Two-thirds of Facebook employees are men and more than half are white, the company said in annual hiring statistics released Thursday. Among its entire workforce, 52 percent are white, 38 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. One-third are women. The company’s senior leadership is 71 percent white, 21 percent Asian, 3 percent black and 3 percent Hispanic. And 73 percent of senior leadership are men, it said. Facebook said 7 percent of employees responding to a survey self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender or asexual. Facebook said 61 percent of employees responded to the voluntary survey about sexual orientation and gender identity. Facebook said it’s doing better at increasing diversity, with new senior leadership hires over the past 12 months including 9 percent black, 5 percent Hispanic and 29 percent women. Over the next five years, Facebook will donate $15 million to Code.org, which provides computer science education to historically underrepresented populations, it said. Facebook said it will encourage recruiters to strive for more diversity, promote an inclusive working environment and support tech education among underrepresented populations.

Millennials will drive much of the future value of smart home energy management, said an Accenture report Wednesday. About a quarter of millennials identified as early adopters, compared with 17 percent in the 35-54 demographic and 7 percent of those over 55. The 18-34 age group attached more importance than older consumers to a personalized experience across digital channels, including social media, and 83 percent would be discouraged from signing up for additional products and services if their provider couldn't provide a “seamless experience,” the report said. The 9,537 online interviews were done this year in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

Domain registry Donuts said it's investing an undisclosed amount in Netki's blockchain-based “wallet names” technology. It said wallet names are user-friendly names for digital currency and other blockchain-based applications that are meant to replace alphanumeric blockchain addresses. The investment is Donuts' second via its Donut Labs initiative. The first was to geofence management firm GeoFrenzy (see 1605030047). Netki's wallet names technology uses domain name system security extension to connect the wallet names to the blockchain addresses, meeting “an unmet market need in the rapidly growing blockchain space,” said Donuts CEO Paul Stahura in a news release.

AT&T and IBM are joining forces on an IoT initiative, combining cognitive computing and global connectivity expertise to create open standards-based tools on the IBM cloud, the companies said Wednesday. The tools will allow developers to improve skills while not having to learn new tools, helping to protect investments businesses have made in IoT solutions, said the companies. The demand for IoT technology is creating demand for skilled IoT developers, they said, citing 2016 VisionMobile data forecasting 10 million active IoT developers by 2020. IBM and AT&T are expanding their commitment and investment in open-source based tools, such as Node-Red and the open MQTT standard, essential for creating IoT solutions, they said. Developers will be able to tap IBM's Watson cognitive computing software and AT&T's IoT Flow Designer and M2X platforms, along with access to its global network, they said. AT&T is also working with IBM on a starter kit to speed up development of IoT projects, they said.

Infidelity website Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media, hit last year with theft of sensitive and personal records of about 40 million people (see 1507200017), changed its name to ruby, the company said Tuesday in a news release. "It’s a new day at ruby and renaming [it] is an important step in our journey to completely rebuild the company as a relevant, digital dating innovator that truly cares for our customers,” said CEO Rob Segal, who was appointed in April (see 1607050032) with President James Millership. Last week, Reuters reported that the new leaders acknowledged the FTC was investigating the breach but said they didn't know the probe's focus. The FTC declined to comment Tuesday. Besides changing Ashley Madison's tagline and logo, the company will launch new global digital campaign and TV advertising campaigns Monday.

Troubled over potential privacy implications with the popular new smartphone game Pokémon Go, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., Tuesday asked game creator Niantic to provide details about the data it's collecting from users. Franken, ranking member on the Senate Judiciary's Privacy and Technology Subcommittee, called the game's popularity “impressive” -- with 7.5 million downloads in the U.S. since its July 6 launch -- but added in a news release that "Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users’ personal information without their appropriate consent." Pokémon Go is an "augmented reality app" that uses a mobile device to introduce animated creatures and activities into views of the real world, including a user's exact location, email and IP addresses, last website visited and/or Google accounts, said the release. Franken sent a letter to the San Francisco-based company asking several questions about the data collected by the app, whether it would support an opt-in option, user information shared with third parties and how it ensures that parents provide meaningful consent for their child's use. A phone message left with Niantic was not immediately returned.

