Cloud services and 5G connectivity are key to enabling local healthcare providers to benefit from remote teleconsultation technologies, reported Juniper Research Monday. The number of telehealth consultations performed globally is forecast to reach 422 million this year, 765 million in 2025, including interactions via healthcare portals, apps and consumer video calling platforms. For teleconsultation services to become an integral element of healthcare, platforms have to develop solutions that cater to differing capacities of regional healthcare sectors, Juniper said.
The Wireless and Public Safety bureaus offered guidance to intelligent transportation system licensees pursuing waivers of FCC rules to operate roadside units using cellular vehicle to everything technology in the top 30 MHz of the 5.9 GHz band. Additional waivers of gear authorization rules are needed “with respect to both roadside units and on-board units,” said Friday's notice in docket 19-138: Certification “must be obtained prior to marketing, sale, or operation of this equipment for use under any waiver authorizing operation of C-V2X-based equipment.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) put social media regulation on an agenda for the special legislative session starting Saturday. Thursday's list includes “legislation safeguarding the freedom of speech by protecting social-media and email users from being censored based on the user’s expressed viewpoints, including by providing a legal remedy for those wrongfully excluded from a platform.” Democrats preventing a quorum over a different bill stymied the proposal in the last special session (see 2107130033).
Akamai had “de minimis” financial impact from the two service disruptions in as many months that cost some customers their connectivity (see 2107300039), said CEO Tom Leighton on a Q2 call Tuesday. “We lost, at the peak, about 2% of our traffic for up to one hour,” he said. “We care a lot about reliability at Akamai. It is core to everything we want to do, and we've put a ton of effort into making our solutions be reliable over the last 10-plus years.” Akamai had a “disastrous” outcome in 2004 when “we actually took the entire platform down for about an hour,” said Leighton. “That didn't happen in this case, but we did hurt hundreds of our customers, and we deeply regret that.” In both the recent outages, an update “caused a problem,” he said: “We are taking a fresh look at how we release updates to make sure that something like this won't happen again.”
The FTC should create an office of civil rights to better enforce against algorithms and commercial data models that reinforce structural racism, advocacy groups wrote the agency last week. Public Knowledge, Access Now, the Anti-Defamation League, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Public Citizen signed the letter, which was shared Wednesday. They urged the FTC to “regulate unfair and deceptive practices” and “increase enforcement against tech companies.” The agency confirmed receipt of the letter.
The FTC reserves the right to challenge a transaction regardless of whether the deal was fully investigated before Hart-Scott-Rodino Act “clearance,” acting Competition Bureau Director Holly Vedova wrote Tuesday. Citing a “tidal wave of merger filings that is straining the agency’s capacity to rigorously investigate deals ahead of the statutory deadlines,” she said the agency is sending standard form letters informing companies that the FTC’s “investigation remains open and reminding companies that the agency may subsequently determine that the deal was unlawful.” Companies that proceed without a full investigation are doing so at their own risk, she wrote: “This action should not be construed as a determination that the deal is unlawful, just as the fact that we have not issued such a letter with respect to an HSR filing should not be construed as a determination that a deal is lawful.”
Nearly two-thirds of experts who experienced ransomware threats in the past year witnessed “partnerships” among bad actors, reported VMware Monday. It canvassed 123 “incident response professionals” globally in May and June, finding defenders are “looking for new ways to fight back,” it said. Victims now experience “destructive/integrity attacks” more than half the time, said VMware. “Cybercriminals are achieving this through emerging techniques, like the manipulation of time stamps, or Chronos attacks,” which nearly 60% of respondents have witnessed, it said. “Catalyzed by the shift to remote work, 32% of respondents also experienced adversaries leveraging business communication platforms to move around a given environment and launch sophisticated attacks.”
Open radio access networks will help providers cut energy costs, the Open RAN Policy Coalition said. “Open RAN enables rapid rollout of efficiency measures across the RAN supply chain.” Electricity costs are 20%-40% of cellsite operating costs, “the majority of which is consumed by the RAN and power amplifiers,” Monday's report said: “Modularized components and open interfaces, combined with innovations in virtualization technologies, will allow telecommunications operators to unlock cloud efficiencies.”
Akamai acknowledges the “unacceptable situation” two recent service disruptions in as many months caused customers “and our need to restore” their confidence, blogged CEO Tom Leighton. “Many of our customers experienced interruptions in service, and for that I sincerely apologize,” he said. “Any downtime is unacceptable, and all of us at Akamai deeply regret the impact.” Neither disruption was caused by a cyberattack, Akamai said. “We have conducted a thorough review and root cause analysis of both incidents,” Leighton wrote Friday. Though the “direct causes of the incidents were different, our platform maintenance processes played a contributing role in both cases,” he said. “The safety mechanisms we had put in place to prevent problems associated with updates to these services did not perform in the manner necessary to prevent a disruption.” Akamai is performing “a full audit of all tools, systems, and processes associated with updates for all of our services,” he said: Until the audit is complete, “there will be additional manual supervision of all updates.”
Colorado is nearly done requesting preliminary data from Google to understand surface-level information about the company’s data gathering practices, an attorney representing Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser told U.S. District Court in Washington during a status hearing (in Pacer) Friday in docket 1:20-cv-03010 (see 2102160052). Colorado expects to make “full-fledged” data requests by the end of September in its antitrust case against Google, Jonathan Sallet told Judge Amit Mehta. The preliminary data will help plaintiffs understand what data Google has, how it measures impact on consumers and what it sees about consumer behavior, said Sallet. Google attorney John Schmidtlein said the company is on track to deliver on this batch of requests, which involves hundreds of thousands of documents. The latest DOJ request is being converted and should be available next week, and the company expects to deliver documents to Colorado by the end of August, he said. DOJ Civil Division trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer said there are “looming” third-party issues to be resolved. Mehta told the attorneys the court will address those after August deposition proceedings.