Several tech companies signed the White House equal pay pledge on Women’s Equality Day. Tech signatories to the pledge announced Friday included Akamai, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, MailChimp, Microsoft and MuleSoft. About 50 companies signed the pledge since its launch a year ago.

About 30 percent of respondents in a poll of more than 220 information security professionals who attended the Black Hat hacker conference nearly a month ago said their organizations are prepared for IoT-related security risks, said security company Tripwire in a Thursday news release. Twenty-seven percent said their organizations weren't prepared, 37 percent said their organizations will soon be prepared and 5 percent weren't concerned about IoT security risks, the company's poll found. Fifty-two percent didn't think their organizations accurately tracked the number of IoT devices on their networks, while 34 percent said their organizations did a good job. Plus, 78 percent said they were concerned about IoT devices being "weaponized" in distributed denial-of-service attacks. Only 11 percent ranked DDoS attacks as one of the top two security threats their organization face. Phishing, cyberespionage, ransomware and insider threats were the other risks that were cited more frequently, Tripwire found. About half of the respondents said IoT devices on their networks will increase by at least 30 percent next year.

The “synergy” between Delphi’s “core” intellectual property in “path and motion planning” and Mobileye's “deep reinforcement learning algorithms” will result in a “fast-to-market solution” for autonomous cars, said Amnon Shashua, Mobileye chairman and chief technology officer, on a Tuesday conference call. The call was about the two companies' collaboration to develop what they said will be the first turnkey Society of Automotive Engineers Level 4/5 automated driving system (see 1608230057). Within four months, “a Level 4 demonstration can be conducted on Las Vegas city roads,” as part of a demo planned for January CES, Shashua said. Delphi and Mobileye expect to begin “fleet testing” in 2017, and by 2019, “the system will reach a production-intense state with production of any hardware,” he said. “Given the level of technology required and the amount of integration, on a combined basis, it is hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Delphi CEO Kevin Clark of partnership spending. Mobileye sees this collaboration as “complementary” to its partnership with Intel to bring fully automated driving to BMW vehicles within five years (see 1607010052), Shashua said.

The average North American home has more than seven broadband devices in use every day, said a report from broadband network solutions provider Sandvine based on real network usage. Six percent of households have more than 15 active devices, with smartphones and tablets on fixed Wi-Fi networks accounting for nearly 30 percent of North American fixed access traffic, it said. So-called home roaming generated 9 percent of traffic five years ago, said Sandvine. Laptops and desktop PCs now are less than a quarter of traffic on fixed access networks, it said. Game play traffic on PlayStation 4 consoles is 2.5 percent of the total traffic the console generates, with video streaming (65 percent) and game downloads (25 percent) causing most PS4 bandwidth consumption, said the report. Roku devices, at 10 percent, were the most-used set-top box, followed by Amazon Fire TV (3.9 percent) and Apple TV (3.3 percent), it said. The top-consuming Netflix device (12 percent) on one network was the operator’s branded set-top box that streams over-the-top content, it said.

Mobileye and Delphi Automotive extended their collaboration to develop what they said will be the first turnkey Society of Automotive Engineers Level 4/5 automated driving system. The companies will demonstrate the technology at CES in urban and highway driving, they said in a Tuesday announcement. The program will result in an “end-to-end production-intent fully automated vehicle solution” by 2019 for customers worldwide, said the companies. Mobileye will provide computer vision systems, mapping, localization and machine learning, and Delphi will supply driving software, sensors and systems integration, they said. Teams from both companies will develop the next generation of sensor fusion technology and the next-generation human-like "driving policy," they said. The module combines Ottomatika's driving behavior modeling with Mobileye's reinforcement learning to produce driving capabilities necessary for negotiating with other human drivers and pedestrians in complex urban scenes, they said. Building on an advanced driver assistance systems relationship that began in 2002, the most recent partnership "will accelerate the time to market and enable customers to adopt Level 4/5 automation without the need for huge capital investments,” said Mobileye Chief Technology Officer Amnon Shashua.

