Applications to the Rural Utilities Service Distance Learning and Telemedicine Grant Program are due July 6, RUS said in Friday's Federal Register. DLT grants are designed to give access to education, training and health care resources for rural Americans, it said. The grants provide financial assistance to encourage and improve telemedicine services and distance learning services in rural areas through the use of telecommunications, computer networks and related advanced technologies to be used by students, teachers, medical professionals and rural residents, said the agency.

The FCC can contribute to the "containment of data breaches by approving the use of automated texts and voice communications to give timely notice of those events," the American Bankers Association responded to an ex parte in docket 02-278. The FCC should grant the association a petition for exemption under the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act because the obstacles have been resolved, as shown in the ex parte letter from the National Consumer Law Center and National Association of Consumer Advocates, said ABA in the docket Friday. NCLC and NACA conceded that automated fraud alert and money transfer messages are appropriate and in consumers' interests and asked that those messages be subject to additional conditions intended to protect the privacy of consumers and avoid inconvenience to unintended recipients, it said.

Per the FTC’s request, federal courts in New York and Georgia temporarily halted three debt collection operations that allegedly violated federal law by threatening and deceiving consumers via text messages, emails and phone calls, a news release said Thursday. The defendants are known as Premier Debt Acquisitions, The Primary Group and Unified Global Group. The FTC said the defendants used text messages, emails and phone calls to falsely threaten to arrest or sue consumers, unlawfully contacted friends, family members and employers, withheld information consumers needed to confirm or dispute debts, and never identified themselves as debt collectors. The commission said it seeks to permanently end the unlawful practices and charged the defendants with violating the FTC Act and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. “Legitimate debt collectors know the rules,” said Consumer Protection Bureau Director Jessica Rich. “They can’t harass or lie to you, whether they send a text, email, or call you.” The commissioner vote approving the federal court complaints was unanimous. Unified Global Group had no immediate comment. Premier Debt Acquisitions and The Primary Group couldn't be reached for comment.

Nearly 150 privacy and human rights organizations, technology companies, trade associations and individual security and policy experts sent a joint letter to the White House Tuesday, defending Americans’ right to use strong encryption to protect their data and opposing the mandatory “backdoor” idea that would allow the government to access encrypted data. The debate over encryption was sparked by Apple’s announcement that new iPhones would be encrypted by default, the groups said. In response to law enforcement and intelligence officials, including FBI Director James Comey, who say Congress should legislate government access to encrypted devices, the letter said strong encryption is the “cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security.” It “protects billions of people every day against countless threats -- be they street criminals trying to steal our phones and laptops, computer criminals trying to defraud us, corporate spies trying to obtain our companies’ most valuable trade secrets, repressive governments trying to stifle dissent, or foreign intelligence agencies trying to compromise our and our allies’ most sensitive national security secrets.” They urged President Barack Obama to “reject” any proposal that would require U.S. companies to deliberately weaken the security of their products and to “focus on developing policies that will promote rather than undermine the wide adoption of strong encryption technology." Adobe, Apple, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Cisco, CEA, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Internet Association, Microsoft and New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute were among the signees. “The President has been letting his top intelligence and law enforcement officials criticize companies for making their devices more secure, and letting them suggest that Congress should pass anti-encryption, pro-backdoor legislation,” even though “encryption backdoors are bad for privacy, bad for security, bad for human rights, and bad for business,” New America’s Cybersecurity Initiative co-Director Kevin Bankston said in a news release. “Even the White House Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies has joined with most leading security experts to agree that strong encryption of data is necessary to protect against hacking and other computer fraud and abuse,” said Computer & Communications Industry Association President Ed Black in a news release.

FCC assertion of jurisdiction over interconnection agreements in its February net neutrality order was possibly the most surprising provision there and at odds with previous policies, said Free State Foundation scholar Daniel Lyons Tuesday in a paper released by the group. The order decided the FCC would develop interconnection jurisprudence “on a case-by-case basis in response to claims filed with the Commission under Section 208 alleging that broadband providers are engaged in unjust or unreasonable practices,” Lyons wrote. This is preferable to imposing prescriptive rules, yet leaves many questions unanswered, he said. “While the Commission has a role to play, it should approach any intervention with caution.” Interconnection markets are complex, competitive and evolving, and every consumer disruption isn't a market failure, said Lyons. The agency "should intervene when there is credible evidence of anticompetitive threats, but without distorting the natural evolution of interconnection markets or retarding the ability of networks to adapt to stimuli elsewhere in the Internet ecosystem,” Lyons wrote. A first step by the FCC should be developing a better understanding of interconnection markets and then it should intervene only when it needs to do so to protect consumers from “legitimate harm,” said the Boston College Law School associate professor.

The FCC's Consumer Bureau on Friday granted video relay service providers a temporary, limited waiver from a Social Security number rule. The order waives in those cases where the users have no such numbers the requirement that VRS providers obtain from new and existing users the last four digits of their Social Security numbers or their Tribal identification numbers as part of the VRS user registration process.

AT&T and Hulu signed a deal to bring the subscription streaming service to the carrier's customers through AT&T’s websites and mobile applications, said the telco in a news release. AT&T customers will be able to browse Hulu programs and watch them through an app for mobile-device viewing or an AT&T website for Internet viewing, it said. AT&T and Hulu are exploring the possibility of bringing a Hulu app to TV, said the telco Wednesday. The mobile offering will be available to AT&T customers later this year, it said.

The FCC Wireline Bureau is seeking comment on AT&T's request to grandfather, and eventually discontinue on Dec. 31, 2016, a corporate calling card service throughout the U.S. because of declining sales, a bureau notice said Tuesday. Comments are due May 27 and the request will be automatically granted within 31 days of the notice's release unless the FCC notifies AT&T the grant won't be effected.

Adtran is expanding NG-PON2’s applicability for gigabit broadband beyond the smaller business and backhaul market to the wider market by removing concerns of future bandwidth exhaustion or quality of service issues, the company said in an email Wednesday. NG-PON2 is a next-generation fiber to the home or fiber to the premises access standard that will enable service providers more scale for their FTTH networks to better support gigabit service as it grows from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps, it said in a blog post. This is the first time both residential FTTH customers and early business adopters of this premium technology can be immediately supported on a single, common access architecture, it said. Adtran is streamlining the high-cost areas of 10 Gbps PON design with flexible optics architecture with multiple “cost vs. capability” options, including fixed wavelength 10 Gbps optics, the company said.

NTIA plans a public meeting June 11 as part of its multistakeholder process to develop a consumer data privacy code of conduct for facial recognition technology, said notice in the Federal Register Wednesday. The meeting will be 1-5 p.m. in the boardroom at the American Institute of Architects, 1735 New York Ave. NW. NTIA held its first facial recognition multistakeholder meeting Feb. 6, 2014. The most recent meeting was in December. The June 11 meeting will let stakeholders continue to engage in an open, transparent, consensus-driven process to develop a code of conduct for the technology, said NTIA.