The “core requirements” at Imax of launching a “location-based” virtual-reality experience for consumers “line up nicely” with its “core skill sets,” CEO Richard Gelfond said on a Thursday earnings call. The Imax brand is “synonymous with immersive experiences,” Gelfond said. Since announcing its VR strategy (see 1608310001), Imax has met with “strong interest for partnership content deals and many other opportunities,” he said. “Unlike many other VR offerings out there, which are targeting the at-home experience, we’re focused on the location-based offering, which has the ability to provide a broader array of high quality, more immersive content experiences with a social element out of the home.” The company’s plan remains firm to open its first “pilot” Imax VR Centers in Los Angeles and the U.K. this year, he said. Imax then will “test the concept and, assuming this concept works, embark on a more aggressive rollout schedule,” he said. Each center will use several VR “pods” that will allow “multiple people to engage in the experience,” and enjoy it with friends, he said. Though “I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, we continue to be very excited about this initiative,” he said. “I look forward to sharing more about our business after we get our pilot sites up and running. I want to underline the word pilot. This is a test. We are not investing a lot of money at this time in the initiative. We are doing a test. If the test works, we will go forward.”

The FTC was asked to investigate and take action against Google, Disney's Maker Studios, Comcast's DreamWorks-owned AwesomenessTV and two other digital studio companies engaged in "influencer" marketing directed at children, which several advocacy groups said is an unfair and deceptive practice. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Center for Digital Democracy, Georgetown University's Institute for Public Representation (IPR) and Public Citizen, in a complaint filed Friday, are urging the commission to also provide clear guidance. With influencer marketing, the complaint said, companies promote brands and products through "people whose implicit or tacit endorsement of a product is designed to influence viewers and followers to want that product." Traditional and digital marketing tactics -- including bots, branded content, data driven programmatic targeting, native advertising, product placement, social media and vlogging -- are used, it said. Such ads take advantage of children, who don't understand or process that companies are using social media and YouTube celebrities to sell products, the groups said in a news release. IPR Director Laura Moy said such ads "cause children to want unhealthy and costly products." The complaint said Google "actively encourages, solicits, and promotes" such advertising on YouTube through popular channels like EvanTubeHD (see 1609120037), Baby Ariel, Meghan McCarthy, the Eh Bee Family and Bratayley. The complaint said multichannel networks like Disney's and DreamWorks' studios, Collab Creators and Wild Brain create and distribute such videos. A Google spokeswoman said in an email that "creators should be transparent with their audiences if their content includes paid promotion of any kind. As our long-standing policy makes clear, anyone uploading videos to YouTube has a legal obligation to disclose to YouTube and their viewers if a video contains paid promotion. Any videos that have disclosed paid product placement or endorsements are restricted from the YouTube Kids app." Neither the FTC nor the other companies commented.

Only 25 percent of organizations have sufficient cybersecurity personnel to detect and respond effectively to a cyberattack, said cybersecurity firm Tripwire Thursday. Dimensional Research did a survey for Tripwire in August of more than 500 IT security professionals. Sixty-six percent said their organizations faced increased security risks because of their lack of sufficient cybersecurity experts. Seventy-two percent said they faced challenges in hiring skilled cybersecurity staff, and 50 percent said their organizations don’t have an effective program to recruit and train skilled experts. Cybersecurity “is a growth industry for employees, and supply is falling far short of demand,” said Tripwire Director-IT Security and Risk Strategy Tim Erlin in a news release. “Smart organizations need to establish effective programs for educating and developing employee skills around information protection."

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump refused again to say the Russian government masterminded the hacking of servers at the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic Party-affiliated organizations, during Wednesday's debate. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security jointly confirmed earlier this month that the Russia government was behind “the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton asked Trump Wednesday to “admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in this election.” Clinton later said 17 U.S. intelligence agencies “concluded that these [cyberattacks] come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and are designed to influence our election, and I find it deeply disturbing.” Trump said Clinton “has no idea whether it was Russia, China or anybody else” behind the hacks. “Our country has no idea,” Trump said. “Yeah, I doubt it.” Trump suggested during the Sept. 26 debate (see 1609270056) that “lots of other people” could be behind the hacks, including China or “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” Trump said during the Oct. 9 debate that Democrats were attributing the hacks to Russia because “they are trying to tarnish me with Russia.”

