Mozilla launched a free content blocker for Safari users on iOS 9, allowing users to control their flow of data "by blocking categories of trackers such as those used for ads, analytics and social media," wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer. The tool can also enhance mobile device performance by blocking Web fonts, she added. "Too many users have lost trust and lack meaningful controls over their digital lives. This loss of trust has impacted the ecosystem -- sometimes negatively. Content blockers offer a way to rebuild that trust by empowering users," she wrote Monday. Standards for what gets blocked by such tools aren't clear, she wrote, saying blockers don't provide ways for content providers "to improve and become unblocked. And some content blockers remove companies from a list in exchange for payment." Dixon-Thayer wrote that Mozilla has based a portion of its tool, Focus by Firefox, on a list provided by partner Disconnect under a general public license. Disconnect "bases its list on a public definition of tracking and publicly identifies any changes it makes to that list, so users and content providers can see and understand the standards it is applying," she wrote. It means content providers can improve their practices and become unblocked, "creating an important feedback loop between users and content providers," she added.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument Wednesday in Facebook v. Power Ventures. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed several amicus briefs supporting Power Ventures, said in a Monday news release that it will urge the 9th Circuit to dismiss Facebook's claim that Cayman Islands-based Power Ventures violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) when it created a Web-based tool permitting users to log into all of their social media accounts in one place and aggregate messages, friend lists and other data. Facebook sued Power Ventures in 2008 and claimed the company also violated the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (Can-Spam) Act, which prohibits sending unwanted emails with misleading information. In February 2012, U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Francisco granted Facebook’s motion for summary judgment (see 1202210105). In September 2013, Power Ventures was ordered to pay more than $3 million in damages to Facebook. Power Ventures CEO Steven Vachani appealed the ruling. EFF said Legal Fellow Jamie Williams will argue that the 9th Circuit "has already ruled that the CFAA must be interpreted narrowly to avoid transforming what was intended to be an anti-hacking statute into a law that could sweep up innocuous conduct. Criminalizing a routine process like switching IP addresses stifles innovation and harms consumers -- and it’s not what Congress had in mind." Facebook didn't comment Tuesday.

Apple users “can no longer be complacent about security,” as the number of infections and new threats against Mac OS X and iOS devices rises sharply, said Dick O'Brien, senior information developer at cybersecurity firm Symantec, in a Tuesday blog post. Symantec estimates the number of new Mac OS X threats rose by 15 percent in 2014, and the number of iOS threats discovered this year has more than doubled since 2014, O’Brien said. The range of threats affecting Apple devices also has “multiplied,” he said. “These threats span from ordinary cybercrime gangs branching out and porting their threats to Apple platforms, right up to high level attacker groups developing custom Mac OS X and iOS malware.” Attackers targeting iOS devices “need to find a way to install malware” on an iPhone or iPad, “which can represent a significant hurdle,” he said. Many threats are installed when victims connect their devices to a “compromised” desktop computer, he said. “Jailbroken” devices, meaning iPhones that have had their iOS software restrictions removed, “present more opportunities for compromise and many threats are designed to take advantage of jailbroken phones,” he said.

Amazon’s Streaming Partners program, launched Tuesday, allows Prime members to add Showtime, Starz and “dozens” more video subscriptions to their Prime membership at slight discounts and with “self-service cancellation of any subscription at any time.” Subscriptions to Showtime and Starz are $8.99 per month through Amazon. It's billing the program to video providers as a fast track to cord cutters, and to consumers as a way to streamline their video subscriptions. Content providers can “reach a new set of highly engaged viewers with Amazon responsible for driving subscriber acquisition,” it said. Amazon also handles billing with credit cards already on file. In addition to “special Prime member pricing,” subscribers get the latest episodes available simultaneously with broadcast, single-account billing, one watch list across all subscriptions and integration with IMDb X-Ray, Amazon said. “The way people watch TV is changing, and customers need an easier way to subscribe to and enjoy multiple streaming subscriptions,” said Michael Paull, Amazon vice president-digital video. The program makes it easy for video providers to reach “highly engaged Prime members, many of whom are already frequent streamers,” Paull said. Additional content launch partners are A+E Network (Lifetime Movie Club), AMC (Shudder and SundanceNow Doc Club), BroadbandTV (Hooplakidz Plus), Cinedigm (Dove Channel, Docurama, CONtv), CuriosityStream, Defy Media (ScreenJunkies Plus), DramaFever (DramaFever Instant), FlixFling (Cinefest, Nature Vision, Warriors and Gangsters, Dox, Monsters and Nightmares), Gaia, Gravitas (Film Forum, Daring Docs, Fear Factory), IndieFlix (IndieFlix Shorts), Qello, Ring TV Boxing, RLJ Entertainment (Acorn TV, Urban Movie Channel, Acacia TV), Smithsonian (Smithsonian Earth) and Tribeca Short List. Showtime also announced a similar deal with Hulu last summer.

Streaming video and audio account for more than 70 percent of North America's downstream Internet traffic in peak hours on fixed access networks, Sandvine said in a news release Monday. That's up from less than 35 percent five years ago, Sandvine said. The three top sources of video traffic on North American fixed access networks -- Netflix at 37.1 percent, Google's YouTube at 17.9 percent and Amazon Video at 3.1 percent -- all had an increase in traffic share over the course of the year, Sandvine said, and Netflix now has a bigger share of traffic than all streaming audio and video did five years ago. The growth in streaming video is driving down the share of fixed access bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent, from about 7 percent a year ago to 5 percent now, Sandvine said. The data comes from Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report.

