Amazon and JetBlue said JetBlue will begin allowing Amazon Prime customers later this year to use its free in-flight Fly-Fi Wi-Fi service to access Amazon’s online video and music library. JetBlue had restricted HD video streaming to customers who bought the airline’s $9-per-hour premium Wi-Fi service because of capacity issues. JetBlue customers who don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime will be able to use Fly-Fi to buy and stream Amazon Instant Video content, the companies said Tuesday. Fly-Fi connectivity will be available in all of JetBlue’s Airbus A321 and A320 aircraft this year, and in all Embraer E190 aircraft in 2016, the airline said. JetBlue said it has no plans to block customers from using other streaming services like Netflix via Fly-Fi, but won’t be able to guarantee connectivity.
“Tech jobs are creating significant opportunities for non-Asian minorities,” but not women, said a Progressive Policy Institute report by PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel and Economist Diana Carew. The report, released Thursday, said from 2009 to 2014 the number of blacks with a college degree employed in the tech industry grew faster than in healthcare. Employment in computer and mathematical occupations rose by 79,000 jobs compared with 76,000 in health care for blacks, a PPI news release said. Hispanics working in healthcare outnumbered those in tech industries, with 104,000 jobs vs. 81,000, but the report’s authors still said it was a significant increase. Women have only 26 percent of college-educated tech jobs, which the report’s authors said isn't an equal share. “Too few science-minded women are pursuing degrees in computer and information science (CIS), choosing instead to study healthcare," the release said. “Policies at the federal, state and local level must encourage more women and minorities to pursue tech careers,” it said. “It is imperative that our nation's higher education system heed labor market signals by providing more pathways into tech jobs,” Carew said.
U.S. policies are continuing to aid the Internet’s exponential growth 20 years after the start of the commercial Internet, said John Morris, NTIA Office of Policy Analysis and Development director-Internet policy, in a Friday blog post. The National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) was decommissioned April 30, 1995, ending the last restrictions on commercial traffic and “paving the way for the commercial use and private governance of the Internet,” Morris said. Key U.S. policies that have resulted in strong Internet growth include trusting in private sector innovation and a reliance on multistakeholder Internet governance, he said. NTIA and the Internet Policy Task Force have continually emphasized multistakeholder governance, including supporting ICANN’s ongoing process of spinning off its Internet Assigned Numbers Authority functions, Morris said. Other important U.S. policies have included “strong” IP rights policies, promoting high-speed broadband access and laws that protect against undue regulation like Communications Act Section 230, “which protects online platforms against claims arising from hosting information posted by users and other third parties,” Morris said.
New America's Open Technology Institute (OTI) released the first in a planned series of papers Thursday on issues and challenges for policymakers and the public in ICANN’s planned spinoff of its Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. The paper released Thursday provides basic details on those issues, including ICANN’s history of controlling the IANA functions, NTIA’s oversight role and related domain name system (DNS) policy issues that need to be addressed as work on the transition process continues. Future papers will expand on issues identified in the initial report, OTI said. “We support the U.S. government’s decision” to complete the IANA transition, said OTI Senior Fellow David Post, one of the paper’s authors, in a statement. “But before that happens, key challenges must be addressed to ensure that the DNS continues to run smoothly and that ICANN stays accountable to its many stakeholders and remains focused on technical coordination rather than broader Internet policy issues involving cybersecurity, copyright, online privacy, and the like.” The OTI papers are meant to “shed some light on the complexity of the process and help inform the public discussion that’s happening right now, because getting this transition right is very important -- especially if the United States wants to maintain its credibility in the broader global Internet governance ecosystem,” said OTI Senior Policy Analyst Danielle Kehl, the report’s other author, in a statement.
Phishing attacks succeed 45 percent of the time, which is why Google launched a free Password Alert Wednesday, Google Security Engineer Drew Hintz and Google Ideas Product Manager Justin Kosslyn wrote in a blog post. “Nearly 2 percent of messages to Gmail are designed to trick people into giving up their passwords.” Google’s new Password Alert protects Google and Google Apps for Work Accounts by warning if a site isn’t a Google sign-in page, but asks for a Google password, they said. The Chrome-extension remembers a “scrambled” version of the Google password for a consumer account, so if a password is typed into a site that isn’t actually a Google page, Password Alert will notify the consumer, Google said. For Google Work customers, an administrator can receive alerts when a problem is detected, they said. “This can help spot malicious attackers trying to break into employee accounts and also reduce password reuse,” Google said.