DOJ’s Antitrust Division and the FTC referenced several recent federal cases against tech firms for entering into “no poach” agreements with competitors, in guidance sent Thursday to human resource professionals aimed at protecting workers against anticompetitive conduct. The advice is meant to educate HR professionals and others on how antitrust laws apply to businesses’ employment practices, the antitrust agencies said. “HR professionals need to understand that these violations can lead to severe consequences, including criminal prosecution,” said DOJ Antitrust head Renata Hesse in a news release: The "guidance provides HR professionals with information to prevent violations and report potentially unlawful activity, furthering the Justice Department’s commitment to protect workers from harmful conduct that stifles competition.” The agencies cited three tech sector-centric cases, saying agreements among employers not to recruit certain employees or not to compete on terms of compensation are illegal. They include a 2010 case against Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar, a 2011 case against Lucasfilm and a 2014 case against eBay and Intuit. “In all three cases, the competitors agreed not to cold call each other’s employees,” DOJ and the FTC said: “In two cases, at least one company also agreed to limit its hiring of employees who currently worked at a competitor. All three cases ended in consent judgments” against the tech companies.

The FTC awarded the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit the commission’s Criminal Liaison Unit’s Prosecuting Attorney’s Award, recognizing prosecutors who “demonstrate an exceptional commitment to consumer protection in partnership with the FTC.” The Cybercrime Unit has a longstanding partnership with the FTC and prosecuted “dozens of individuals for their participation in mobile cramming, fake and abusive debt collection, and deceptive payday lending schemes,” the agency said in a Wednesday news release.

Netflix thinks the growth of internet TV mirrors that of the mobile phone, CEO Reed Hastings said Monday in an online earnings Q&A. “Fixed-line telephony was an amazing invention,” because it brought 100 years of “broad, incredible benefits to society, and the same thing is true with linear TV,” Hastings said. It has been an “amazing innovation,” but “the age of linear is starting to fade and it's going to be replaced by internet,” he said. “So I think you have to think big about the future.” Netflix is “closing in” on 100 million global subscribers, “but I remind everyone at Netflix that Facebook and YouTube have 1 billion daily actives,” he said. “And so, in many parts, we are just so small compared to those other internet video firms and we have a lot of catch-up to do." That’s why Netflix is so heavily “investing in our content and making it globally interesting and compelling,” he said. “So there's a lot out there” in terms of market opportunity, he said: “But we only just have to take it year by year, and it's tremendous fun inventing the future.” Netflix shares closed 19 percent higher Tuesday at $118.79 after Q3 subscriber additions exceeded the company's forecasts (see 1610170061).

Cybersecurity spending on connected medical devices by healthcare providers and OEMs will reach $5.5 billion this year, but "only $390 million" of that will be earmarked for securing medical devices, said ABI Research in a news release Monday. "Healthcare stakeholders have to understand that there is a new hostile environment that will emerge around networked medical devices and that threat actors have multiple levels of skills and diverging motivations for attacking the medical IoT," said Research Director Michela Menting. While the U.S. is the only country "putting significant energies" into this area, ABI said awareness is increasing and global spending will triple by 2021.

Two out of three people encountered a tech support scam over the past year, found a Microsoft global survey summarized in a National Cyber Security Alliance blog post Monday. Courtney Gregoire, senior attorney in Microsoft's digital crimes unit, wrote that one in five consumers surveyed either downloaded software, visited a scam website, provided remote access to a computer or handed over credit card or other payment data -- and one in 10 lost money. She said consumers have lost hundreds of millions of dollars from such scams but often are "embarrassed or scared" to report them. The survey, conducted during the summer, included respondents from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Singapore, South Africa, the UK and U.S. Fraudsters typically have called older people to say their computers have been infected and try to sell them unnecessary tech support, Gregoire said, but scammers are now using "pop-ups, unsolicited email and scam websites" and luring younger people. The FTC recently filed a complaint against a multinational tech support company based in Missouri (see 1610120057).

Increasing the transparency of data collection, sharing use and retention; ensuring that information flow and use are in line with privacy principles; and reducing privacy risks of algorithms are three main areas of focus in a Monday call for research papers by Feb. 24 from the Future of Privacy Forum, International Association of Privacy Professionals and Washington & Lee University School of Law. The expanded collection and use of data can provide societal benefits like identifying discrimination and bias and has risks such as breaches, the groups said in a two-page summary. Policy advocates and technical experts are divided over "how privacy priorities should be managed in relation to other values," the groups said. The summary provides explanations and pertinent questions for each of the focus areas.