FedEx this week is “closing out what has been another busy peak season” for the company, “largely driven by the continued rapid growth of e-commerce,” said FedEx Services co-CEO Mike Glenn on a Tuesday earnings call. “As e-commerce grows, so does the challenge of peak, with multiple days of volume levels approaching or surpassing double our average daily volume,” Glenn said. “This surge in demand is driven primarily by a relatively small number of customers.” Fewer than 50 “large retail and e-tail customers” account for most of the peak demand, “so it’s extremely important that we understand their forecasts well in advance to allow us to plan resources properly,” he said. Though a few FedEx e-commerce customers this year “have experienced demand below their forecasts,” demand at most clients is “meeting expectations,” he said.

ICANN updated a draft version of its gTLD marketplace health index to include statistics from the first half of 2016. ICANN said it plans to release an update to the index biannually “to track progress against its goal of supporting the evolution of the domain name marketplace to be robust, stable and trusted.” An advisory panel is refining the index's metrics before the rollout of a formal "version 1.0," the nonprofit said. Domain name registrars and others urged the organization in September to further revise its gTLD marketplace health metrics (see 1609120060). The index now measures marketplace health based on geographic diversity, overall changes in the number of registered gTLDs, changes in the number of registrars, accuracy of WHOIS records and dispute resolutions.

A White House report on artificial intelligence "rightly" extols the technology's potential, but also gives "undue credence" to speculation that AI will "exacerbate inequality" and eliminate jobs before acknowledging creation of new ones, said Center for Data Innovation (CDI) Director Daniel Castro in a statement. Tuesday's report (see 1612200056) said the technology could hurt less-educated, lower-skilled workers and recommended several policy changes including more R&D, worker training and education, and a modernized social safety net. "The White House is wrong to suggest that AI will power a productivity explosion so great that it destroys jobs faster than the economy can keep up," said Castro. "That idea vastly overestimates the ways in which AI will be able to replace people -- and it underestimates the extent to which productivity gains create new job opportunities by putting more money into the economy." He said policymakers including the incoming Trump administration should keep the claims in perspective. But Castro said he supports the strategies the White House put forth and said the report correctly says the bulk of new jobs created won't be high-skilled technical jobs like computer scientists but in other sectors where companies benefit from AI. In October, CDI released an AI report and held a discussion on how government regulators and policymakers could help foster the technology (see 1610190027).

Global government requests to Facebook for user account data rose to 59,229 for the first half of 2016, up 27 percent from the second half of last year, said Deputy General Counsel Chris Sonderby in a Wednesday news release. U.S. law enforcement made 23,854 requests, but most of those requests contained a nondisclosure order that prevented the website from notifying users, he said. "As for content restriction requests, the number of items restricted for violating local law decreased by 83% from 55,827 to 9,663," he said. "Last cycle’s figures had been elevated primarily by French content restrictions of a single image from the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks" (see 1604280039). The report also includes, for the first time, information on requests from governments to preserve data, he said. These are records that won't be disclosed until Facebook gets a formal and valid legal process, wrote Sonderby, adding that the company received 38,675 preservation requests for 67,129 accounts. The social media service expanded reporting of emergency requests to include countries outside the U.S -- 3,016 requests for 4,192 accounts. It also said the U.S. government lifted a gag order for one national security letter received in the second half of 2015 due to transparency changes introduced this year by the USA Freedom Act.

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.