Holiday season online sales to date climbed 13 percent for the first 48 days of the holiday season vs. the year-ago period, said a Tuesday comScore report. U.S. e-commerce sales via PC totaled $55.2 billion, with the latest week -- Dec. 12-18 -- posting 15 percent growth to $7.6 billion vs. the 2015 period, comScore said. Free Shipping Day (Dec. 16) had $967 million in desktop spending, up 14 percent over 2015, closing out a streak of 22 consecutive days of billion-dollar online PC sales and 30 days overall since Nov. 1, it said. ComScore CEO Gian Fulgoni cited a “notable weekend surge” as consumers rushed to get orders in in time for shipping by Christmas. While the heaviest spending is over, comScore expects another $7 billion-$8 billion to be spent online over the rest of the year.

A CTA working group on virtual and augmented reality finished work on an agreed-upon set of “industry definitions” to help companies better and more uniformly explain to consumers “the spectrum of experiences their technologies deliver,” the association announced Monday. The working group defines VR products and services as creating “a digital environment that replaces the user's real-world environment,” while AR “overlays” digitally created content into the user's real-world environment, CTA said. Other definitions: (1) “Mixed reality” (MR) is an experience “that seamlessly blends” the user's real-world environment and digitally created content, “where both environments can coexist and interact with each other.” (2) The term “360 Video" is defined as an experience that allows users “to look in every direction around” them. (3) “Immersive Experience" is defined as deeply “engaging” and “multisensory,” which can be delivered by a diversity of different technologies. “The collaboration from across our industry to develop and align on these consumer definitions is the kind of joint effort across the value chain that will ensure the success of this brand new industry and art form," said Technicolor executive Mark Turner, chairman of the working group. "AR, VR and MR offer consumers a remarkable world of interactive and immersive engagement -- whether that's incorporating information and imagery into our everyday environment or submerging ourselves completely into another world.”

The frequency of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack mitigations increased 40 percent so far in 2016, vs. the same period in 2015, Neustar reported Monday. IoT botnets emerged this year as a DDoS tool, as evidenced by the Mirai botnet that caused the October Dyn attacks (see 1610210056 and 1610250035), Neustar said. “The DDoS attack landscape has become increasingly complex in 2016 because there is no singular goal behind these attacks; some seek to disrupt services, while others serve as smokescreens to breach data,” said Senior Vice President Rodney Joffe in a news release. “Mirai signals a watershed moment for DDoS attacks, where the bad guys finally turned the Internet back on its users. It is imperative to invest in effective DDoS protection now because the threat landscape has fundamentally changed.” Multi-vector attacks are 322 percent higher this year than 2015, and were 52 percent of all DDoS attacks that Neustar mitigated this year, the company said. Domain name system-based attacks increased 648 percent this year as attackers increased their leveraging of DNS security extension amplification to generate “massive volumetric pressure,” Neustar said.

Google allegedly violated the law and a consent agreement when it changed its privacy policy June 28 to permit combining users' personally identifiable information with DoubleClick browsing data, which the search company said it wouldn't do when it acquired the now-subsidiary nearly a decade ago (see 0712210173), said Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in an FTC complaint filed Monday. The complaint said Google "forced the change on users in a highly deceptive manner, without meaningful notice and consent. The change marked the culmination of a nearly decade-long deception that Google has perpetrated against its users, the FTC, and the public at large." The groups are asking the FTC to claw back all advertising revenue Google earned since the privacy policy change in June. “Fines Google has faced so far are but pocket change for Google. The company’s executives consider it merely the cost of doing business as they willfully violate our privacy,” said Consumer Watchdog Privacy Project Director John Simpson in a news release. “The FTC must take meaningful action to stop this serial abuser and force it to give up its ill-gotten gains.” The company emailed that it updated its ads systems and related user controls "to match the way people use Google today: across many different devices. Before we launched this update, we tested it around the world with the goal of understanding how to provide users with clear choice and transparency. As a result, it is 100% optional -- if users do not opt-in to these changes, their Google experience will remain unchanged. Equally important: we provided prominent user notifications about this change in easy-to-understand language as well as simple tools that let users control or delete their data." Google also noted it pre-briefed regulators on the changes.

