A slew of tech and media luminaries participated in a $25 million Series C funding round for Change.org, the website said in a news release Tuesday. Investors in the financing round included Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; Virgin Group founder Richard Branson; and the Omidyar Network, an investment firm backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Change.org expects to use the funding to develop its mobile applications. The website has more than 80 million users in 196 countries.

NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling countered Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz’s Dec. 1 article that called for the U.S. to retain control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority contract. “Crovitz’s criticism is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the U.S. role in the DNS [domain name system]. No one entity controls the Internet,” Strickling said Sunday in the WSJ. Strickling said he took issue with Crovitz’s “continued mischaracterization that there is a September deadline for this transition.” "NTIA’s current contract with Icann, which operates technical functions related to the DNS, expires on Sept. 30, 2015, but we have repeatedly stated that if the transition plan is not ready by then, we can extend the contract,” he said. “The Obama administration is so uncomfortable with American exceptionalism that it violated the cardinal rule of good government: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Crovitz said last week.

The Broadband Forum, which represents broadband service providers and technology suppliers, has thrown its support behind the new ITU-T ultra broadband access standard, G.fast, as a new way to deliver "bandwidth intensive" consumer applications such as Ultra HD, the group said Monday. G.fast "makes it possible for telcos to deploy 4K UHD services faster and more affordably than they could with Fiber to the Home," the forum said. Its announcement quoted CEA President Gary Shapiro as saying that with Ultra HD the "hot new product" this holiday selling season and beyond, "consumers need confidence" that bandwidth-constrained 4K online content distribution services "are feasible," Shapiro said. "G.fast offers a promising way to overcome this challenge."

The Department of Justice is adding a cybersecurity unit to its Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, said Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell Thursday. The dedicated cyber unit will give legal guidance on investigations into electronic surveillance and aid Congress in writing cybersecurity legislation, Caldwell said during a speech at Georgetown University. The new unit is meant to ease citizens’ concerns about privacy following former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures beginning last year about NSA surveillance programs. Mistrust in government “can hamper investigations and cybersecurity efforts,” Caldwell said in a prepared version of her speech. The new cyber unit will “ensure that the powerful law enforcement tools are effectively used” and protect “the privacy of everyday Americans,” Caldwell said.

Qualcomm agreed to spend $7 million for 7 percent ownership of Qterics, the new Silicon Image subsidiary that will supply services and components and devices for Internet of Things-capable TVs, smartphones, tablets, routers, home automation devices and smart appliances, the companies said in a joint announcement Thursday. Qterics will be composed of Silicon Image’s UpdateLogic services business and other of its software and IP holdings, they said. "The vast expansion of Internet-enabled devices enables new applications and services, but only if the devices can be properly managed." UpdateLogic, now under the Qterics umbrella, has been a leading supplier of device management and remote access services already deployed in "tens of millions" of CE products, they said.

New FTC Chief Technology Officer Ashkan Soltani will focus on improving the agency’s tech recruitment, big data initiatives and data security, he said in a blog post Tuesday. “Data security is one of the most important aspects of a functioning marketplace and a critical aspect in consumer protection,” he said. “I hope to expand the agency’s ability to measure big data’s disparate effects in order to ensure that the algorithms that consumers interact with on a daily basis afford them the same rights online as they’re entitled to offline.” Consumer advocates and technologists expect Soltani to put the agency at the forefront of emerging tech issues (see 1410290060).

Legal and regulatory scrutiny of corporate leaders’ management of cybersecurity may increase in 2015 if more “major” data breach incidents occur, Experian said Monday in a report. Data breaches in the coming year are likely to increasingly result in the theft of usernames, passwords and other information stored in the cloud, because cloud services’ increasing popularity make them an “attractive target” for hackers, Experian said. Data breaches at physical retail locations may also increase in the coming year as hackers attempt to make final profits from point-of-sale attacks before the more secure chip-and-PIN technology is adopted in the U.S. in October, the firm said. Data breaches at healthcare facilities are also likely to increase due to the increasing use of electronic medical records and wearable technology, Experian said. Third-party breaches also will increase due to the increased use of the Internet of Things, the firm said. Despite the increased threat from outside actors, employees’ mistakes will remain the main threat to corporations’ cybersecurity, Experian said. Only 54 percent of companies say they provide security awareness training to employees, far lower than what’s needed to make a “significant dent” in breaches during the coming year, the firm said.

BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music sued Cox Communications for failing to penalize subscribers who repeatedly infringe copyrighted materials, said documents filed Wednesday at U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. The music publishers alleged that Cox failed to comply with the Copyright Alert System, which lets ISPs terminate Internet services to repeat infringers. “Despite its published policy to the contrary, Cox's actual policy is to refuse to suspend, terminate, or otherwise penalize subscriber accounts that repeatedly commit copyright infringement through its network in any meaningful numbers,” the publishers said. Cox didn't comment.

The Chinese government has “legitimized” ICANN and the notion of “one global Internet,” said ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade in a videoconference Monday. He said he had just returned from China’s World Internet Conference. The “danger” of the Chinese government partitioning its Internet is “largely behind us,” he said. That’s “extremely powerful and notable,” said Chehade. The Chinese expect to have a “seat at the table” in global Internet governance debates, he said. China’s participation within and endorsement of such debates was “impossible” as long as the U.S. maintained its contract over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions with ICANN, said Chehade. ICANN couldn’t claim China had an “equal seat at the table” while the U.S. had authority over the IANA functions, he said. “By ‘seat at the table’ Fadi was not talking ‘seat on the ICANN Board’ but rather the euphemistic seat at the table of discussion,” emailed an ICANN spokesman Wednesday. He said ICANN has had Chinese board members in the past; Hualin Qian served from 2003 to 2006 and Pindar Wong served as the board’s first vice chairman in 1999.

Consumer sentiment toward the overall economy slipped 1.2 points in November but is above that of last year, said a CEA report released Tuesday. Consumer expectations about technology spending, meanwhile, climbed 7.3 percentage points in November, 1.6 points above the year-ago period, CEA said. “Consumers appear to have held off slightly on tech purchases in October in preparation for holiday shopping, including Black Friday,” said Shawn DuBravac, CEA chief economist. For the holiday period, the association is forecasting 2.5 percent growth in tech spending, compared with 0.9 percent growth for the period in 2013, to reach a record $33.76 billion.