Toshiba became the first Japanese company to join the OpenFog Consortium, whose other members include Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University’s Edge Laboratory, Toshiba said in a Thursday announcement. The consortium “brings together key players” in the IoT “ecosystem” to promote the deployment of “fog computing,” Toshiba said. It defined fog computing as a “paradigm for expanding cloud computing” to enable the creation of storage and network services between devices and cloud data centers “in a highly virtualized manner.” OpenFog “works to accelerate innovation and industry growth through new business models and applications enabled by an open fog-based architecture,” Toshiba said. “The OpenFog architecture brings seamless intelligence from the cloud to IoT endpoints using an open standardized approach.” IoT’s “prevalence” has made it possible to monitor and control many types of devices over the cloud, Toshiba said. “The cloud receives and analyzes data to provide visualized information for use in prediction, efficiency optimization, downtime reduction, and performance improvement,” it said. “Companies also expect to add new functions to the IoT devices. All of these factors increase network traffic and pose a challenge to fast data.”

ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee continued debating Tuesday into early evening whether to adopt a document that would say the GAC is still unable to reach consensus on supporting or rejecting the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability's (CCWG-Accountability) proposed recommendations for changing ICANN accountability mechanisms. The GAC is expected to say in its response it “has no objection” to the ICANN board transmitting the existing CCWG-Accountability proposal to NTIA. GAC members indicated they fully support nine of the 12 recommendations included in the CCWG-Accountability proposal but weren't sure whether divisions about three other recommendations mean they shouldn't partially support the proposal. GAC, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization all need to reach a conclusion by Wednesday whether they support or reject the CCWG-Accountability proposal. The ICANN board is to vote on the CCWG-Accountability proposal and a final Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition plan Thursday as part of ICANN's meeting in Marrakech, Morocco (see 1603040065). GAC's main sticking point in reaching consensus in Marrakech again involved how to handle CCWG-Accountability's recommendations on GAC's status within ICANN after the IANA transition. CCWG-Accountability recommended the ICANN board be allowed to reject consensus ICANN advice via a 60 percent majority vote. The working group also included a carve-out in its proposal that would bar the GAC from participating in final community votes on taking enforcement action when an ICANN community member objects to ICANN board implementation of GAC advice. GAC Vice Chairwoman Olga Cavalli, also one of Argentina's GAC representatives, led France and six other Latin American nations in objecting to both portions of the CCWG-Accountability proposal (see 1602190047). GAC told CCWG-Accountability in January it wasn't able to reach consensus on whether to support an earlier version of the accountability proposal amid similar concerns about earlier versions of the GAC-related recommendations (see 1601260067).

“Completeness of protection” is the top concern among large- and medium-sized businesses that have mobile device and IoT security systems in place, an IHS survey found. The legal battle between Apple and the FBI over iPhone encryption “has put extreme focus on the topic of mobile device security,” IHS said in a Monday report. “Like it or not, a new wave of mobile devices is being connected to corporate networks, changing the way people work and blurring the lines between personal and corporate assets -- and making nearly every enterprise in North America a target for mobile security solutions,” it said. “Buyers are making important budget and technology decisions now, and security vendors wishing to tap into the mobile and IoT device security opportunity need to offer on-device, on-network and even cloud-based solutions.” The research firm canvassed 157 businesses in the U.S. and Canada and found that many IT departments “don’t know how many or which mobile devices are on their networks already,” it said. “Even with security solutions in place, devices are lost, stolen, infected and compromised, so solutions need to address more than threat prevention.” Most IT departments also lack “comprehensive security for mobile devices, and the pressure of also rolling out solutions for IoT devices can be overwhelming,” it said.

The Obama administration unveiled its new open data initiative, the Opportunity Project -- a resource meant to assist individuals in using government data to access resources in their communities, during an event at the White House Monday. "Federal open data is much more meaningful when we do some of the work of combining and curating so that the data can really paint a comprehensive picture of something that matters a lot to people, which is access to assets in their community," said Aden Van Noppen, adviser to U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith. Van Noppen said the project was developed as a collaboration of 12 software development teams, plus subject matter experts, for use within Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, Missouri, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington. It uses "user-friendly digital tools to expose inequality and access to opportunity" and help many different groups access that information, Van Noppen said. Users of the various tools provided by the project can access aggregated federal data collected from their community related to affordable housing, transportation, schools and more, said Van Noppen. "The project represents a collaboration [of] the White House, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Census Bureau, private sector and local communities," said Smith. "It's been a true collaboration." The Opportunity Project is at www.opportunity.census.gov.

The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles directed ICANN not to issue the .africa generic top-level domain (gTLD), granting a temporary restraining order sought by the DotConnectAfrica (DCA) Trust that halts delegation of the gTLD until after a ruling is issued in DCA’s lawsuit over its claim to the gTLD. ICANN had chosen to delegate the gTLD to ZA Central Registry over DCA and issued an emergency resolution Thursday “to prepare to move forward” with delegation of the gTLD. DCA disputed ICANN’s delegation decision and won a binding independent review process ruling at the International Centre for Dispute Resolution in 2015 that found ICANN violated its bylaws after DCA’s earlier 2013 challenge to the .africa delegation decision. U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles ruled Friday there are “serious questions going to the merits” of DCA’s case. The registry “has demonstrated that once the [generic] TLD is issued, it will be unable to obtain those rights elsewhere. Moreover, the injury it will suffer cannot be compensated through monetary damages,” Klausner said in his order. ICANN claimed “the African governments and the ICANN community will suffer prejudice if the delegation of the gTLD is delayed,” Klausner said. The restraining order “will allow the Court time to consider arguments” from DCA, the registry said in a news release. ICANN said it plans to file a brief on the case March 14 and will participate in oral argument April 4, “after which the Court will make a decision about whether or not ICANN can proceed to delegation, even though the lawsuit is still proceeding.”