Seven individuals from South Africa and Nigeria, who used dating websites in "romance scams" that took advantage of victims to obtain tens of millions of dollars, pleaded guilty to international online fraud and conspiracy charges, said DOJ in a Friday news release. Each defendant pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and several also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit identity theft, access device fraud and theft of government funds, said Justice. The schemes, which date back to at least 2001, involved defendants using a false identity on a dating website to establish a "romantic relationship" with a victim, said DOJ. Victims were then convinced to send money or, for example, help launder money via Western Union or MoneyGram, cash counterfeit checks or fraudulently obtain merchandise.

The FTC's second annual PrivacyCon event will feature 18 presentations of original research on consumer privacy expectations, information security, IoT and big data, mobile privacy and online behavioral advertisements, said the commission in a Friday news release. The agency released a detailed agenda for the Jan. 12 public forum that will include opening remarks by Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and a closing panel moderated by Consumer Protection Bureau Director Jessica Rich. Among the presenters are Maria Rerecich, who heads Consumer Reports' electronics testing team, Center for Democracy & Technology Senior Policy Analyst Alethea Lange and George Mason University associate law professor James Cooper. The FTC said the first PrivacyCon event earlier this year drew more than 300 attendees and 1,500 webcast viewers (see 1601140062 and 1601140029). The all-day event will be at 400 7th St SW.

Despite its waning importance in recent years, Green Monday sales from PCs rose 15 percent year on year to $1.62 billion, comScore reported. That’s an “encouraging sign” for the last major buying week, said CEO Gian Fulgoni Wednesday. It was the No. 5 online spending day. Analyst Adam Lella told us high spending on Nov. 29 can be attributed in part to extended Cyber Monday deals that some retailers offered, along with “natural spillover from the biggest promotional day of the year." Green Monday used to be the No. 1 holiday spending day, before Cyber Monday came to the fore, he noted.

The U.S. private cyber insurance market is continuing to grow and is capable of managing most risks, the R Street Institute reported Thursday. The free-market think tank said that sector is growing at a rate of between 25 and 50 percent annually, netting $2.75 billion in premiums in 2015. U.S. cyber insurance premiums are expected to rise to $7.5 billion by 2020, R Street said. Policies with a $50 million limit “would be able to cover roughly 92 percent of cyber-event claims,” R Street said. The likelihood of a major cyber incident that causes $250 billion-$1 trillion in damage during the next decade is between 10 and 20 percent, the group said. The potential for that sort of “black swan” event requires a government “backstop” or reinsurance entity to manage U.S. cyber exposure, R Street said. “The cyber insurance market is growing rapidly and ... already has sufficient capacity to cover the overwhelming bulk of events the market already has faced,” R Street said. “Businesses report they are satisfied with their existing cyber coverages."

Successful conclusion of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition and expiration of NTIA's role in authorizing changes to the authoritative root zone file mean the federal government has “finally realized the bipartisan goal of previous administrations to privatize the domain name system,” said the agency Thursday in what it called its final progress report to Congress on the switchover. ICANN completed the IANA handoff in early October, leading many to predict a refocus of the organization's attention on other issues (see 1610030042). The global “multistakeholder community has reacted positively” to the transition, including positive reports from the Internet Architecture Board, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society, NTIA said. The U.S. government “will continue to play an active leadership role in advocating for a free and open Internet and U.S. interests within ICANN as a member of the Governmental Advisory Committee, and in other international venues,” the agency said.

Annual revenue from blockchain-based enterprise applications will increase to $19.9 billion by 2025, Tractica said Wednesday in a report. Annual revenue from such applications is set to top out at $2.5 billion at the end of this year, Tractica said. Much of the increase will come from North America, which will contribute about $10 billion to blockchain enterprise app sales in 2025, Tractica said. Blockchain “is enjoying a blossoming beyond cryptocurrency and the transfer of money, to an architecture able to support many types of transactions, from logging an event, to signing a document, to voting, to allocating energy between parties, and far beyond,” said analyst Jessica Groopman in a news release. Blockchain startups have received more than $1 billion in investment over the past year, “but through the fog of hype lies the sobering reality that this is a market of extreme nascence and fragmentation,” Groopman said. “Despite significant hurdles, however, blockchain has the potential to impact a wide variety of industries.”