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.”

The global average internet connection speed rose 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 to 6.3 Mbps, Akamai reported Wednesday. South Korea had the highest average speed at 26.3 Mbps, while Hong Kong had 20.1 Mbps and Norway had 20 Mbps. The U.S. placed No. 12 with an average of 16.3 Mbps. The U.S. average Q3 speed was up 30 percent. The U.K. had the top average mobile connection speed at 23.7 Mbps, while Venezuela had the slowest at 2.2 Mbps. U.S. average mobile speed was 7.5 Mbps. The number of IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai increased by 0.7 percent from Q2 to 806 million, mostly offsetting a decrease in IPv4 use during that quarter, Akamai said. The report found Belgium remained the “clear global leader” in IPv6 adoption, noting that 39 percent of the country’s connections to Akamai occurred via IPv6. Verizon, AT&T Communications America and Comcast were the ISPs with the largest volumes of Akamai connections using IPv6, the web caching provider said.

In 2016, data breaches and cyberattacks resulted in more than 2.15 billion records being compromised, including the more than 500 million Yahoo user accounts that were stolen two years ago, said cybersecurity firm IT Governance in an updated blog post Tuesday. Last year, breaches totaled 480 million, wrote Lewis Morgan, a social media marketing executive who compiled the list. He said he initially didn't include the breach at Yahoo in his count because it occurred in late 2014, but decided to add it because the incident was first reported in September (see 1609220046).

The number of connected IoT devices, sensors and actuators will top 46 billion in 2021, Juniper reported Tuesday, but hurdles remain. The 200 percent jump from 2016 will be driven by lower hardware costs, said Juniper. Challenges remain, including complexity in developing large-scale IoT deployments and cybersecurity issues that have reached a “boiling point,” it said.

Released from gag orders, Google started posting online copies of national security letters (NSLs) it has received whether through litigation or legislation, wrote Richard Salgado, the company's director-law enforcement and information security, in a Tuesday blog post. "Our goal in doing so is to shed more light on the nature and scope of NSLs," he said. "We minimized redactions to protect privacy interests, but the content of the NSLs remain as they were when served." An NSL is a type of administrative subpoena that seeks subscriber information relevant to a terrorism investigation or clandestine activity and usually is accompanied with a gag order. Salgado said the company's efforts include "working with the government to publish statistics about NSLs we’ve received, successfully fighting NSL gag provisions in court, and leading the effort to ensure that Internet companies can be more transparent with users about the volume and scope of national security demands that we receive." The 2015 USA Freedom Act that allows companies to make more detailed disclosures of NSLs they receive has helped companies be more transparent, he added. The law also requires DOJ to regularly review gag orders in NSLs and remove those no longer needed.

ICANN received minimal but mixed stakeholder response through Monday on its proposal to implement a revised policy for consistent labeling and display of “thick” WHOIS registration data for all generic top-level domains. Thick registration data includes data associated with the domain name itself, along with the registrant and other contacts of the domain name. Thin registration data has only data associated with the domain name itself. The revised labeling policy plan ICANN proposed in October doesn't require registries to implement a registration data access protocol (RDAP) service to achieve consistent labeling, which was criticized by the Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG), ICANN said. RySG said it “supports the removal” of the RDAP requirement from the labeling policy plan. RDAP “is outside the scope of the Thick Whois PDP recommendations,” the stakeholder group commented: “The RySG’s concerns with the inclusion of RDAP were compounded by the introduction of a requirement to implement the RDAP in accordance with an Operational Profile that was introduced unilaterally by ICANN staff” in the policy plan. The Internet Architecture Board urged ICANN to remove “all barriers to the deployment and use of RDAP.” The protocol “was developed within the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force], by technical contributors whose affiliations include registries, registrars, and other WHOIS users and providers, to resolve the technical shortcomings of WHOIS,” IAB said. “Given the well known issues with WHOIS, the IAB strongly encourages ICANN, Registrars, and Registries to begin experimenting with RDAP as soon as possible.” The Generic Names Supporting Organization's IP Constituency (IPC) said it “has no substantive objections” to the revised policy plan but believes the decision to not include the RDAP requirement is "a 180 degree reversal” by ICANN. “While this requirement has been a consistent feature of the CLD [consistent labeling and display] implementation plan throughout the drafting process, ICANN staff completely reversed its position on it within days” of RySG's objection, the IPC wrote. “Wholly apart from the merits of the RySG objections, IPC empathizes with its frustrations regarding staff unresponsiveness. IPC will certainly bear this precedent in mind the next time the ICANN staff fails to heed IPC’s well-considered and repeatedly-voiced objections to a proposed course of action.” Verisign urged ICANN to include provisions in the labeling policy plan to allow extensions to the plan's Aug. 1, 2017, effective date. “It is possible for legitimate issues to arise during the implementation of the [CLD] Policy (include security and stability concerns) which may impact the ability of Registry Operators to comply with the” effective date, the company commented.

Aura Labs, marketer of a mobile blood pressure app, agreed to settle FTC allegations the app's readings aren't as precise as a traditional around-the-arm blood pressure cuff, said the commission in a Monday news release. Commissioners voted 3-0 to authorize staff to file the complaint and stipulated order, which was filed and signed by a judge in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the FTC said. “For someone with high blood pressure who relies on accurate readings, this deception can actually be hazardous,” said Consumer Protection Bureau Director Jessica Rich. “While the Commission encourages the development of new technologies, health-related claims should not go beyond the scientific evidence available to support them.” The commission said the company, which does business as AuraLife and AuraWare, and its co-owner Ryan Archdeacon are barred from making deceptive claims about the app and any health benefit claims without supporting scientific evidence. The settlement also imposed a nearly $600,000 judgment, which is suspended because the defendants are unable to pay unless they misrepresented their financial condition, the commission said. In a statement on the company's website, Archdeacon said the dialogue with the FTC "was a learning experience" for both sides and the company values consumer safety. "That being said, we feel that the agency's heavy handed approach can stifle innovation with a costly and bureaucratic process," he said. "A conversation regarding potential concerns early on would have allowed the Commission and the company to reach a swift resolution, saving time, energy and taxpayer dollars."