The Internet Association released a policy road map to President-elect Donald Trump to help his incoming administration focus on the industry's priorities. In a Monday letter to Trump, IA CEO Michael Beckerman wrote that his group "looks forward to working with you on policies that encourage this kind of growth, innovation, and consumer choice." The internet sector is responsible for 6 percent of the economy, or about $1 trillion of gross domestic product in 2014, he wrote. Among the policies listed in the 12-page letter are copyright, intermediary liability, the on-demand economy, an open and accessible internet, patent changes, privacy and data security, trade and global internet policy and workforce issues.

The FTC's Jessica Rich, who heads the agency's consumer protection bureau, will kick off a Dec. 7 event on smart TVs, featuring two panels that will explore advertising targeting technologies and data collection practices and safeguards, said the commission in a Monday news release with agenda details. The FTC said "virtually all" TV systems this year -- including apps, game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs and streaming devices -- track viewers' habits that allow advertisers to target ads even through consumers' phones and desktop browsers. The first panel -- with representatives from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, comScore, Network Advertising Initiative, Samba TV and TiVo Research -- will discuss new measurement capabilities, how smart TVs are used in cross-device targeting and how consumer transparency and choice are being addressed. The second panel -- with experts from Consumer Reports, Direct Marketing Association, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Knowledge and the University of California, Berkeley -- will talk about what viewers' data is being collected and shared, how consumers can be more informed about such practices and the legal protections they have. The 1-4:30 p.m. event will be held at 400 7th St. SW.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang sees development of self-driving cars as perhaps the most “disruptive dynamic that's happening in the automotive industry,” he said on an earnings call. It's “almost impossible” to "imagine that in five years' time, a reasonably capable car will not have autonomous capability at some level, and a very significant level at that,” he said Thursday. The challenge of tackling a commercially viable autonomous vehicle “is not a detection problem, it's an AI computing problem,” Huang said of artificial intelligence. It's not just about “detecting objects” on the road that will be key, he said. It’s more about learning the “perception of the environment around you,” and that will be one of the important breakthroughs from AI computing, he said. Another key is developing the “reasoning” that must take place in AI computing, including how to teach the computer “to take action based on that reasoning, and to be continuously learning,” Huang said.

Most Americans and Chinese have purchased a product or service digitally over the past 12 months, while Chinese digital users lead the way on mobile purchases as well, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and IAB China said in a survey Thursday. Eighty-nine percent of Chinese and 84 percent of American digital users engaged in online commerce, a news release said. Chinese users were more bullish on mobile purchases over the past 12 months, with 67 percent engaged vs. 34 percent of American users. IAB said 24 percent of Chinese users make a mobile purchase daily while only 15 percent of U.S. mobile shoppers do. Much higher portions of both groups are interested in buying something through their mobile device over the next month, and IAB said security is an obstacle: "These feelings manifest in different ways depending on the country, with [American] shoppers concerned about information safety and privacy and Chinese shoppers fearing digital fraud and scams." Consulting firm Hypothesis Group conducted the digital survey of 1,000 online adults in the U.S. and China Sept. 19-Oct. 12.

Following negative interactions online, adults and teens said they "became less trusting of others in the real world" and suffered other consequences such as stress and sleep deprivation, Microsoft said in releasing preliminary poll results Thursday. The survey of people ages 13 to 74 across 14 countries, including the U.S., found that about two-thirds of respondents fell victim to at least one of 17 different online risks such as unwanted contact or various forms of harassment, Chief Online Safety Officer Jacqueline Beauchere wrote in a blog post. Microsoft will release full results Feb. 7, Safer Internet Day 2017, she said, but it wanted to present some preliminary data after the U.S presidential elections. Adults are more inclined than youths to distrust people online and more reluctant to participate in blogs and online forums, she added. "On a positive note, 29 percent of adults said they tried to be more constructive in their criticism of others after a negative online situation. That compares to one-quarter of teens." Youths, however, were more likely to experience social and academic losses after encountering an online risk.