Three in every four millennials routinely delete content to free up storage space on their smartphones and later regret it, a survey for Western Digital found. The company commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to canvass 5,000 consumers aged 16 to 24 in the U.K., France, Germany and the U.S. to analyze how people “create, consume, share and store digital content,” it said in a report. Though many described content on their smartphones as “priceless,” sacrificing a picture or video to free up storage space on the device “is a regular occurrence,” it said. Thirty-one percent said they run out of space on their smartphones on a weekly basis, while 17 percent say this is a daily problem, the company said. “Running out of storage space isn't the greatest challenge threatening mankind at the moment, but it's certainly an annoyance for a great many consumers," it said. "Our findings clearly show that consumers are sacrificing precious memories and valuable content to make more space on their devices." A big reason why deleting content is so prevalent is millenials’ preference for digital forms of media over physical content, it said. “Of the respondents, 48 percent prefer digital versions of music albums compared to 25 percent preferring the hard copy,” it said. “The same goes for films,” with 41 percent of respondents preferring a digital copy versus 29 percent for DVD or Blu-ray, it said. “With an average of five music albums, five feature films and five television shows being downloaded each week by the consumers in the study, it's clear a huge amount of digital media is being consumed.” The findings “support the notion that there is a disconnect among the majority of consumers over how much digital content they consume and create and how much storage they own and need,” the company said Thursday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's complaint against Google on its student data tracking, collection and use practices is "serious because it alleges and provides persuasive evidence that Google continues to misrepresent its privacy practices in the same manner that the FTC found illegal twice -- before the 2012 election," wrote NetCompetition Chairman Scott Cleland in a blog post Thursday. NetCompetition members include AT&T, Comcast, CTIA, NCTA and Verizon, its website said. EFF's petition filed with the FTC (see 1512010068) is a "legitimate litmus test of the FTC-Google privacy enforcement" for several reasons, said Cleland. He wrote that the FTC has known about the Google Apps for Education privacy problems for nearly two years but hasn't taken action and that EFF's petition generally reflects EU problems with Google's privacy practices. He said the FTC charged Google as a privacy violator in 2011 and 2012, but "abruptly shut down all" Google antitrust investigations after Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was credited "with being very helpful in tilting the 2012 Presidential outcome." Cleland said state attorneys general are expected to "step up" if the FTC doesn't fulfill its enforcement role. Google has denied EFF's allegations and said it keeps students' data private and secure.

In a 2-1 decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of ex-New York City police officer Gilberto Valle, who was charged with improperly accessing a police database -- violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) -- to get information about people in connection to a fantasy role-playing sex fetish community. The court's Thursday opinion also upheld his July 2014 acquittal on a kidnapping conspiracy count. Valle was convicted in March 2013 on the conspiracy count and CFAA violation count. He engaged in email communications and Web chats with members of the Dark Fetish Network, the Internet sex community, said the opinion. "These 'chats' consisted of gruesome and graphic descriptions of kidnapping, torturing, cooking, raping, murdering, and cannibalizing various women." Valle was sentenced to 12 months in custody (essentially a sentence of time served since he already spent 20 months in pretrial detention), one year supervised release and a $25 special assessment, the opinion said. Valle appealed both counts and was acquitted of the conspiracy conviction last year. The government appealed the acquittal and Valle separately appealed the CFAA count. The 2nd Circuit reviewed the question of whether Valle "exceeded authorized access" of the Omnixx Force Mobile computer program, which allows officers to search restricted databases containing sensitive information such as people's home addresses and dates of birth. While Valle admitted he accessed the database for personal use, he said he didn't violate the CFAA since "he never 'used his access to obtain any information he was not entitled to obtain.'” Adopting the prosecution's construction of CFAA "would criminalize the conduct of millions of ordinary computer users," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "While the Government might promise that it would not prosecute an individual for checking Facebook at work, we are not at liberty to take prosecutors at their word in such matters. A court should not uphold a highly problematic interpretation of a statute merely because the Government promises to use it responsibly." Circuit Judges Barrington Parker and Susan Carney ruled in favor of Valle, while Judge Chester Straub dissented. Straub said the majority "discovers ambiguity" in CFAA language "where there is none. Under the plain language of the statute, Valle exceeded his authorized access to a federal database in violation of the CFAA." Straub also said when the jury convicted Valle on the conspiracy count it was "beyond a reasonable doubt, that Valle actually and genuinely conspired to kidnap someone." Straub said "the majority’s eloquent prose on the importance of protecting thoughts from criminal punishment" is more editorial than judicial opinion and "is thus irrelevant, because the jury did not convict Valle for fantasizing." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had a rundown of the case on its website, filed an amicus brief supporting Valle, along with Center for Democracy & Technology, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others.

A "major carrier" was expected to have restored Internet connectivity service by 6:40 p.m. Friday to about 250 customer circuits in the Washington area after a hardware failure, an industry official said. "It’s a connectivity outage for one carrier." The connection between the end-user's location and the carrier's network is out, he said. The expert declined to identify the carrier. "One connection could be three people, it could be 3,000 people. I have no idea," he said, referring to the scope of the problem: "And does this happen often? No, it doesn’t happen often. It’s very rare." The official believed mainly businesses were affected, saying most businesses have multiple connections to the Internet. "If this is their only connection, then they’re down," he said. An AT&T spokeswoman said the carrier's wireless service was working normally in the Washington area and it doesn't have wireline Internet operations. Verizon didn't comment Friday.

VTech hired FireEye’s Mandiant cyber forensic team to help investigate the recent cyberattack that resulted in the theft of more than 11 million parent and children's records (see 1512010041). VTech said in a Thursday news release that Mandiant will review how the toy company "handles customer information and clearly define ways in which the group can further strengthen the security of its user data."