IDG News Service

A bill requiring that all smartphones sold in California contain a “kill-switch” that allows users to disable them if stolen was approved by the California Assembly.

The California bill mandates that all smartphones contain software that will allow the user to remotely wipe the phone of personal data and lock it so it cannot be used unless an unlocking code is entered.

One of the amendments made to the bill in the assembly allows for phones that were introduced prior to 2015 “that cannot reasonably be reengineered” to continue to be sold past July 1, 2015. Proponents of the bill say that it will reduce smartphone theft because thieves are much less likely to steal phones if the handsets quickly become unusable.

United States and European Union privacy and consumer groups called on privacy regulators to stop Facebook's plans to gather the Internet browsing patterns of its users while they visit other sites.

The groups, gathered in the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) to stop Facebook collecting the web browsing activities of Internet users in order to target advertising.

The groups also called on the FTC to examine whether Facebook's change in business practices violates a 2012 consent order between it and the FTC in a case involving the company's repeated sharing of information its users had asked to keep private

Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, says Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank.

Encrypted traffic can't be given special treatment because it can't be identified, said Meinrath. That could eliminate a major revenue source for ISPs, giving them a strong reason to oppose the use of encrypted services and potentially an indirect way to degrade their performance, he said. Because of the way network discrimination could affect encrypted services, guaranteeing Net neutrality will be critical to ensuring consumers' right to privacy online,

Meinrath wrote with policy activist Sean Vitka in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Both authors of the study also call for regulators to keep control of communications in the hands of users and in their own devices at the edge of networks, giving consumers the power to encrypt their communications from end to end.

Microsoft admitted it made a technical error after it commandeered part of an Internet service's network in order to shut down a botnet, but the Nevada-based company says its services are still down.

A federal court in Reno granted Microsoft an ex-parte restraining order that allowed it to take control of 22 domains run by No-IP, a DNS (Domain Name Service) provider owned by Vitalwerks, which was served the order.

Microsoft alleged the domains were being abused by cyber criminals to manage and distribute malware.

It was the tenth time Microsoft has turned to the courts to take sweeping action against botnets, or networks of hacked computers. Although No-IP was not accused of wrongdoing, Microsoft maintained the company had not done enough to stop abuse on its networks.

Microsoft's intention by seizing the domains was to block only the computers using No-IP's services that were being used as part of a botnet. But "due to a technical error, however, some customers whose devices were not infected by the malware experienced a temporary loss of service," according to an email statement from David Finn, executive director and associate general counsel of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit. He claimed that No-IP's services were restored at 6 a.m. Pacific Time on July 1. No-IP spokeswoman Natalie Goguen wrote via email that Microsoft made a technical change the following day to forward legitimate traffic back to No-IP, but "it didn't do anything."

The smartphone kill switch appears to be on its way to every handset sold in the US so what's all the fuss about? Here's a look at the main points of the technology.

1. What is it? It's a piece of software installed in every new phone that can disable a stolen handset.
2. Why is it needed? In the last few years, the number of violent thefts of smartphones on the streets of major US cities has been rising. Some estimates say 1 in 3 thefts in the US involve a smartphone.
3. How will it work? If your phone is stolen, you or someone you have authorized will be able to call your carrier or use a website to send a "kill" signal to your phone. That signal will lock the device and, if you choose, will also delete personal data.
4. When will it begin? Minnesota's law and the proposed California legislation both mandate a kill-switch for smartphones that are both sold in those states and manufactured after July 1, 2015. Pending federal legislation says Jan 1, 2015.
5. How much will it cost? The Minnesota law and the proposed legislation in California and at the federal level mandate it must be available at no extra cost to users.
6. Do I have to have it on my phone? No. Minnesota's law says it should be installed or available for download.
7. What about Find My iPhone or Google's Android locator? Built-in tracking services can help locate a phone and wipe its memory if the phone remains online, but all too often thieves switch off a stolen phone and reinstall the operating system.
8. What's the industry doing? The industry is hoping to avoid legislation and make it a voluntary commitment. Previously, it launched a database of stolen phones that could be used to prevent them from being reused with new accounts. However, the database has limited reach outside of the US and many stolen phones are sent overseas.
9. Will it work? It's too early to tell, although some early data from New York, London and San Francisco showed significant drops in thefts of iPhones after Apple launched its kill switch.
10. So, can the government kill my smartphone? A court order is typically required, although an exception is made in an emergency that poses "immediate danger of death or great bodily injury."

