The FTC and FCC are among 11 regulatory agencies from eight nations that recently signed a memorandum of understanding to share information and intelligence about unsolicited messages and calls that mainly deal with fraudulent and malicious activities, the FTC said in a Tuesday news release. The other signatories -- which are all part of the London Action Plan, a global network of public agencies and private sector representatives that fight spam and unsolicited calls -- come from Australia, Canada, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the U.K. In the release, the FTC and Florida attorney general's office also said the U.S. District Court in Orlando issued a temporary restraining order against several defendants, collectively known as Life Management Services of Orange County, preventing them from making illegal robocalls. The agencies said the defendants have bilked consumers out of more than $15.6 million since at least January 2013. The operation also will be prevented from selling bogus credit-card interest rate reduction and debt relief services pending an upcoming hearing, said the commission, which voted 3-0 to issue the complaint. The court unsealed the temporary restraining order Monday, four days after it was granted, the release said. Defendants claimed they would work with consumers' credit card companies or banks to reduce credit card interest rates, allowing consumers to pay off balances "three- to five-times faster," but consumers first had to pony up between $500 to $5,000 to Life Management Services, the release said. While the defendants sometimes tried to contact credit card companies, they "were almost never able to obtain the promised rates or savings," the agencies said. The defendants also promised consumers they could eliminate credit card debt by accessing a government fund -- which doesn't exist -- but required consumers to pay $2,500 to $20,000 up front, the release said. We got no reply to a message seeking comment that was left through a phone number that the Central Florida Better Business Bureau's website associated with Life Management.

Symantec agreed to buy web security company Blue Coat for $4.65 billion in cash, it said Monday. Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will be named CEO of Symantec after the close of the deal in Q3, succeeding Ajei Gopal, interim chief operating officer, it said. The combined operations will offer security solutions across hundreds of millions of endpoints and servers and billions of email and web transactions, said Symantec. The combined company will help enterprises secure their cloud offerings and consolidate R&D efforts, bringing together more than 3,000 engineers and researchers and nine threat response centers, it said.

Unit shipments of artificial intelligence systems used in car infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including autonomous vehicles, are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, IHS said in a Monday report. The “attach rate” of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and “the vast majority were focused on speech recognition,” IHS said. “That number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars.” AI-based systems in automotive applications today are “relatively rare, but they will grow to become standard in new vehicles over the next five years,” IHS said. It sees the biggest growth in infotainment “human-machine interface” uses, such as speech and gesture recognition, eye tracking and driver monitoring, and ADAS and autonomous vehicles, including camera-based machine vision systems, radar-based detection units, driver condition evaluation, and sensor fusion engine control units, it said. In ADAS, “deep learning” functions that mimic “human neural networks,” will represent “a key milestone on the road to fully autonomous vehicles,” it said. “Deep learning allows detection and recognition of multiple objects, improves perception, reduces power consumption, supports object classification, enables recognition and prediction of actions, and will reduce development time of ADAS systems.”

Austrian privacy activist and attorney Max Schrems said the U.S. government asked the Irish High Court to weigh in on his case against Facebook (see 1606020018). Schrems, who's best known for successfully challenging the trans-Atlantic safe harbor agreement due in part to U.S. surveillance programs, said in a Monday news release that the U.S. government wants to join as an amicus curiae because it "likely wants to defend its surveillance laws before the European Courts." Schrems is fighting Facebook's use of model contracts, which is one vehicle that businesses use to legally transfer data to the U.S. as European Union officials still assess Privacy Shield, the new mechanism that would replace safe harbor (see 1606060034). In the release, Schrems said he welcomes the U.S. government's involvement. "This is a huge chance to finally get solid answers in a public procedure," he said. "I am very much looking forward to raise all the uncomfortable questions on US surveillance programs in this procedure. It will be very interesting how the US government will react to the clear evidence already before the court." DOJ didn't comment.

