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.
About 86 percent of the 200 largest e-commerce websites immediately stopped sending marketing emails after customers sent unsubscribe requests, the Online Trust Alliance reported Wednesday. OTA said in a news release that it's a slight improvement over last year, but almost 6 percent, or 11 retailers, didn't honor unsubscribe requests, violating U.S. and Canadian anti-spam laws. "Making the consumer email experience as straightforward as possible, aligning email marketing practices to users’ interests and honoring customer unsubscribe requests is critical to merchants’ online brand reputation and ability to meet regulatory requirements,” said President Craig Spiezle. OTA said it signed up to receive promotional emails from retailers between April and September and analyzed the user experience.
Cisco, Dell, Juniper and seven other IT companies jointly formed the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association (ZOISA) Wednesday in a bid to jump-start an industry-wide discussion on safeguarding IT infrastructure reliability, the companies said. The group plans to develop a zero-outage framework of best practices to improve infrastructure safety and security, they said. The framework also would maximize infrastructure availability and improve industry wide customer satisfaction, the founding firms said. ZOISA's best practices framework will “specify consistent error response times, employee qualification levels and set security and platform requirements,” said a news release. “This can help companies to minimize errors, increase availability, ensure security and operate cost-effectively.”
The founder of Gawker Media, embroiled in four-year legal battle with Hulk Hogan, who sued over the publishing of video excerpts from a sex tape, said in a Wednesday blog post that his company settled with the former wrestler. In March, a Florida jury awarded Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, a $140 million judgment against Gawker. The site's founder Nick Denton wrote he was confident an appeals court would have reduced or eliminated the judgment, but an "all-out legal war" against PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who funded the privacy lawsuit, "would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight." Several media reports pegged the settlement at $31 million. Univision Communications bought Gawker Media Group for $135 million in August after Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June, with Gawker.com being shut down (see 1608180068). This week, Thiel defended the suit, speaking to reporters in Washington (see 1610310051). Our email Wednesday to Bollea's lawyer David Houston wasn't returned.
U.S. digital advertising revenue hit a high of $32.7 billion in the first half of 2016, a 19 percent jump from the same period last year, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau in a Tuesday news release on its latest PwC-prepared internet ad revenue report. For 2Q, ad revenue rose 18 percent to $16.9 billion. Mobile ad revenue was nearly half of the total revenue for the first six months this year -- or about $15.5 billion, up 89 percent from the same period. Within mobile, IAB said smartphone and tablet videos reached $1.6 billion for the period, a 178 percent hike. "Total social media revenues, including mobile and desktop, surged to $7 billion in HY 2016, a 57% rise compared to $4.4 billion in HY 2015," said IAB. "Consumers’ appetite to enjoy media -- in particular video and social media -- on smartphones and tablets provides marketers with the opportunity to connect and interact with their customers while they are on the go, in a very personal environment," said IAB Chief Marketing Officer David Doty.