Apple is allowing the new app Hinder, which allows users to browse where their elected officials stand on women's rights issues like birth control, abortion and sex education, to be included in its app store, a group said. Apple’s decision to make the app available was announced in a news release Wednesday by UltraViolet, which had a petition signed by more than 30,000 people that asked Apple make the app available. Direct tweets from nearly 1,000 individuals asking for the app to be available also helped convince Apple to change its mind in less than 24 hours, the release said.

The copyright holders of the Dallas Buyers Club are suing an array of Comcast broadband customers for allegedly pirating the film via the Popcorn Time software program. The suit, filed Sunday in U.S. District Court in Portland, Oregon, asks for a permanent injunction stopping the John Doe defendants from using the Internet to distribute the film or make it available for distribution, as well as a permanent injunction enjoining them from using any peer-to-peer software like Popcorn Time to download or distribute content without a license, and unspecified financial damages. Dallas Buyers Club LLC said it plans to use initial discovery to subpoena Comcast for the identities of each of the Oregon defendants, based on their IP addresses. Comcast isn't a defendant in the suit and declined to comment.

The global average Internet connection speed increased 17 percent year-over-year, according to a State of the Internet Report for the second quarter of 2015 by Akamai Technologies, which was released Wednesday. Other findings include that Washington, D.C., “unseated Delaware in the highest average and peak connection speeds,” and that Gabon, Cameroon, Nepal and Iraq experience significant Internet disruptions, an Akamai news release said. “We continued to see healthy increases in key connection speed metrics, particularly on a year-over-year basis,” said David Belson, editor of the report. “The improvement in connection speeds is vital as more content, not the least of which is video at increasingly higher levels of quality, is being delivered over the Internet,” Belson said. “Ongoing progress and innovation in these areas, as evidenced in the report, will play a key role in helping address consumer demand for access to content where and when they want it,” he said.

ICANN's Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has decided to “continue advancing” its IANA transition proposal “as planned, aiming to make as much progress as possible” by the time ICANN stakeholders meet in Dublin Oct. 18-22, ICG leaders said Tuesday in a blog post. ICG found that a majority of public comments submitted through Sept. 8 (see 1509090053) support the proposal, though “in some cases that support was qualified by suggestions, questions, and criticism that the ICG is working hard to synthesize and address as appropriate,” the group's leaders said. ICG's decision to adhere to its planned timeline “as much as possible without sacrificing quality for speed is notable in light of indications” that the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN's Accountability's (CCWG-Accountability) work on its proposal for changes to ICANN's accountability mechanisms is likely to be delayed, ICG leaders said. The group said it's “closely following the work of [CCWG-Accountability] and expects to have more clarity about the trajectory of [its] work after that group meets at the end of this week.”

An audit of the 23 presidential candidates’ websites by the Online Trust Alliance found that 74 percent failed to guard voters’ privacy and security, an OTA news release said Tuesday. Twenty-six percent passed and "performed so admirably that they achieved ‘Honor Roll’ status,” it said. “There was no middle ground.” Presidential candidates who made the honor roll include Republicans Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum, as well as Scott Walker, who left the race Monday. Democratic candidates Lincoln Chafee and Martin O’Malley also made the honor roll. The sites that failed scored an F in privacy practices, it said, with some linking to “nonexistent or inadequate privacy policy disclosures,” while others failed because they reserved the “right to liberally share or sell their donors and site visitors’ personally identifiable information (PII), including addresses, phone numbers, employers and even passport numbers, with unaffiliated third parties that the candidates deem to be like-minded organizations,” said OTA. “Although political websites may not be beholden to the same security and privacy standards as industry, our findings clearly reveal that these campaigns’ data practices are out of alignment with consumer expectations and Federal Trade Commission guidelines for the business community," said OTA Executive Director Craig Spiezle. On a positive note, all candidates had “excellent consumer protection scores,” it said. But Spiezle said that in an era of “mounting distrust of data and privacy practices, candidates must move beyond a compliance mindset and embrace responsible data stewardship” because consumers not only pay with their credit card, but also with “giving away their PII.” Friday at 1 p.m. EDT, OTA will host a webinar to discuss further the findings of the audit with Future of Privacy Forum Executive Director Jules Polonetsky and TRUSTe CEO Chris Babel.

The FTC “needs to analyze and address how contemporary online lead generation embodies a panoply of applications and tactics to acquire, use, and often share or sell a person’s personal data,” said the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group in comments submitted Friday to the FTC ahead of the agency’s Oct. 30 workshop on the topic (see 1507220053). Online lead generation “incorporates the use of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, search engines, mobile phones, apps, geo-location, native advertising, email, sentiment mining, data-driven audience buying (programmatic), user ‘scoring’ methods, attribution analysis for measurement, and a network of data brokers providing instantaneous identity and other sensitive information,” they said. CDD and U.S. PIRG urged the FTC to “protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, and privacy-threatening practices that companies regularly use for online lead generation.”

Many people are “betting on television over the Internet, and we’re betting on television over the Internet,” Starz CEO Chris Albrecht told a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York when asked about his company’s ambitions in over-the-top video delivery. “We think the premium channels -- Starz being one of only a few -- are really well positioned to thrive in that changing landscape,” Albrecht said. “We see more opportunities than we see challenges.” But it’s unlikely Starz would introduce a Netflix-style service anytime soon, he said. “I don’t really see in any near future that I can foresee a direct-to-consumer product” from Starz, he said. “To just go out and put together a marketing plan to start to sell a stand-alone video service” is very expensive, he said. “Netflix built it on the back of their DVD business, and I don’t know what would have happened had they just gone out and licensed a ton of rights” to launch a stand-alone OTT service cold, he said.

Cisco released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Prime Collaboration Assurance, Prime Collaboration Provisioning and TelePresence Server software that may have allowed a remote attacker to escalate privileges, obtain sensitive information or cause a denial-of-service condition, said an alert from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team Thursday.

Tech companies took to social media to show support for and offer jobs to Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Texan who was arrested at his high school after bringing in what his teacher thought was a bomb but actually was an electronic clock he made as part of an engineering project. Twitter tweeted support for Ahmed and offered him an internship. Mark Zuckerberg said he would love to meet Ahmed and give him a tour of Facebook. Foursquare tweeted support for Ahmed, as did several other tech companies including Google, which invited him to its online global science competition this weekend. President Barack Obama tweeted “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?” The president’s top science adviser, John Holdren, personally invited the teen to the White House Astronomy Night Oct. 19, U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil wrote in a White House email.

Security threats to mobile networks originating from PCs and adware increased significantly in the first half of 2015, Alcatel-Lucent said in a report. A significant number of “spyphone” apps also are being detected on Android and iOS mobile devices, it said Wednesday. About 80 percent of malware infections on mobile networks during the first half of 2015 originated from Windows-based computers, up from the approximately 50-50 split between Android and Windows devices that was present in 2013 and 2014, Alcatel-Lucent said. “The modern smartphone also presents the perfect platform for corporate and personal espionage, information theft, denial of service attacks on businesses and governments, and banking and advertising scams,” said Alcatel-Lucent General Manager-Network Intelligence Patrick Tan in a news release.