A court order issued at the FTC’s request bans Consumer Collection Advocates and Michael Robert Ettus from selling advance fee recovery services and from telemarketing, an FTC news release said Monday. The court order resolves a 2014 FTC complaint that alleged the defendants illegally collected money from consumers, many of them elderly, in fraudulent telemarketing recovery scams, it said. The final order prohibits the defendants from misrepresenting any product or service, collecting payments for any recovery service, selling rights to collect for such service, profiting from customers’ personal information, and failing to properly dispose of customer information, it said. The order also imposes a judgment of more than $2.8 million, it said. U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida issued the final order of permanent injunction Sept. 28 after granting the FTC’s motion for summary judgment Sept. 9. The defendants have appealed the court’s decision, it said.

Incompas joined by the Competitive Carriers Association opposed a USTelecom request joined by ITTA to extend the comment periods in the FCC special access rulemaking. USTelecom and ITTA apparently are trying to simply delay the proceeding, Incompas (formerly Comptel) and CCA said in their opposition Friday in docket 05-25. USTelecom and ITTA had asked that the current comment and reply deadlines of Nov. 20 and Dec. 11 be pushed back to Jan. 19 and Feb. 18. They said some incumbent telco outside counsels hadn't yet been cleared to see massive amounts of confidential industry data collected by the agency, and time was running out to review the data and file comments without an extension (see 1510220069).

Tyco is working with Nest Labs to develop “useful integrations” between Nest products and Tyco’s “expanding smart home product portfolio,” it said Thursday. Tyco has “multiple projects” under development and Nest’s Weave communication protocol will connect “disparate devices in the home,” said Tyco. Tyco’s participation in the Works with Nest program reflects the company’s commitment to the home automation market, it said. Tyco provides security products and interactive services in more than 5 million homes worldwide, it said.

Juniper Research is forecasting consumer spending of $43 billion for smart home devices this year, jumping to $100 billion by 2020. Entertainment services including Netflix and Spotify are enlarging the smart home market on “universal appeal” and low-cost service, Juniper said, but emerging segments including home automation will begin to catch up, driven by falling hardware prices and growing consumer awareness. To date, numerous home automation subscription services, such as AT&T's Digital Life, “have struggled to address the mass-market,” Juniper said. Unit product purchases, rather than systems, are the most likely entry point to the smart home for consumers, Juniper said. It cited Nest and SmartThings as companies that have “successfully added subscription services to their hardware sales in order to generate lifetime value.”

Apple, AT&T, Cox Enterprises, Dell, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Microsoft are among the 81 companies that signed the White House’s American Business Act on Climate Pledge and support an agreement being reached to reduce carbon emissions and achieve a sustainable future at the U.N. Climate Change Conference beginning next month in Paris, a White House fact sheet said Monday.

Windstream signed an agreement with TierPoint to sell its data center business for $575 million, Windstream said in a news release Monday. Windstream will establish an ongoing partnership with TierPoint as a part of the transaction, it said, and its new structure will allow Windstream to "focus capital on its core telecom offerings while continuing to offer traditional data center services to enterprise customers across a broader data center footprint." Both companies have approved the transaction, which is expected to close in two to four months, said Windstream.

Uber said that its driver partners in more than 180 cities will begin receiving “geographically targeted” Amber Alerts as part of the company's partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Uber's nationwide participation in the Amber Alert program follows on a pilot program for drivers in Colorado, the company said. “Uber’s presence in communities all across the country will be an incredible asset and we are proud to team up with Uber to increase the reach of the AMBER Alert program and help bring more missing children home safely,” NCMEC Missing Children Division Director-Special Programs Robert Hoever said in a news release.

Commissioner Terrell McSweeny will deliver opening remarks at the FTC Start with Security conference in Austin Nov. 5, an agency news release said Wednesday. Speakers will include those who “helped build and run security programs at large-scale enterprises and rapid-growth startups in Austin, like Dell, RetailMeNot, Honest Dollar, and National Instruments, along with top security experts,” it said. Panelists will address how startups can “build a culture of security, including how they can effectively model threats, train their developers, and ensure secure coding practices; scale security testing when they are growing rapidly and continuously iterating their products; work with third-party code and bug reports, and effectively address vulnerabilities; and move past bug hunting to embrace key security features,” it said. A full list of speakers is available on the event website. The conference begins at 9:30 a.m. and will end at 4 p.m. at the University of Texas-Austin’s AT&T Conference Center, it said.

The FTC approved early termination requests from Ericsson and Amazon in their respective pending acquisitions, effectively eliminating the remainder of the waiting period during which the commission and the Justice Department may have reviewed the deals. Amazon Web Services is buying Elemental Technologies (see 1509040030), and Ericsson is purchasing Envivio.

The Association for Telecommunications Industry Solutions issued an IP "roadmap" to ease the migration of public-safety applications to "IP-enabled media, products and services." The report provides an overview of public-safety needs, IP solutions and new capabilities to spur the adoption of all-IP systems in technologies used to protect lives and property, an ATIS release said Thursday. "This report is vital in helping network operators and the public safety community usher in the all-IP and M2M era in the public safety infrastructure," said CEO Susan Miller.