Have you ever tried to read a website's privacy policy only to give up after slogging through paragraphs and paragraphs of dense, lawyerly language? Privacy-focused companies Disconnect and TRUSTe have released a new browser add-on that attempts to translate those policies into easy-to-understand terms.

The companies' Privacy Icons software, released for a pay-what-you-want fee, analyzes websites' privacy policies, breaking them down into nine categories, including location tracking, do-not-track browser request compliance, and data retention policies. The software then displays, as a browser add-on, nine color-coded icons, with green, yellow and red icons signifying the level of concern about the website's privacy policy in each area.

More transparency on privacy policies is needed, said Casey Oppenheim, co-CEO at Disconnect, which also makes software that blocks online tracking requests.

"The end goal is to help individuals regain control of their personal information online," he said. "As a means to that end, we definitely hope that this project will inspire companies to improve their data practices and compete, even more, on the basis of privacy and security."

In the hunt for more spectrum to speed up mobile networks, Vodafone and Huawei Technologies have successfully tested a technology that lets LTE and GSM share the same frequencies.

The speed of future mobile networks will depend on the amount of spectrum mobile operators can get their hands on. The more they get, the wider the roads they can build.

One thing they can do to get more space is to reuse frequencies that are currently used for older technologies such as GSM and 3G. But that isn't as easy as sounds, as operators still have a lot of voice and messaging traffic in those older networks. That traffic isn't going away for a long time, irrespective of the level of competition from Internet-based services.

However, using a technology called GL DSS (GSM-LTE Dynamic Spectrum Sharing) Vodafone and Huawei have shown a way to allow GSM and LTE to coexist. GL DSS lets Huawei's SRC (Single Radio Controller) give GSM a higher priority during periods of heavy traffic, ensuring that voice calls get though unharmed. But the SRC can also provide more room for LTE when users aren't making calls, allowing for better throughput, the vendor said.

The total amount of data handled by wireless carriers in the US more than doubled in 2013, an increase driven in large part by video traffic. US carriers saw 3.2 exabytes of data traffic run across their networks, the CTIA said in its annual report on the US wireless industry.

An exabyte is 10x18 bytes or, put another way, a billion gigabytes.

The figure represents a 120 percent increase from the 1.5 exabytes carried in all of 2012, the group said.

The data refers to traffic carried over licensed spectrum. With 336 million subscriptions in the US, that figure works out to an average of 801 megabytes per subscriber line per month. A large proportion of that data was video. That's an average of 563 megabytes per subscriber line per month.

US customers spent 218 billion minutes per month talking on their wireless devices, which works out to an average of 650 minutes per month per line; sent 153 billion text messages per month, or 457 messages per line; and 10 billion multimedia messages, or 30 per line.

Free snacks and on-site video games may help companies attract skilled IT workers, but speeding up the hiring cycle is also important. Drawn-out employee searches frustrate IT managers and prompt good candidates to accept jobs elsewhere.

Increased corporate IT investment and the technology industry's low unemployment rate have created a candidate-driven market, so companies need to streamline the recruitment process if they want to get their hands on the best IT pros available.

"The unemployment for technical jobs in most of our markets is a lower rate than the general unemployment rate," said Victor Gaines, vice president of talent acquisition at Fiserv, which provides financial services technology to banks, retailers and investment firms, among other clients. "Folks who have technical skill sets are finding jobs at a faster rate and they're staying at those jobs [longer] than perhaps some other skill sets."

Jack Cullen, president of IT staffing firm Modis, offered a blunt assessment of the US IT hiring process: "Managers that are hiring IT talent, they're pickier than ever and they're hurting themselves." Talented workers may have multiple job offers, he added, so slow and overly selective employers will lose their top choices. IT job website Dice.com placed the US technology industry's unemployment rate at 2.7 percent in 2014's first quarter, compared to an overall US unemployment rate of 6.7 percent.

Developers can try out new features of the next version of Internet Explorer using a test edition Microsoft has released for their use. The Internet Explorer Developer Channel, which can be downloaded for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1, runs independently of the user's copy of IE, allowing programmers to test the newest browser features without disrupting their current browser setup.

The Internet Explorer Developer Channel will offer an early version of IE while it is still being worked on by Microsoft programmers. Developers can preview features planned for the upcoming editions of the browser to help them better build Web applications and pages that use the new capabilities.