It’s getting crowded at the edge of consumer electronics as Microsoft announced at its Build 2015 developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday that its next-gen Web browser will be called Microsoft Edge. It joins Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge and Note Edge and the Ford Edge SUV on the cutting edge of consumer tech. Microsoft Edge, formerly code-named Project Spartan, will launch with Windows 10 this summer. At the conference Wednesday, Microsoft predicted Windows 10 will be running on 1 billion computers within 2-3 years, the Los Angeles Times reported.
IEEE said a new amendment to its 802.3bm standard for ethernet supports recent advances in optical networking, “enabling migration to higher-density applications, reducing cost and power demand” of 100 Gbps devices and simplified metropolitan services. “Significantly higher Ethernet performance, capacity and reach in optical networking are needed especially inside and among data centers across metropolitan areas, given the ongoing proliferation of smartphones, video-on-demand, cloud computing and other bandwidth-intensive applications such as the Internet of Things,” said Dan Dove, chairman of the IEEE 802.3bm Task Force, in a Wednesday news release.
Small-business owners looking to attract and retain customers should make the most of email campaigns, said the “2015 Cox Consumer Pulse on Small Businesses” report. Slightly more than half of consumers ranked email as the most effective communications channel, the survey found. Despite the shift to mobile devices, respondents ranked email, at 53 percent; in-person events, 48 percent; social marketing, 45 percent; and direct mail, 32 percent, higher than texts/SMS in terms of their effectiveness. Though the majority of respondents were pleased with their "shopping small" service levels, 20 percent of consumers polled suggested offering free Wi-Fi to help enhance the customer experience. Cox Business surveyed nearly 1,400 U.S. consumers in eight states about their sentiments on the importance of shopping at small and medium-sized businesses.
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling is to speak at the Internet2 Global Summit Tuesday about the Internet assigned names numbers authority (IANA) process and the continued importance of global Internet governance to the research community, Internet2 said. Strickling’s speech comes days after ICANN’s IANA stewardship cross-community working group (CWG-Stewardship) released its revised draft transition plan proposal for comment. The revised draft addresses several of the criticisms that stakeholders leveled against the CWG-Stewardship’s original draft proposal, which includes claims that the original plan was too bureaucratic (see 1412240048). Strickling was among those who criticized the original CWG-Stewardship proposal (see 1501270042). The revised plan recommends that ICANN create a specific subsidiary, called the Post-Transition IANA, to handle the IANA transition. An ICANN-selected board would govern PTI, while the Customer Standing Committee and the IANA Function Review Team (IFRT) would handle current federal oversight functions, CWG-Stewardship said in the revised plan proposal. The IFRT could propose separating PTI from ICANN entirely under extraordinary circumstances, the revised proposal said. The contents of ICANN’s current IANA contract with the federal government, affirmed in 2009, would become a part of the bylaws for ICANN and IFRT, the revised proposal said. Comments on the revised CWG-Stewardship proposal are due May 20. A separate CWG is anticipated to release a draft proposal on ICANN accountability soon.
The “smartphone opportunity” remains a “strong positive” for Qualcomm, which forecasts “continued healthy global demand in the near term and over the next several years” in that segment, CEO Steve Mollenkopf said on an earnings call. “We also continue to gain traction in adjacent areas where our mobile technologies and capabilities can deliver next-generation solutions.” Areas such as IoT and the connected car “are expected to represent large new opportunities for Qualcomm, with over 5 billion new non-phone connected device shipments expected in calendar year 2018,” he said. In connected car, Qualcomm has more than 40 design wins with “15-plus” OEMs, and its new two LTE modems, the Snapdragon X12 and X5, will “augment our portfolio to support connectivity across all tiers of the automotive industry,” he said.