“The FCC’s proposal is potentially damaging to the entire online advertising ecosystem,” said Dan Jaffe, Group Executive Vice President of Government Relations for ANA. “This attempted regulatory overreach by the FCC is not necessary. Existing privacy self-regulatory programs such as those carried out by the Digital Advertising Alliance are working well and already provide consumer transparency, notice and choice for interest-based advertising.”

The Digital Advertising Alliance provides a voluntary self-regulation program for companies using online behavioral advertising. The program includes group principles, implementation resources, and a registry through which consumers can opt out of data collection.

Jaffe calls digital advertising and interest-based advertising a “growth powerhouse that supports much of the freely available content online,” calls for the FCC to produce evidence that it harms consumers. He also says there is no distinction made in the proposal between sensitive and non-sensitive information. He also says that the First Amendment protects ISPs and marketers commercial speech rights against targeted restrictions like those proposed by the FCC, that the commission failed to consider an opt-out strategy, and suggested that the courts would side with the ANA if the proposal was challenged legally.

“The industry has designed strong privacy self-regulatory programs, buttressed with enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, are an effective framework that provides consumers with the ability to control how information about them is collected and used,” Jaffe said.

Reply comments on the proposal are due June 27.

Source: TheWHIR

In an analysis of recent revenue and profit trends of HPE’s various businesses, The Next Platform’s Timothy Prickett Morgan points out that enterprise technology services are a people-intensive, low-margin business, and says that this is probably the biggest reason CEO Meg Whitman has decided to get out of it.

While its bread-and-butter server business has been essentially flat, it’s generated a lot more profit for HPE than Enterprise Services. Second to servers in terms of revenue is Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing, which is being shed as part of the Enterprise Services unit.

The only clear way for the company to drive meaningful revenue growth now appears to be simply selling higher volumes of commoditized data center hardware, Prickett Morgan concludes. Driving volume in hardware sales is HPE’s first line of defense against the market behemoth that is about to be born as Dell closes its $67 billion acquisition of EMC.

Original article appeared here: HPE Bets on Core Data Center Hardware Sales to Drive Profits

Source: TheWHIR

CIRA surveyed 1,200 Canadian Internet users and 300 leaders at IT firms in the country to produce the report From Broadband Access to Smart Economies, which will inform discussions at the upcoming Canadian Internet Forum, June 1 in Ottawa, Canada’s capital. The forum will likely include some calls for increased government involvement in infrastructure, as only three percent of those who feel Canada is competing well in the global technology market cite government infrastructure investment as a factor.

Nearly half of IT leaders surveyed said “Canadian technology companies aren’t equipped to compete globally,” and three-quarters said their major technology challenges require “made-in-Canada” solutions. The report refers to a Conference Board of Canada report which ranked the country 9th of 16 OECD countries for innovation, and indicated it is falling behind in ICT investment and connectivity.

Connectivity is not just a business issue, but is seen as crucial by Internet users for learning new skills (75 percent) and supporting childhood education (68 percent). Six in ten Canadian Internet users say that students should learn “basic programming/coding” skills, and IT leaders agree, with 88 percent saying coding should be a part of the core secondary school curriculum.

The global shortage of cloud skills led to the launch of AWS Educate a year ago, and a report from Incapsula in September suggested DDoS mitigation skills are also lacking around the world.

The average download speed for Canadians is 18.64 Mbps, as measured by CIRA’s Internet Performance Test, and a major divide between rural and urban users means many Canadian’s have much slower Internet speeds.

Source: TheWHIR

Service providers and others in the cloud and hosting ecosystem can still reserve a booth by downloading a prospectus (PDF), filling out the form, and sending it back to Penton by email.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Canadians Speak Out Against Controversial Anti-Terrorism Legislation Bill C-51

The code of conduct arrives as Europe comes to terms with the bloody attacks in Paris and Brussels by Islamic State, which has used the Web and social media to spread its message of hate against its enemies. The companies said it remains a “challenge” to strike the right balance between freedom of expression and hate speech in the self-generated content on online platforms.

“We remain committed to letting the Tweets flow,” said Twitter’s head of public policy for Europe, Karen White, in the statement. “However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.”

Platforms Sued

A French Jewish youth group, UEJF, sued Twitter, Facebook and Google in Paris this month over how they monitor hate speech on the web. In the course of about six weeks in April and May, members of French anti-discrimination groups flagged unambiguous hate speech that they said promoted racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism. More than 90 percent of the posts pointed out to Twitter and YouTube remained online within 15 days on average following requests for removal, according to the study by UEJF, SOS Racisme and SOS Homophobie.

“With a global community of 1.6 billion people we work hard to balance giving people the power to express themselves whilst ensuring we provide a respectful environment,” said Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, in the statement. “There’s no place for hate speech on Facebook.”