Publishers concerned about the growing use of advertising blockers are getting some help from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. IAB released a tactical guide to help coax consumers to stop using such applications and a tool that can detect website visitors using ad blockers. "The release of this primer in conjunction with the open-source ad blocking detection script will open the door for transparency and meaningful dialogue with visitors using ad blockers,” said Scott Cunningham, IAB Tech senior vice president-general manager, in a news release Monday. He said the offerings would help both small and big publishers find a way to "cut through the blockade." IAB, whose members include News Corp., Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, The New York Times and Time, said the primer provides a step-by-step process for publishers to detect and explain to consumers the value of advertising and then ask them to remove such blockers, among other options. As of August, ad blocking reached about 198 million active users globally, a 41 percent increase over the prior 12 months and cost publishers about $22 billion, IAB statistics show. In the U.S., there were about 45 million active users as of June, the industry group said. Consumers use ad blockers to protect against viruses, improve computer performance and because they dislike ads, said IAB.

The Supreme Court denied Apple’s petition for a writ of certiorari seeking a review of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling the company violated antitrust laws in its e-book pricing case. As is customary, the Supreme Court provided no reasoning in its Monday order denying cert. Apple’s cert petition had faced long odds of getting a Supreme Court review given the court’s history of taking few antitrust cases each year and the lack of a clear split among federal circuit courts on the issues in the case (see 1510300062). The Supreme Court’s denial of Apple’s cert petition means the company will now have to pay a $450 million settlement it agreed to pay to consumers and state attorneys general that had been contingent on the 2nd Circuit’s 2015 ruling (see 1506300067), DOJ said. “Apple’s liability for knowingly conspiring with book publishers to raise the prices of e-books is settled once and for all,” said DOJ Assistant Attorney General-Antitrust Division Bill Baer in a news release. Apple didn’t comment. Amazon said it’s “ready to distribute the court-mandated settlement funds to Kindle customers as soon as we’re instructed to move forward.” The Supreme Court needed to decide “whether Apple should even be allowed to argue that its arrangement could benefit consumers,” said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka in a blog post. “Apple made a strong case that its deal with publishers was critical to allowing it [to] compete with Amazon. The Supreme Court might or might not have found those arguments convincing, but it should have at least weighed them under antitrust’s flexible rule of reason. By letting the rigid per se deal stand as the controlling legal standard, the Court has ensured that antitrust law in general will put obsolete legal precedents from the pre-digital era above consumer welfare.”

The 24 departments and agencies participating in the Office of Management and Budget's federal data center consolidation initiative "made progress" on data closure efforts but "fell short" of OMB's goal for agencies to close 40 percent of all noncore data centers by FY 2015, GAO said in its yearly review of the initiative. As of November, "agencies identified a total of 10,584 data centers, of which they reported closing 3,125," said GAO. The departments of Agriculture, Defense, Interior and Treasury had 84 percent of total data center closures. Agencies also made "limited progress" against OMB's FY 2015 core data center optimization performance metrics, and two failed to report any optimization information to OMB. GAO recommended to "better ensure that federal data center consolidation and optimization efforts improve governmental efficiency and achieve cost savings," the heads of the departments of Interior, State, Transportation and Treasury, plus the EPA, NASA, Small Business Administration, National Science Foundation, OMB and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "take action to address challenges in establishing, and to complete, planned data center cost savings and avoidance targets for fiscal years 2016 through 2018."

ICANN said its initial release of label generation rules for the root zone (LGR-1) is “designed to be the first installment of a conservative set of rules to determine the validity and variants of labels for the [Domain Name System] Root Zone.” LGR-1 contains code prints, variants and rules for using Arabic script in domain names. As ICANN approves additional LGR proposals for other language scripts, it will release “new versions of the integrated LGR,” the nonprofit said in a Wednesday news release. “Once finalized, each version can be applied mechanically to determine the validity of an applied-for top-level domain label and the maximal set of its allocatable variant labels for the scripts supported. Further mechanisms are being developed to determine which of these allocatable variant labels will actually be allocated to those who have applied for top-level domains.” ICANN Internationalized Domain Names Program Senior Manager Sarmad Hussain said the release of LGR-1 Wednesday is “a significant step forward in developing a multilingual Internet. These rules provide an open and transparent method for determining the validity and variants of top-level domain (TLD) names, or labels, in the world's various scripts and writing systems.” Development of LGR-1 “benefits current and future Internet users who use the Arabic script by making it easier to navigate the web, and helps address confusion and security issues in using the domain name system -- specifically top-level domains,” Hussain said in a blog post.

Business professionals in many industries see IoT making a big shift toward “mainstream adoption” in 2016, Gartner said Thursday in a survey report. The research firm canvassed 465 firms in 18 business sectors globally in November and found 29 percent using IoT products or services, it said. An additional 14 percent are planning to implement IoT in the coming 12 months, with 21 percent more planning to implement IoT after 2016, it said. “The number of organizations adopting IoT will grow 50 percent in 2016, reaching 43 percent of organizations overall.” In the “aggregate,” 64 percent “plan to eventually implement IoT,” it said. “It is also important to note that another 38 percent have no plans to implement IoT, including 9 percent that see no relevance whatsoever in the technologies.” IoT adoption remains low because “many organizations have yet to establish a clear picture of what benefits the IoT can deliver, or have not yet invested the time to develop ideas for how to apply IoT to their business,” Gartner said. "However, we are poised for a marked shift in focus toward customer-facing benefits for planned IoT implementations, positioning IoT as a key competitive marketplace weapon going forward."