CEA and LonMark International set two standards for home and building automation. The standards give multiple parties -- users, developers, vendors, integrators and specifiers of open building control systems -- a way to develop and deliver a higher level of device-to-device interoperability using any open control networking communication platform, said CEA in a Monday news release. The intent of the standards is “to offer to the market a very proven, well adopted approach to solving the Internet of Things (IoT) interoperability issue,” said Ron Bernstein, LonMark chief ambassador. The library of device profiles includes definitions for HVAC, lighting, security, access, metering, energy management, fire and smoke control, gateways, room automation, renewable energy, utility, transportation and home and appliances.

The FTC is expanding its efforts to help businesses protect consumers’ information through an initiative to give firms more information on data security, the agency said in a news release Tuesday. The Start with Security initiative includes new guidance for businesses based on the more than 50 data security cases the FTC has brought throughout the years, it said. The guidance laid out 10 key steps to effective data security and is “designed to provide an easy way for companies to understand the lessons learned from those previous cases,” said the commission. A series of conferences will be held across the country for small- and medium-sized businesses, starting with one at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco Sept. 9. A second event will be at the University of Texas Strauss Center for International Security and Law in Austin Nov. 5, it said. The FTC also created a website dedicated to data security information for businesses.

Brazil and the U.S. said they will resume their joint Working Group on Internet and Information and Communication Technologies, with the group set to hold its second-ever meeting this fall in Brasilia. The group held its first meeting in July 2012 and disbanded after the start of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about controversial NSA surveillance programs, an industry lawyer told us. Brazil later enacted a law strengthening Internet privacy policies due to the “anger and repudiation” of the NSA surveillance programs (see report in the April 24, 2014, issue). The restart of the U.S.-Brazil working group “will offer the opportunity of exchanging experiences and exploring possibilities for cooperation in a number of key areas, including e-government, the digital economy, cybersecurity, cybercrime prevention, capacity building activities, international security in cyberspace, and research, development, and innovation,” said President Barack Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in a joint statement Tuesday. Rousseff has been in Washington this week to meet on U.S.-Brazil relations. The countries reaffirmed their commitment to “cooperate for the success” of the next Internet Governance Forum Nov. 10-13 in João Pessoa, Brazil, and said they will participate actively in the U.N. General Assembly’s high-level meeting on the 10-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society outcomes in December.

A New York City-based private investigator was sentenced to three months in prison Friday by a federal court after pleading guilty in March to conspiracy to commit computer hacking, said a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. It said that since 2009, Eric Saldarriaga, 41, advertised “Hacking Services” on the Internet, and hired individuals to hack into email accounts for about 50 different individuals he investigated on behalf of his clients, as well as individuals he was interested in personally. Saldarriaga was ordered to forfeit $5,000, pay a $1,000 fine and also was sentenced to three years of supervised release.

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, both 23, of Springfield, Virginia, pleaded guilty Friday to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to access a protected computer without authorization, and conspiracy to access a government computer without authorization, said a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Virginia. Muneeb Akhter also pleaded guilty to additional charges of accessing a protected computer without authorization, making a false statement and obstructing justice, it said. Muneeb Akhter faces up to 50 years in prison, and Sohaib Akhter up to 30 years, it said. Around March 2014, they hacked into a cosmetics company website and stole credit card and personal information for thousands of the company’s customers, it said. “Muneeb Akhter also provided stolen information to an individual he met on the ‘dark net,’ who sold the information to other dark-net users and gave Akhter a share of the profits." In a separate incident, the Akhter brothers and “co-conspirators” attempted to hack the Department of State computer network to “obtain sensitive passport and visa information and other related and valuable information about State Department computer systems,” the release said. “Around February 2015, Sohaib Akhter used his contract position at the State Department to access sensitive computer systems containing personally identifiable information belonging to dozens of co-workers, acquaintances, a former employer, and a federal law enforcement agent investigating his crimes,” it said. And the U.S. Attorney's office said that around November 2013, Muneeb Akhter did contract work for a data aggregation company in Rockville, Maryland, and “hacked into the company’s database of federal contract information so that he and his brother could use the information to tailor successful bids to win contracts and clients for their own technology company."

In branded tablets, there’s “no denying the market is losing its momentum and leading vendors are feeling the squeeze,” ABI Research said in a Monday report that said tablet shipments in Q1 registered their largest declines since the category’s 2009 inception. It estimates shipments dipped 35 percent sequentially from Q4 and 16 percent from Q1 a year earlier. The slowdown “does not necessarily mean the end of the tablet market,” ABI said. “Tablets are still popular among consumer households and even have a practical purpose for many businesses and the education sector,” the firm said, describing tablets as a market in search of a “niche.”

“You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, referring to the Office of Personnel Management breach Thursday at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Symposium in Washington. If the U.S. had the opportunity to breach the data the Chinese stole from OPM, the intelligence community wouldn’t hesitate for a moment, Clapper said. When asked to confirm whether the Chinese were responsible for the breach, Clapper said China was the “leading suspect.” Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Policy Senior Fellow Robert Knake wrote a blog post Friday saying that he wasn’t that concerned about the impact on U.S. human intelligence following the breach because the U.S. is aware of the breach, the CIA is “pretty good at what they do,” password resets already were weak, spearfishing is already pretty effective and blackmail is an overstated threat. The Chinese Embassy in Washington had no comment.

The FTC unanimously approved a final consent order involving Network Solutions, which “misled consumers who bought its web hosting services by falsely promising a full refund if they canceled within 30 days,” an agency news release said Friday. The commission issued an administrative complaint against Network Solutions in April alleging that the Web hosting company didn't adequately disclose that the company would withhold up to 30 percent of the refund from its “30 Day Money Back Guarantee” from customers who canceled within 30 days of buying an annual or multiyear package and registering an included domain name, the release said. Network Solutions is prohibited from "failing to clearly disclose, before obtaining a customer’s billing information, the material terms of any money-back guarantee, or failing to refund the full purchase price in response to a request that complies with the terms of a guarantee," the release said. The company is barred from "misrepresenting material terms of any refund or cancellation policy or money-back guarantee, or any other material fact about web hosting, and requires Network Solutions to keep records demonstrating compliance with the order for five years," it said. Network Solutions didn't comment.

"There are no easy answers" to closing the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told a Women in Consumer Electronics event in New York. But she said Tuesday that companies in STEM industries need to collect more data on their workforce demographics. "What we have seen," she said in prepared remarks released Wednesday, "is a stunningly less diverse workforce than the population as a whole. These numbers are not what we want them to be. But collecting data is a start." Rosenworcel also said women need to start taking it upon themselves to bring more women to the industry and should show more support to women in economic and civic life. "That's how we start the process of changing a world where talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not," she said.

IEEE’s IoT initiative launched a Scenarios contributor program to help developers “get exposure for IoT projects, ideas, and services and to provide a venue for sharing best practices and lessons learned,” the standards group said in a Thursday announcement. The program’s submission process “provides a streamlined means to easily upload IoT contributions in PDF format” through a targeted landing page, it said.