D-Link began selling a HomeKit-enabled webcam at Apple.com Wednesday, with plans for Apple Store availability later this month, said the company. When activity is detected, users receive a notification on their lock screen, delivered by the Apple Home app, that shows a live feed from the camera.

Millennials ages 18-29 are among those least likely to own an energy-related IoT product and participate in utility-driven energy management programs, said a report on a survey by the Association of Energy Services Professionals and Essense Partners. Energy-related IoT products in the study included smart thermostats, power strips, air conditioners and washing machines. The survey of more than 2,700 consumers asked people in various age groups whether they own IoT home devices and whether they participated in what the industry defines as demand-side management programs their utilities sponsor. Findings showed 85 percent of millennials didn’t own IoT home products or participate in energy-saving programs from a utility, compared with 79 percent of consumers aged 30-44, 81 percent aged 45-59 and 84 percent 60 and older. Though the association expected a lower rate of participation among younger people "who may not be homeowners yet,” the survey found a “consistent trend of higher participation rates as people get older” that will inform planning and design of participation programs, said AESP Chief Operating Officer Suzanne Jones. The highest participation rates were in Washington, Oregon and California, followed by Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. The lowest participation rates were in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, it said.

The Media Rating Council (MRC) accredited ComScore "for its mobile viewable impressions and related viewability metrics for display and video ads, in mobile web and in-app, in validated Campaign Essentials," said the measurement company in a Wednesday news release. “We’re working hard to help our clients and the industry bridge the gaps that divide devices and platforms," said Dan Hess, comScore executive vice president-products. "Cross-platform ad verification -- including mobile viewability -- helps close one such gap.” The accreditation builds on another by MRC of comScore's Sophisticated Invalid Traffic detection capabilities that "provide media buyers greater assurance that their desktop and mobile ads have the opportunity to be seen by a real person," the company said.

The FTC cleared Cisco’s $3.7 billion acquisition of application-performance monitoring company AppDynamics, in an early termination notice released Tuesday. Cisco announced the deal last month. AppDynamics will become a software business unit in Cisco's IoT/Applications business (see 1701250060).

“Mega” distributed denial-of-service attacks increased 140 percent year-over-year in Q4, Akamai said Tuesday in a report. Akamai said it considers any DDoS attack larger than 100 Gbps to be a “mega” attack. Twelve such attacks took place in Q4, it said. The largest DDoS attack during Q4, from non-IoT botnet Spike, peaked at 517 Gbps, Akamai said. Seven of the 12 mega attacks are “directly attributed” to the Mirai botnet, which caused the October DDoS attacks against Dyn, Akamai said. The number of IP addresses associated with DDoS attacks also grew during Q4 even though the overall number of DDoS attacks dropped, the company said. The U.S. was the source of the most IP addresses associated with DDoS attacks during the quarter, and remained the top source country for web app attacks, Akamai said. “As we saw with the Mirai botnet attacks during the third quarter, unsecured [IoT] devices continued to drive significant DDoS attack traffic,” said Senior Security Advocate Martin McKeay in a news release. “With the predicted exponential proliferation of these devices, threat agents will have an expanding pool of resources to carry out attacks, validating the need for companies to increase their security investments. Additional emerging system vulnerabilities are expected before devices become more secure.”

Roughly half of U.S. broadband homes want the ability to monitor and adjust thermostats remotely, and a third find voice control very appealing, said a Parks Associates report Tuesday. Voice control is “transforming the smart home user experience” and offering a way for companies to expand consumer engagement with their services and solutions, said Parks analyst Patrice Samuels. In the past six months, 2-4 percent of U.S. broadband households purchased an Echo, said Parks, saying both the Echo and Google Home have the ability to drive adoption of multiple smart home and energy management products. The research firm scheduled a panel, “Leveraging Voice Control and AI in Energy Management,” at its Smart Energy Summit next week in Austin.