Dotgay criticized the ICANN board Tuesday for tabling its expected decision earlier this month on considering the Board Governance Committee's rejection of dotgay's appeals of Economist Intelligence Unit evaluations of the registry's application to have the .gay generic top-level domain designated as a community gTLD. The board removed consideration of the .gay issue from its agenda for its Aug. 9 meeting. The ICANN board is to meet again Sept. 17. Board consideration of the BGC's review of dotgay's case was seen as a necessary precursor to board consideration of now-former ICANN Ombudsman Chris LaHatte's report urging ICANN to designate .gay as a community gTLD (see 1608010063). “Ever since the collective gay community has stood up and asked for their own piece of the Internet with .GAY, every conceivable argument has been used to deny their efforts,” dotgay said in a news release. “The approach being used is divisive and contrary to the goals of ICANN's new gTLD program and aspirations of the LGBTQIA effort behind creating a community-operated .GAY.” Dotgay noted the similarity between its case and an independent review panel's recent finding that ICANN's accountability process in its consideration of gTLD applications by the Dot Registry amounted to a “rubber-stamp.” The Dot Registry case vindicates dotgay's “claims that the Economist Intelligence Unit's purportedly independent community priority evaluation reports were flawed, applied unequal standards and that dotgay's application has never been given appropriate consideration,” dotgay said. ICANN didn't comment.

The FTC detailed the agenda for a Sept. 15 event on how company disclosures to consumers about advertising claims, privacy practices and other information are tested and evaluated. In a Monday news release, the commission said it's "especially interested in learning about the costs and benefits of disclosure testing methods in the digital age." Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, Chief Technologist Lorrie Cranor and Consumer Protection Bureau Director Jessica Rich will speak at the daylong workshop, which will feature academics, other FTC staff and representatives from technology companies. Twenty-two presentations will focus on cognitive models on how consumers process disclosures, methods and procedures to assess the effectiveness of such disclosures, whether people pay attention to various types of disclosures, how well they understand the disclosures and how disclosures affect consumers' decision-making processes. The event will also look at future research and case studies. The 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. workshop, which will be webcast live, will be at FTC's Constitution Center auditorium, 400 7th St. SW.

Many consumers are financially cautious, which may mean "lukewarm holiday sales," but a plurality of those who are buying online are spending more, Berkeley Research Group reported. Fifty-seven percent of the 1,026 adults online the researcher polled in late June said they plan to spend about the same as last year on holiday gift-giving, 19 percent less and 15 percent more, the group said Thursday. Of the 90 percent of adults across all age groups who said they made at least one online purchase in the past year, 42 percent said their online spending increased from a year earlier, compared with 13 percent who said they spent less.

Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer, who has avoided handing over documents in a congressional inquiry into illegal online sex trafficking, "has no First Amendment right to ignore a subpoena for documents" about the classified online advertiser's business practices and should be denied a stay, said (in Pacer) the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Friday in a filing and addendum with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Senate panel has been tussling with Backpage for more than year to get documents about methods the company uses to screen out illegal sex trafficking on its website. After a U.S. District Court judge recently ordered Backpage to hand over documents, enforcing the panel's Oct. 1 subpoena, the company appealed to the D.C. Circuit, saying the subpoena endangered its First Amendment rights. The D.C. Circuit issued an administrative stay Aug. 12 temporarily blocking the subpoena without ruling on the merits of the case (see 1608170007). In its response in D.C. Circuit docket 16-5232, which was due Friday, the Senate panel said Ferrer has identified his First Amendment interests only "in sweeping generalities" and hasn't shown they outweigh the government's interests. "Merely affixing the 'editorial' label to Backpage's business practices does not imbue them with constitutional protection," it said. "In any case, evidence suggests ... that Backpage's editing practices -- for example, editing out incriminating material from advertisements for illegal transactions -- enjoys no constitutional protection." The panel said Ferrer's chances of prevailing on appeal are "remote." The CEO also hasn't established "any actual and non-theoretical irreparable injury likely to result" from producing the documents, the panel's response said. If the subpoena isn't enforced, it would hamper the panel's ability to complete its investigation and undermine the public interest, the filing said. Lawyers for Backpage didn't comment.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation lauded California Assembly Banking and Finance Committee Chairman Matt Dababneh's withdrawal of AB-1326, which would have altered the state's regulation of bitcoin and other currencies. The bill, which included amendments seen as requiring a wide swath of digital currency users to register with state agencies, “does not meet the objectives to create a lasting regulatory framework that protects and allows this industry to thrive in our state,” said Dababneh, a Democrat, in a statement. “More time is needed and these conversations must continue in order for California to be at the forefront of this effort.” Dababneh previously withdrew AB-1326 from consideration at the close of last year's legislative session, during which EFF first opposed the bill (see 1508180057). The group is “grateful” that Dababneh “recognized there were problems with the legislation and put the brakes on sending it through the legislature as its session winds down,” said legal fellow Aaron Mackey in a blog post Thursday. “The bill demonstrates that there are still too many technical and policy gaps in the current thinking about digital currencies and the need for regulation.” EFF “continues to believe that before lawmakers anywhere consider legislation regulating digital currencies, they need to better understand the technology at issue as well as demonstrating how the legislation actually benefits consumers,” Mackey said.