 1,600 transactions per second. The framework provides distributed governance "that establishes a network constitution and allows members to vote on all terms and conditions governing the consortium and the blockchain software system," Microsoft said.

Fossil’s “successful entry” into wearables enabled the company “to expand our addressable market and to work with new wholesale partners in the consumer electronics channel,” said CEO Kosta Kartsotis on a Tuesday earnings call. On the call, the company announced a sizable loss in the second quarter and the stock market reacted Wednesday by dropping the closing share price to $8.87, a 25 percent decline. “But we didn't get as far as we wanted to" during Q2, said Kartsotis. “Much of our time has been spent finalizing the specifics around margin and other details given that this is a new distribution channel for us.” That CE "channel works a little bit differently,” said outgoing Chief Financial Officer Dennis Secor. Fossil suffered from a “lack of understanding exactly how that channel works ... we're catching up quick,” said Secor. The company named a board member to succeed Secor (see the personals section of this issue). “Our products are too big for female customers and female customers are our core,” he said. “We're just going to have a product that looks better; it feels better and allows for much better branding and design.”

Facebook is strengthening efforts to ban "cloaking" that bypasses the company's review processes to show content in violation of community standards and advertising policies, blogged Product Management Director Rob Leathern and Software Engineer Bobbie Chang Wednesday. "Cloaked destination pages, which frequently include diet pills, pornography and muscle building scams, create negative and disruptive experiences." Cloakers create web pages with links that take Facebook reviewers to websites that comply with company policies, but users are taken to malicious or misleading sites. Leathern and Change said Facebook has taken down "thousands of these offenders" through artificial intelligence and expanded human reviews. They said the company will closely collaborate with industry and ban such advertisers and pages.

Google "strongly" supports employees' rights to express themselves, CEO Sundar Pichai said, but a now-fired engineer's 10-page document circulated inside the company violated its code of conduct, "advancing harmful gender stereotypes." Pichai's Monday note made public Tuesday didn't mention the document's author, James Damore, reportedly fired Monday. "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive," said Pichai. But he said employees, "especially those with a minority viewpoint," shouldn't be afraid of expressing their views and the company needs to find a way to debate issues without violating the code of conduct. Pichai said he was cutting a vacation short to discuss the issue. Contact information for Damore couldn't be found.

Faster broadband and widespread adoption of connected devices helped fuel 136 percent growth in the “cumulative number” of global children’s VOD services to 175 in 2016 from 2012, said IHS Markit in a Monday report. “An increase in original exclusive online content, ease of online payment, and the offer of a secure environment for age-appropriate content have further encouraged the uptake of on-demand content.” Children’s VOD services are booming in number, “with traditional linear broadcasters reaching their audiences online and a wave of new players led by Amazon, Netflix and YouTube competing for eyeballs,” it said. “Children do not have the same ingrained loyalty to existing media brands as older viewers, so it is not just a battle for today’s under-12 audience but also about establishing awareness among future consumers.” About 90 percent of the services are accessible on mobile devices, including a third of the services accessible only on a smartphone or tablet, it said: “The smartphone-fueled emergence of app stores has led to a new wave of subscription services. Besides the ability to offer a protected environment for young children, they can be rolled out internationally more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of linear TV channels.”

The Center for Democracy & Technology said AnchorFree's virtual private network service violates promises of protecting users' data security, collection and sharing practices and wants the FTC to investigate, said a Monday complaint. An FTC spokeswoman said it received the complaint. CDT alleged the company's Hotspot Shield Free Virtual Private Network (VPN) product privacy policy said it doesn't keep a log of users' online activity and personal information and doesn't track or sell such information. But CDT said Hotspot Shield "regularly" collects users' IP addresses, unique device identifiers and other data, and monitors their browsing habits when the VPN is in use. CDT said the service deploys persistent cookies "and concedes that it works with unaffiliated entities to customize advertising and marketing messages," despite claiming browsing and other similar data are "cleared" after VPN sessions close. The complaint alleged Hotspot Shield connected advertisers to frequent, unique visitors to business, finance, retail and travel websites, giving advertisers access to customers' IP addresses and device identifiers. CDT wants the FTC to order the company to stop misrepresentations, provide clearer statements, implement a comprehensive security and privacy program and offer customer refunds. AnchorFree didn't comment.