ICANN’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer sought to dispel myths that there are “keys that cause the Internet to function (or not to function),” saying Monday such claims are “incorrect.” Various media outlets have for several years published articles that claim the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) mechanism constitutes the “keys to the internet,” but it's only a “single part of the Internet -- the mechanism for authenticating the data in the domain name system,” the CTO’s office said in a blog post. “It is based on a hierarchy of [ICANN-managed] cryptographic keys starting at the root of the DNS.” The Trusted Community Representatives that are present when activating the cryptographic keys “perform a valuable service, but for a very limited operation,” the CTO’s office said. “The Internet consists of many different systems, and the DNS is just one of them. Controlling one aspect of the Internet, such as DNSSEC, does not lead to full control of other aspects.”

There's “no rational ‘America first’ global internet policy that won’t break the internet,” said former U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy Daniel Sepulveda in a Friday Facebook post. Sepulveda left the State Department in January a week before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who pledged to take an “America First” attitude toward trade and other economic issues. “The benefits of the democratization of power and opportunity that the global platform creates must be shared for our own good,” Sepulveda said. “And the challenges the global platform creates -- from enabling criminal or harmful activity to challenging jurisdictional control over the development of local societies -- do not allow for a situation in which we win and others lose by putting America first.” Either “we solve these challenges together or we all lose,” Sepulveda said. “As we close ourselves off from people, goods, and services from abroad, nations will respond, in part, by closing themselves off to us digitally or by trying to extract some price for continued interconnection. If our friends across the aisle want to head this way, at least do it consciously.”

The FBI, which did a 2015 sting into the child porn website called Playpen, hacked thousands of devices, most of which were located outside the U.S., using a search warrant that illegally permitted extraterritorial searches and seizures, said UK-based Privacy International (PI), which filed an amicus brief Friday with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. The privacy group said in U.S. v. Alex Levin that hacking computers outside the U.S. has "profound foreign relations implications" because the government didn't get the consent of other countries. PI Legal Officer Scarlet Kim said in a news release that the extraterritorial searches raise important questions: "How will other countries react to the FBI hacking in their jurisdictions without prior consent? Would the U.S. welcome hacking operations on a similar scale carried out on U.S. residents by other countries? Is the FBI violating the laws of foreign jurisdictions by hacking devices located in them?" In the amicus filing, PI said the FBI hacked more than 8,700 computers, over 83 percent outside the U.S., in 120 countries and territories. The group also said the law enforcement agency used "vague and imprecise language" to describe the "network investigative technique" (NIT) as a "tracking device" but which PI and many other privacy advocates maintain is a euphemism for malware. At the time, PI said Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure largely prohibited such extraterritorial searches and NIT uses. The rule has since been changed to allow a single magistrate judge to issue one warrant that permits searches outside the judge's jurisdiction, which critics say has vastly expanded the government's hacking authority (see 1612140051). The Levin case arises out of the hacking operation of the Playpen child porn site (see 1610250049). Levin, a Massachusetts resident, is one of the defendants in the case and challenged the FBI's use of the search warrant, which was granted by a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia. A district judge then granted Levin's motion to suppress evidence because he argued the NIT warrant was invalid since it was obtained outside of his state. The case was then appealed to the 1st Circuit. DOJ didn't comment.

ICANN said it's “free to proceed” with delegating the .africa generic top-level domain to the ZA Central Registry after the California Superior Court threw out DotConnectAfrica Trust’s lawsuit to block the delegation from proceeding. DCA Trust had sought to require ICANN to follow the terms of independent review process proceedings that found ICANN mishandled DCA's 2013 challenge to the nonprofit's .africa delegation decision. DCA Trust also wanted ICANN to reconsider the registry's application to be the .africa registry (see 1603070062 and 1603280050). The California court cited the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles’ dismissal in December of a lawsuit that Donuts’ Ruby Glen subsidiary filed against ICANN over the controversial auction of the .web generic top-level domain, in which Judge Percy Anderson ruled that the anti-lawsuit covenant that ICANN includes in all gTLD applications is enforceable. That same covenant bars DCA Trust from suing ICANN on claims of fraud and unfair business practices, the California Superior Court ruled Thursday. ICANN said it “will now follow its normal processes towards delegation” of the .africa gTLD. DCA Trust didn’t comment Friday.