ICANN sought comment by Aug. 7 on three documents on governance of the post-transition Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (PTI). The documents include PTI's code of conduct, conflict of interest policy and expected standard of behavior. All three governance documents are “modeled off the versions already in force” at ICANN, it said in a Friday notice.

A federal court temporarily shut down an international tech support operation last week, froze its assets and appointed a receiver after the FTC and the state of Florida alleged the business duped consumers "into spending hundreds of dollars for dubious computer 'repairs' and antivirus software," said the commission in a Friday news release. The FTC voted 3-0 to file the complaint in U.S. District Court in Chicago, which issued a temporary restraining order June 28 against the defendants, based in Florida, Iowa, Nevada and Canada. Named in the June 24 complaint were Big Dog Solutions, doing business as Help Desk National and Help Desk Global; PC Help Desk US, doing business as Help Desk National and Help Desk Global; and BlackOptek, among other companies. Named individual defendants include Christopher Costanza, Suzanne Harris, Muzaffar Abbas, Gary Oberman, Donald Dolphin and Justin Powers. They allegedly violated the FTC Act, telemarketing sales rule and a similar Florida statute, the commission said. The complaint alleged defendants caused "pop-up messages ... to be displayed on consumers' computers instructing them to immediately call a toll free number for technical assistance," which connected them to telemarketers in Boynton Beach, Florida. Essentially the pop-ups, which resembled messages from Apple and Microsoft, rendered the consumers' browsers "unusable," the complaint said. After consumers called, the telemarketers supposedly ran "diagnostic tests" on the computers and then would offer a $200 to $400 charge to fix the problems, and also push an ongoing technical support plan that could cost up to $19.99 per month, the complaint said. Boca Raton, Florida-based attorney Joe Grant, who represents only Big Dog, Costanza and Harris, emailed that his clients' business had closed down before the complaint was filed and a receiver has been appointed. "We are working with the FTC and the State of FL on an agreement relating to the injunction issues and asset freeze," he wrote. "We dispute the allegations in the complaint, which we deal with at a later stage in this action." Abbas, who is CEO of BlackOptek, didn't comment.

DOJ’s Tax Division went to federal court Wednesday seeking an order forcing Facebook to comply with six IRS summonses for documents in the agency’s investigation of the company’s tax liabilities for the 2010 tax year, two years before Facebook went public. Facebook has refused to turn over “the books, records, papers, and other data demanded in the summonses” about the company’s September 2010 transfer to Facebook Ireland of rights for its businesses outside the U.S. and Canada, said the DOJ petition (in Pacer) filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Facebook’s 2010 tax return “reported royalty income that I learned came from transfers of intangible property” to Facebook Ireland, said a signed declaration (in Pacer) from Nina Wu Stone, the IRS agent in charge of the investigation. The “preliminary” findings of an IRS “examination team” of outside tax experts “suggested” that Facebook’s “valuations of the transferred intangibles” may have been “understated by billions of dollars,” her declaration said. “Facebook complies with all applicable rules and regulations in the countries where we operate,” a company spokeswoman emailed us Thursday. Facebook acknowledged in recent SEC filing disclosures that it was “under examination” by the IRS for the 2008-2010 tax years. “We believe that adequate amounts have been reserved for any adjustments that may ultimately result from these examinations, and we do not anticipate a significant impact to our gross unrecognized tax benefits within the next 12 months related to these years,” Facebook said in January in its most recent 10-K filing at the SEC.

The Society for Information Display is soliciting “original contributed papers” on the subject of vehicle displays for publication in a special section of its Journal of the SID during Q1, SID said in a “call for papers” notice emailed Wednesday to SID members and to attendees of its recent Display Week conference in San Francisco (see 1605230032). “Papers can deal with technological aspects of manufacturing, image quality and reliability issues, form factors, deformability, power consumption, human factors related to the use of vehicle displays.” Deadline is Sept. 15, it said.