The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the NETmundial initiative (CD Aug 28 p4) for its lack of transparency and its association with the World Economic Forum, Jeremy Malcolm, EFF senior global policy analyst, said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1rE36du). The EFF was invited to participate in the initiative, he said. The initiatives’ participants and steering committee members were “hand-picked by the organizers rather than being nominated by their own stakeholder groups (as, ironically, the NETmundial Principles set out as a best practice),” he said. Malcolm said civil society groups were accused of being “exclusive and elitist” for raising such concerns. EFF and others are “entitled to object to what is essentially a pre-cooked, big business initiative (well intentioned as it may be) from co-opting the name of an overtly more inclusive and grassroots-directed Internet governance meeting,” he said. The initiative won’t do “any harm, but initial indications suggest it is far from an ideal model of global Internet governance in action,” Malcolm said.
Google expanded its Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge Tuesday, committing to not sue users, distributors or open-source developers over patent infringement for “patents related to technologies that help deliver fast, secure experiences on the web, including encryption, XML parsing and prefetching,” it said in a Tuesday night blog post (http://bit.ly/1tcqD5d). Google said it’s adding 152 patents to its pledge, initially made over a year ago (http://bit.ly/1tcqKOe).
ICANN confirmed it received a letter Tuesday from its major constituencies and stakeholder groups questioning ICANN’s accountability process (CD Aug 27 p9). ICANN released its accountability process Aug. 14 (http://bit.ly/1vdRn3j), but it was “announced without a corresponding public comment period,” said the letter, saying “substantial questions and concerns remain unanswered” about the process. The letter writers plan to submit a list of clarifying questions within seven days, it said. The letter was signed by 12 ICANN constituency representatives, including Heather Dryden, Governmental Advisory Committee chair; Patrik Fältström, Security and Stability Advisory Committee chair; Michele Neylon, Registrar Stakeholder Group chair; Byron Holland, Country Code Names Supporting Organization chair; Olivier Crépin-LeBlond, At-Large Advisory Committee chair; and Elisa Cooper, Commercial Stakeholder Group executive committee member.
The Department of Health and Human Services said Timothy DeFoggi, convicted Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Omaha on multiple child pornography charges, worked at the agency from 2008 until January. DeFoggi was a supervisory IT specialist for the Indian Health Service from September 2008 until March 2012, when he became lead IT specialist for HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Administration, HHS said. The Department of Justice said DeFoggi was a registered member of at least one of a set of three child porn websites that the FBI shuttered in December 2012. HHS didn’t comment on DeFoggi beyond disclosing Tuesday night his employment history at the department.
Businesses of all sizes need to “proactively check for possible Point of Sale (PoS) malware infections,” particularly the bug known as “Backoff” malware, said a joint advisory Friday from the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Secret Service. Backoff was identified in October 2013, but wasn’t recognized by antivirus software until this month, it said. The advisory estimated Backoff has affected more than 1,000 businesses, many of which don’t know they've been compromised, it said. Seven PoS providers have confirmed that their clients have been affected, it said.
Human Rights Campaign asked House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to investigate alleged “transphobic” edits by someone from an anonymous House IP address to the Wikipedia site for Netflix series Orange is the New Black, said Jeff Krehely, HRC vice president, in a blog post Friday (http://bit.ly/1q1qRJM). A remark on Wikipedia about one of the show’s actresses, Laverne Cox, a transgender woman, was edited to read that she is a “'real man pretending to be a woman,'” it said. Wikipedia temporarily banned the anonymous House IP address from editing Wikipedia for one month Wednesday, said news reports. “When more and more Americans are recognizing and upholding the rights and dignity of transgender Americans, it is an unwelcome reminder of how much work remains to be done,” said Krehely. Boehner didn’t comment.
Consumers slightly favored federal government websites over private-sector websites in Q2, said the ForeSee Answers E-Government Satisfaction Index in a news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1rogCSt). The index “collected more than 234,600 survey responses across 103 federal government websites” in Q2, rating agencies on a “100-point citizen satisfaction scale,” it said. A score of 80 or more is the “threshold for excellence at which a site meets and exceeds citizen expectations,” it said. The overall e-government score in Q2 was 74.8, versus 73.4 for private-sector sites, it said. The Social Security Administration sites “Extra Help with Medicare Prescription Drugs” and the “Retirement Estimator” both received a score of 90, the highest score in Q2, it said. Amazon and Mercedes-Benz scored 88; Apple 87; and FedEx 85, it said. Sixty percent of e-government users said they used a mobile phone or tablet to access the Internet in Q2, an increase from 57 percent during Q1, it said. Thirty-nine percent of visitors “reported having accessed a federal government website using a mobile device, up from 37 percent in Q1,” said ForeSee, part of Answers Corp.
Classifying the Internet as a common carrier is “a terrible mistake,” said NCTA in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1tlysE4). “The Internet has succeeded up until this point because it has been free to grow, innovate, and change largely free from government oversight.” Cable broadband providers believe “all legitimate Internet traffic should be treated equally when traveling over local networks, that ISPs should not pick favorites, and that consumers should have unfettered access to legal content of their choosing,” NCTA said. The best way to preserve those rules is to regulate the Internet through the Communications Act’s Section 706, the association said. It said that section doesn’t get in the way of innovation and “offers strong consumer protections that guarantee enforceable open Internet rules and promote competitive marketplaces."
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced two cloud computing projects worth a total of $20 million, in a news release Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/1wa8ya9). The projects, named Chameleon and CloudLab, will let academics “develop and experiment with novel cloud architectures and pursue new, architecturally-enabled applications of cloud computing,” it said. The projects will fall under the NSFCloud program and are expected to “revolutionize the science and engineering for cloud computing,” said Suzi Iacono, acting head of NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The foundation decided to fund the projects after a public proposal period, a spokesman said.
Google Chrome is available in Cuba, said Google’s Pedro Less Andrade, Latin America director-government affairs and public policy, in a blog post Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1tl7hcw). Google has been working to make “more tools available in sanctioned countries,” it said, saying Syria and Iran already have access to Chrome.