Roku’s first Ultra HD streaming player, the Roku 4, became available for pre-order Tuesday at $129 and will be shipped Monday, the company said in an announcement. The Roku 4 has a quad-core processor for 4K streaming up to 60 frames a second with HDCP 2.2 content protection and optical audio out, the company said. It enables access “to more streaming channels for 4K entertainment than any other streaming player," the company said. The Roku 4 runs the new Roku OS 7, which also was announced Tuesday. Roku OS 7 will be rolled out to current-generation Roku players and Roku TVs through a software update beginning next week, the company said. It expects to finish the updates in November, it said.

ICANN extended to Oct. 30 the public comment period on its preliminary report on future new generic top level domain (gTLD) procedures. The report, prepared in response to questions raised by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, urged GNSO to proceed with policy development for subsequent rounds of new gTLD rollouts. Policy developments may include reevaluating the $185,000 fee for applying to be a registry for a new gTLD and ICANN’s outreach on gTLDs, ICANN said. ICANN said it believes extending the deadline on the GNSO report would give the community more time to consider the report and will mean the deadline no longer occurs before the start of ICANN’s planned Oct. 18-22 meeting in Dublin. Setting the comment deadline after the end of the Dublin meeting means “discussions about the report can occur during the meeting while the public comment period remains open,” ICANN said.

Privacy and child protection advocates expressed concern Friday after an announcement from Google the day before that it had made changes to its YouTube Kids app. The recent changes in no way address the concerns (see 1505190015) of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), the groups’ attorney, Angela Campbell of Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation, said in a statement Friday. “Google not only did not consult with CCFC and CDD, but it refused their request to meet.” Google launched its YouTube Kids app in February and promised parents only family-friendly ads would be shown, Campbell said. “Now this language is gone and the app store description has a new, vaguely worded disclaimer at the end: ‘YouTube Kids contains paid ads in order to offer the app for free. Your child may also see videos with commercial content from YouTube creators that are not Paid Ads. For more information, please check out our Parental Guide.’” The new YouTube Kids app ad policy, which prohibits advertising food, beverages and other products, only applies to paid ads sold by Google, Campbell said. “This means that the vast majority of the content available on [the app] is not subject to any limits on advertising.”

U.S. reliance on an “all-tools” cybersecurity strategy that emphasizes public-private cooperation has “raised the cost of cyber attacks and economic espionage, and made it clear that we will not tolerate the status quo,” said Assistant Attorney General-National Security Division John Carlin in remarks prepared for the American Gaming Association posted Wednesday. That strategy “altered the dialogue,” as evidenced by last week's U.S.-China agreement not to engage in cybertheft of each other's IP assets, Carlin said. “Only time will tell” whether that agreement will result in concrete actions, but “our commitment to deterrence has made a difference,” he said. That commitment will continue, so “whether you are the Syrian Electronic Army, North Korea, ISIL or a state-sponsored hacker, we can and will find you. And when we do, there will be consequences.” The U.S.'s cybersecurity commitments will also continue to require private sector involvement and the Department of Justice will continue to help private sector participants “manage your risk” via information sharing and threat response assistance, Carlin said.

The Center for Digital Democracy, National Consumer Law Center and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group filed comments Wednesday citing privacy concerns in response to the Treasury Department’s request for information on expanding access to credit through online marketplace lending. “Among the most challenging issues confronting consumers and other borrowers are new threats to their privacy and the ability to control how data are collected and used by online financial services companies,” CDD and USPIRG said in joint comments. Online lenders and financial service companies can use an array of big data-driven digital applications to “tap into the explosive growth of online, social and internal data to make better customer decisions,” they said. Given the lack of privacy protections online for American consumers, with their data freely gathered across devices by data brokers and many others, and the increasing expenditure of the financial services industry to use this information for actionable purposes, a key challenge for the Treasury Department is to propose a national consumer and small-business framework to protect privacy for online lending and related credit and lending sectors, CDD and USPIRG said. In its comments, the National Consumer Law Center expressed concern about the use of data in ways that are “potentially inconsistent with the protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, privacy rights and fair lending laws.” NCLC said it shared the privacy concerns other groups raised about the impact targeted advertising has on Americans, especially since most don’t know their personal data is used to “shape the offers they receive and the prices they pay online,” and particularly since lead generators gather data about potential borrowers and sell it to the highest bidder. In the payday loan market, that data can sometimes include sensitive financial information such as Social Security numbers and bank account numbers, NCLC said.

Advocacy groups and tech companies have partnered to create a petition on WhiteHouse.gov encouraging the Obama administration to affirm its support publicly for strong encryption and to reject any law, policy or mandate that undermines an individual’s security. “Weakening encryption weakens the entire Internet,” it says. The American Civil Liberties Union, Computer & Communications Industry Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Technology Institute, Tech Freedom and Twitter are among those backing the petition. At our deadline, more than 6,516 individuals had signed the petition in its first two days. For the White House to respond, 100,000 signatures are needed. The group is hoping to make this the most popular WhiteHouse.gov petition and is asking for at least 370,000 signatures.

Online advertising company Adzerk is the latest company to agree to comply with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's new “Do Not Track” standard for Web browsing (see 1508100071), an EFF news release said Wednesday. Adzerk serves billions of ad impressions per month for customers including BitTorrent, reddit and Stack Overflow, EFF said. The company’s participation in the EFF DNT program significantly strengthens the coalition of companies using the policy standard to better protect people from sites that try to secretly follow and record users’ Internet activity, it said.

Apple removed two apps from the iTunes store that tracked drone strikes, app creator Josh Begley reported on Twitter. Begley was first notified that his app Metadata+, which launched in early 2014 and used data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to report targeted killings by U.S. drones, was removed on Sunday because it contains “excessively crude or objectionable content.” Begley shared the news on the Twitter account @Dronestream, which performs the same role as the app. Begley’s other app Ephemeral+, which records drone strikes, was removed from the app store on Wednesday for the same reason as Metadata+. Apple didn’t comment.

Chinese ISP Baidu certified Pioneer China as the first contract developer and manufacturer of on-board equipment supporting the Baidu CarLife telematics service in China, Pioneer said in a Tuesday announcement. Pioneer will start shipping the “on-board equipment” needed for the service to car manufacturers in China in November, the company said. “Today in China, with the rapid spread of smartphones, it is possible to establish a constant connection to the Internet, and a boost in the telematics service in the car to connect to the network is expected,” it said. “Our on-board equipment to start shipping this autumn is able to provide an easy-to-use, high quality service” for Baidu CarLife, using “the hardware technology and know-how of Pioneer’s Car OEM business,” Pioneer said. “Pioneer will investigate further cooperation with Baidu in a variety of sectors, including the connected vehicles and automated driving society of the future to combine the hardware technology of Pioneer and the abundant content and applications of Baidu.”

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden joined Twitter Tuesday. Snowden’s Twitter bio says he “used to work for the government,” but now "I work for the public.” Snowden was following only one account on Twitter -- the NSA’s account, and he had 605,000 followers at our deadline.