Source: TheWHIR

On May 12, Tumblr told users that it “recently learned that a third party had obtained access to a set of Tumblr user email addresses…from early 2013, prior to the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo” — perhaps an important clarification as Yahoo undergoes a strategic review to sell off its core business.

“Our analysis gives us no reason to believe that this information was used to access Tumblr accounts,” Tumblr said. “As a precaution, however, we will be requiring affected Tumblr users to set a new password.”

Hunt said that the Tumblr security breach is part of a pattern of massive breaches recently that have come to light years after they happened, referring to the LinkedIn breach that happened in 2012; “[t]his data has been lying dormant (or at least out of public sight) for long periods of time,” he said.

According to the report, because the passwords were hashed and salted, they are “very hard for hackers to crack.” The hacker selling the dataset on the dark web was only able to get $150 for it because the data was “essentially just a list of emails.”

Source: TheWHIR

QTS acquired Carpathia for $326 million. The deal gave the data center provider a well-developed managed hosting business and more than doubled the amount of data centers in its portfolio, including the company’s first international footprint in Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Former CEO Weber also joined Carpathia in 2008 following a three-year run at Sun, which in 2005 acquired an IT management startup he co-founded called SevenSpace.

“The primary goal for the integration of QTS and Carpathia was to strengthen QTS’ ability to deliver the nation’s only fully integrated technology platform, and Peter Weber played a key role in helping us achieve that goal,” QTS CEO, Chad Williams, said in a statement.

Original article appeared here: QTS Appoints Carpathia’s Jon Greaves as CTO

Source: TheWHIR

The Most Popular Messaging App in Every Country

What are the apps you use to communicate? The most popular messaging apps vary country by country, according to a survey by SimilarWeb. WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in 109 countries, or 55.6 percent of the world.

Google Beats Oracle on Copyright, Defeating $9 Billion Claim

Google vs. Oracle has come to a conclusion with jurors arguing in Google’s favor that it made fair use of the code under copyright law. The outcome saved the search giant around $9 billion.

Services, Not Price, Move the Needle on Cloud Vendor Market Share

Remember a few years ago when it seemed there were cloud price drops everywhere you looked? Well, it turns out this may not have been the best move as it had little impact on cloud market share, a new report by 451 Research finds.

Microsoft, Facebook Build Undersea Cable for Faster Internet

Water takes up about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, so it only makes sense that Internet companies would make use of the space to expand their reach. Microsoft and Facebook are building an undersea cable in the Atlantic Ocean will be operated by Telixus.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Verizon Shutting Down Public Cloud, Gives Users One Month to Move Data

The walkout by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has been one of the largest in the U.S. in recent years. Perez helped broker the deal by bringing Verizon Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and two union executives to Washington to discuss ways to resolve the dispute.

To try and keep up with business demands during the strike, Verizon had dispatched managers and non-union workers to call centers and field-service assignments. Yet even with the temporary help, the strike has been a drag on the company’s landline business, Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said during an investor presentation earlier this month. Because of the strike, Verizon probably won’t add FiOS TV or broadband customers in the quarter, he said.

READ MORE: Equinix Mulling Purchase of CenturyLink and Verizon Data Centers

The new labor contract is the first since Verizon took full control of Verizon Wireless and agreed to buy AOL, two deals worth almost $135 billion that point toward a wireless-centric future. The company has been shedding union-heavy operations, including its FiOS business in three states last month. Landlines accounted for 29 percent of Verizon’s revenue, down from almost 50 percent in 2008. And as its strategy has shifted, the ranks of union workers have shrunk by about half from 78,000 13 years ago.

Facing years of declines in the landline unit as more people opt for only wireless service, Verizon pushed to have union workers pitch in more for health benefits and be flexible on temporary job relocations. The unions, which had been working without a contract since Aug. 1, wanted to limit those transfers of workers to other regions, protect jobs from being moved offshore and preserve pension increases.

Of the workers, about 29,000 are represented by the CWA, 10,000 by the IBEW, according Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the CWA.

Source: TheWHIR

While the courses offer the basics around security, only 38 percent of respondents said that the course includes mobile device security and 29 percent said the course includes training on the secure use of cloud services. Less than half (45 percent) of respondents said that the training is mandatory for employees.

In order to create a culture of security, the study recommends providing interactive games that illustrate threats for employees which can make the content easier to retain. Employees should also be given incentives around reporting security issues and protecting confidential information.

[LEARN MORE AT HostingCon with Trey Guinn on The New Encryption Landscape: Trends and How To]

The change in culture starts at the top as only 35 percent of respondents said senior management believes privacy and security training is a priority.

A minority of companies (19 percent) said their organizations actually demote employees or reduce salary, bonuses or incentives (16 percent) in the event that an employee is found responsible for a data breach.

A study last year found that inappropriate file sharing inside the organization was the most likely cause of data leakage. Eighty-four percent of companies surveyed by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) said that they planned to improve file security through investments in training.

Source: TheWHIR