Uber accelerated its autonomous-vehicle ambitions, partnering with Volvo and acquiring self-driving trucks startup Otto. In a news release Thursday, Volvo announced a partnership with Uber to develop base vehicles incorporating autonomous driving technologies, “up to and including fully autonomous driverless cars.” In a blog post, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick revealed the Otto acquisition, which will see Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski leading the combined company’s self-driving efforts in Pittsburgh, Palo Alto, California, and San Francisco, he said. The initiative will cover personal transportation, delivery and trucking, Kalanick said.

Twitter has suspended 235,000 accounts over the past six months for violating its policies on promoting terrorism, it said in a Thursday blog post. They're in addition to the 125,000 accounts suspended since mid-2015, for a total of 360,000 accounts suspended, it said. "Daily suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, with spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks." The amount of time the accounts were on the site and the number of followers they've attracted "have all decreased dramatically," and Twitter has enhanced its ability to prevent them from returning, it said. The company said it expanded partnerships with nongovernmental organizations to counter violent extremism and used various technologies like spam-fighting tools to identify terrorist content. In a separate post, the company announced new filter and notification features. Its filter feature, the company said, can help users improve the quality of tweets by screening duplicate or automated tweets, but it doesn't filter content from people whom users follow. The company also said users can limit notifications "to only people they follow on mobile and twitter.com."

With autonomous vehicles approaching, the automotive industry needs “a hard reset” on advanced driver assistance systems architectures, said an ABI Research report Wednesday. As vehicles begin to drive and react to traffic on their own, autonomous systems will aggregate and process data from a variety of on-board sensors and connected infrastructure, said ABI. Benefiting will be vendors new to the industry and veterans including Nvidia, NXP and Mobileye, which all have announced centralized autonomous driving platforms, said the industry research firm. It said some platforms can handle up to 12 teraflops of data.

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system "sends an unprecedented amount of usage data back" to the company, so it could face backlash from users whose privacy is being disregarded, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a blog post Wednesday. EFF Intake Coordinator Amul Kalia wrote that some of the information sent back includes location data; text, touch and voice input; visited webpages; and telemetry data such as programs run and for how long. He said Microsoft "claims" the data is used to "'personalize' the software by feeding it to the OS assistant called Cortana." Many users might find that service useful, he said, but many other users would want to opt out to preserve their privacy. "While users can opt-out of some of these settings, it is not a guarantee that your computer will stop talking to Microsoft’s servers," wrote Kalia, saying users can't opt out of providing telemetry data at all. While the company has said the data is aggregated and anonymized, Microsoft doesn't explain how or say how long data will be retained, he said. It needs to offer "real, meaningful opt-outs," among other changes in security updates, he added. If not, "Microsoft may find that it has inadvertently discovered just how far it can push its users before they abandon a once-trusted company for a better, more privacy-protective solution," said Kalia. Microsoft "is committed to customer privacy and ensuring that customers have the information and tools they need to make informed decisions," emailed a spokesman. "We listened to feedback from our customers and evolved our approach to the upgrade process. Windows 10 continues to have the highest satisfaction of any version of Windows."

The FTC approved a final order against Practice Fusion, resolving allegations the electronic health record company misled consumers (see 1606080010) into providing doctor reviews without telling them their feedback and personal information would be publicly posted on the internet, the commission said in a Tuesday news release. The commission, which OK'd the order 3-0, settled with the company in June. The settlement bars Practice Fusion from making deceptive statements in how it "uses, maintains and protects the privacy or confidentiality of the information it collects," FTC said. The company also must inform consumers in a clear way that it wants to make their information publicly available but get their "affirmative express consent" first, the commission said. Practice Fusion also can't publicly display any reviews it collected during the time period covered by the complaint, FTC added. In an updated blog post, the company announced the FTC's approval of the final order.

ICANN transmitted a largely positive report to NTIA Friday on its progress in implementing governance changes required before the planned Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, as expected (see 1608110062). All of the tasks ICANN needs to perform before the transition were already completed, awaiting approval or in a final review stage as of Friday, ICANN said in the report. Three of NTIA’s recommendations from its June assessment of ICANN’s transition-related plans won’t be addressed before the transition because they require the post-transition Public Technical Identifiers subsidiary in charge of administering the IANA functions “to be in active operation, or coordination with community structures in place only after the transition,” ICANN said. Those tasks still in final review or awaiting approval “will be complete in advance of September 30, 2016 to allow the IANA functions contract to expire,” ICANN said.

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez will open a Sept. 7 event on ransomware that will feature three panels of private-sector experts and government officials, including an FBI agent, the commission said in a Monday news release. In ransomware, criminals typically encrypt files after they hack into a person's or company's computer and then demand a ransom in exchange for the key to decrypt the files, the FTC said. Some members of Congress also said ransomware is becoming a major problem (see 1604190032). The FTC panels will focus on the scope of ransomware, best defenses against it and how consumers should respond if they've been hit, the release said. The commission's Office of Technology Research and Investigation and New York University's computer science department will present research based on different types of ransomware used, the FTC said. The 1-4:30 p.m. event will be at FTC's Constitution Center offices, 400 7th St. SW.

There’s no single “answer” among semiconductor competitors how to resolve the challenges of autonomous driving “because nobody knows exactly how to get it done,” nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on an earnings call. When “the automobile we step into is completely autonomous, and it has AI inside and out,” it will be “just an incredible experience,” he said Thursday of artificial intelligence. Autonomous driving’s challenges are “massive,” he said. “Otherwise, we would have done it already. ... We're working with some really, really amazing people to get this done.”

NTIA plans a webinar Wednesday under its Broadband USA program, 2-3 p.m., the first in a monthly series running through Jan. 19, said a notice in Friday's Federal Register. The webinars will be on the third Wednesday of each month to "engage the public and stakeholders with information to accelerate broadband access, improve digital inclusion, strengthen broadband policies, and support local community priorities," it said.

Facebook said new changes to its news feed algorithm will help it predict stories that will be most informative to individual users via a new ranking signal that will be applied to data in its Feed Quality Program. “First, we look at the stories that people tell us they find informative,” said Product Manager-News Feed Vibhi Kant and a pair of company scientists in a Thursday blog post. “People from our Feed Quality Program look at each story in their feed and rank it on a scale of one to five -- one being 'really not informative' and five being 'really informative.' Generally, we’ve found people find stories informative if they are related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions and if they contain news about the world around them.” The stories “people rate as informative and really informative help create a new prediction about how informative we think you’ll find each story,” the staff said. The website will use the new prediction signal in combination with the story's relevance data “to best predict stories that you might personally find informative,” Kant and the scientists said. “Informative stories are therefore different for each person and will likely change over time.” Most pages won't see a significant change in distribution because of the new prediction signal, but some may see either a small increase or decrease, Facebook said. The social media company has made multiple changes to its news feed algorithm in recent months following claims that it was censoring politically conservative content from appearing prominently on the feed (see 1605100032, 1606290066 and 1608040053).