The FTC, which held a September workshop on ransomware, is offering advice on guarding against the growing threat (see 1609070044). It has provided guidance and an accompanying video for businesses that become ransomware victims. In a Thursday blog post, staff attorney Ben Rossen said that the Privacy and Identity Protection Division also during the workshop proffered some tips for consumers, including updating software, thinking before clicking on questionable links or downloading attachments and backing up data. Rossen said consumers should try to contain an attack, possibly restore their computer and call law enforcement. "Law enforcement doesn’t recommend paying the ransom, although it’s up to you to determine whether the risks and costs of paying are worth the possibility of getting your files back," he wrote. There's no guarantee that criminals would restore files and they could possibly target people for other scams, he added.

Cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold by 2020 from last year, Cisco forecast Thursday, to 14.1 ZB per year. Continued rapid growth will occur because the cloud's ability to scale quickly and efficiently will increasingly make it a more attractive option than traditional data centers, Cisco said. Consumer and business data workloads are expected to increase substantially through 2020, and firms' share of data center workloads is expected to decrease to 72 percent in 2020, from 79 percent, Cisco said. “Cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe," Vice President-Service Provider Marketing Doug Webster said in a news release. “Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV [software-defined networks and network function virtualization] and more, we forecast this significant cloud migration and the increased amount of network traffic generated as a result to continue at a rapid rate as operators streamline infrastructures to help them more profitably deliver IP-based services [to] businesses and consumers.”

The ZigBee Alliance is in “continuous communication with its member companies to develop and maintain its suite of market-relevant standards for the IoT,” the alliance emailed us Tuesday following a report last week of researchers using Philips Hue smart light bulbs as the on-ramp for a staged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The study described adjacent IoT devices infecting each other with a “worm that will spread explosively over large areas in a kind of nuclear chain reaction." An infected bulb could “catastrophically spread” throughout a smart city within minutes, it reported, “in a massive DDoS attack.” The test found a bug in an Atmel circuit. “Like many technology platforms, such as smartphones and our daily computing devices, there’s a constant need to keep software current and check for updates to ensure the security of devices and system solutions." Atmel didn't respond to a request for comment. Last month, DDoS attacks affected many popular websites and led to calls for government action (see 1610260067).

Advances in artificial intelligence are helping Facebook create innovative virtual reality, speech recognition and connectivity technologies, said Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer in a Tuesday blog post. Computer vision, which helps machines better process, analyze and understand images, is improving immersive experiences and helping to build high-quality VR headsets not leashed to a computer, he said. AI is improving speech recognition through avatars whose lips move in sync with speaking voices and enable users to issue hands-free voice commands in a VR environment, said Schroepfer. AI technologies also are contributing to Facebook's connectivity projects -- the high-altitude, solar-powered unmanned aircraft Aquila aimed at providing internet service to remote areas and the Terragraph system to provide high-speed connectivity to dense urban areas, he said. AI is helping better analyze areas so the company can effectively deploy and install connectivity equipment, he added. The company, Schroepfer said, is investing in long-term AI research that can help computers "learn, plan and reason like humans" such as describing images for individuals who are visually impaired, providing better contextual understanding and perform predictive learning. Such abilities "will add up to something like what we call common sense," which will improve interaction with humans, he said.

The IAB Technology Laboratory launched a compliance program to audit and validate companies' use of advertising industry standards. In a Monday news release, the independent R&D consortium, whose founding members include AppNexus, Google and Yahoo, said the compliance program accurately verifies deployment of OpenRTB (real-time bidding), VAST (video ad serving template) and VPAID (video player ad-serving interface definition) standards and will add MRAID (mobile rich media ad interface definition) in the coming months. Under the compliance process, companies will provide auditing samples, which will then be confirmed through various tools, and then their business procedures will be evaluated and graded, IAB said. Companies will submit at least three sample validations every year to stay compliant, it added.