Some 8.1 billion devices were connected worldwide at the end of last year, said an IHS report Friday, counting smartphones, tablets, PCs, TVs, set-top boxes and audio devices. That's an average four devices per household, IHS said. Smartphones are adding a half billion new devices to the market each year, five times that of tablets, with the ratio expected to widen to 10:1 by 2020, IHS said. Google shipped 3.7 million Chromecast units in Q1, outnumbering Apple TV shipments (1.7 million) for the first time, a trend IHS expects to continue as the companies pursue “vastly different strategies.” The $149 Apple TV has carved out a space at the high end for digital video streamers and gamers in the Apple ecosystem. At $35, Chromecast is a “bargain,” providing a no-frills experience that complements Android devices, said analyst Merrick Kingston. Leading all streaming video companies, Netflix addressed 339 million connected devices in the U.S. at the end of 2015, or about a third of the AV hardware landscape, said Kingston. Pay-TV media apps “are virtually guaranteed to sit alongside the Netflix application on consumers’ end devices,” he said

Facebook and Twitter are the newest members of CTA, the trade group said in a Thursday announcement.

Technology will again play a major role in the upcoming holiday season, but it won’t be just products that consumers buy driving end-of-year sales, said a National Retail Federation report. While the expected TVs, PCs and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets are primed to be top sellers come November, wearables and video streaming also will be factors on the gift side, and buy buttons and mobile payments will influence the way consumers make purchases, NRF said. It cited a Synchrony Financial report from early this year saying eight of the top 10 retail trends for 2016 involve technology. Topics to keep an eye on, said NRF: (1) how social media and in-store shopping experiences blend, (2) how retail takes advantage of location-based strategies, (3) whether augmented reality and VR play a role, (4) if messaging services and bots “become the new apps,” (5) how online marketplaces will change the landscape, (6) the impact of payment options on the bottom line, (7) whether Singles Day (Nov. 11) gains traction with early-bird shoppers in the U.S. and (8) how two additional shopping days will affect holiday season sales compared with 2015.

Symantec introduced cybersecurity protection for connected cars, the company announced. Called Anomaly Detection for Automotive, the product protects against “zero-day attacks” and other security vulnerabilities unique to the connected car. Zero-day attacks are so named because a defender against those attacks has zero days to come up with a fix once a security flaw becomes widely exploited. “Connected cars offer drivers conveniences such as navigation, remote roadside assistance and mobile internet hot spots,” Symantec said Wednesday, citing Gartner forecasts of 220 million connected cars on the road globally in 2020. Though new connected-car technologies “promise to enhance the driving experience, these advancements also create avenues of attack for hackers that can endanger drivers and passengers,” Symantec said. Its product uses machine learning to provide “passive in-vehicle security analytics” that monitor all “controller area network” bus traffic without disrupting normal vehicle operations, the company said. Since the product learns “what normal behavior is,” it’s able to “flag anomalous activity that may indicate an attack,” it said: “The solution works with virtually any automotive make and model.”

Global advertising agencies Interpublic and Omnicom and companies Bayer, GoDaddy and Google said they will take aggressive steps to stop ads from appearing on pirated websites, the Trustworthy Accountability Group said in a Thursday news release. The 2-year-old TAG, formed by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers and Interactive Advertising Bureau in part to combat digital ad piracy and copyright infringement, said $2.4 billion in revenue is lost to pirated sites annually. By committing to Tag's pledge, the companies -- joining dozens more ad agencies and advertisers now in the initiative -- must take "commercially reasonable steps to minimize the inadvertent placement of digital advertising on websites or other media properties,” the group said. This means they must hire a TAG-validated company that offers anti-piracy services, use TAG-certified ad placement services or conduct business with ad agencies that carry the TAG “Certified Against Piracy” seal. Eleven companies have "earned" that seal, "which signals to the industry that their anti-piracy services meet stringent requirements of keeping ads off of sites that contain illicit content," said TAG.

U.S. internet ad revenue saw a record Q1, hitting $15.9 billion, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said in a news release Thursday. The previous first-quarter record, $13.2 billion, was set last year, said the IAB report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The 21 percent year-over-year jump is the biggest in four years, it said. The report included revenue data from websites, commercial online services, free email providers and other online ad sellers. “These landmark revenues confirm the growing importance of interactive for brand marketers to reach consumers who are increasingly spending their time on digital screens,” said IAB Chief Marketing Officer David Doty. “Last year the industry reached its highest level of investment at over $50 billion, and this first quarter lays the foundation for what could very well be the biggest year yet for digital ad spending.”