The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Freedom of Information Act request and accompanying blog post (see 1610260060) are an attempt to “fabricate drama,” said MPAA Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Neil Fried in his blog post Thursday. EFF said the Copyright Office met with programmers and content interests and didn't do enough to seek out all sides on the FCC set-top box proposal before deciding it violated copyright law. “The bottom line is that the Copyright Office did not approach stakeholders, selectively or otherwise,” Fried said. “It spoke with any and all comers who asked for the opportunity. It then examined the issues and met its statutory obligation to advise federal agencies and Congress on the law. Any EFF suggestion to the contrary is entirely false.” The CO “studiously avoided being brought into the debate” until it was asked by the FCC and Congress to weigh in, Fried said. “EFF’s great 'revelation' is that the Copyright Office did its job, responding to inquiries from various groups -- including technology companies, labor unions, copyright owners, the FCC and Congress,” he said. “Like anyone else, the EFF could have just as easily made its own inquiries, rather than issue a hyperbolic blog complaining about the entirely legitimate practice of a government agency communicating with a range of parties.”

The European Broadcasting Union was one of three entities to recently join the UHD Alliance, the alliance told the FTC and Attorney General Loretta Lynch in Sept. 28 written notifications, said a notice in Wednesday’s Federal Register by DOJ’s Antitrust Division. Part of the alliance's stated mission is to broaden its compliance and logo programs in high dynamic range and other performance attributes to include broadcasters (see 1509130002). Others joining the alliance were Analogix Semiconductor and Pixelworks, the notice said. The notifications were required to extend antitrust protections to UHD Alliance members under the 1993 National Cooperative Research and Production Act, it said.

GSMA released a final agenda for its GSMA Mobility-Live show, which starts next week in Atlanta. The two-day conference begins with a state of the industry keynote Nov. 1, headlined by Glenn Lurie, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Operations, and John Dwyer, president of Cricket Wireless. GSMA is sponsoring a new trade show in partnership with CTIA, next year in San Francisco (see 1610070023).

Society of Motion Picture and TV Engineers organizers are warning of possible traffic delays Monday on the opening day of their technical conference and exhibition in Hollywood, California. President Barack Obama will be a guest of the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show that begins taping at 1:30 p.m. Monday at the El Capitan theater across Hollywood Boulevard from the Hollywood and Highland complex where the conference is being held, they said. “Although we have not received any road closure notices at this time, there is potential for additional traffic due to the President’s proximity to SMPTE 2016,” organizers emailed attendees Friday. “Please allow yourself additional time, if you will be driving to the Hollywood and Highland Center for SMPTE 2016 on Monday.”

A suspected distributed denial of service attack against DynDNS early Friday resulted in outages or latency for many websites that use the service. The attacks primarily affected users on the East Coast. Dyn confirmed that a DDoS attack against its servers began at 7:10 a.m. EDT, with service restored by 9:20 a.m. Dyn said it subsequently began “monitoring and mitigating” a new DDoS attack by mid-day. Amazon Web Services said it began experiencing outages and latency at 7:31 a.m. EDT, but operations returned to normal by 9:10 a.m. GitHub was “one of the sites affected” by the DDoS attack, a spokeswoman said. Airbnb, Etsy, Netflix, Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tumblr and Twitter were among the other sites experiencing outages or connectivity issues. Sony said some of its PlayStation services were still “experiencing issues” at our deadline. Dyn didn't confirm the size or origin of the DDoS attacks. The Department of Homeland Security is “investigating all potential causes” of the attacks, a spokeswoman said.

Apple and Facebook provide strong encryption in their messaging and communications services, but Amnesty International said BlackBerry, Microsoft's Skype and Snapchat have weak privacy protection on their instant messaging services. Amnesty on Thursday issued rankings of 11 companies with the most popular messaging apps on their use of encryption to protect privacy. Sherif Elsayed-Ali, who heads the group's technology and human rights team, said "our communications are under constant threat from cybercriminals and spying by state authorities," with young people, who are the biggest users of such services, more at risk than others. Based on a scale of one to 100, Tencent scored zero in privacy protection, BlackBerry scored 20, Snapchat 26, and Skype 40. Facebook got a score of 73 for its Messenger and WhatsApp apps, and Apple scored 67 for iMessage and FaceTime apps. Amnesty said Snapchat, used by more than 100 million people daily, has a strong privacy policy commitment but doesn't provide end-to-end encryption, which, unlike Apple, few companies use. Amnesty said end-to-end encryption should be the default for all messaging apps. A Microsoft spokesman emailed that the company agreed with Amnesty about the importance of encryption but the group's report "does not accurately reflect" Skype's privacy and security protections. "Skype uses encryption and a range of other technical security measures, and we protect people’s privacy through legal challenges, advocacy, and strong policies to notify customers when we receive government requests for their data or detect attempted third party intrusions," he wrote. BlackBerry, Snapchat and Tencent didn't comment.

DOJ’s Antitrust Division and the FTC referenced several recent federal cases against tech firms for entering into “no poach” agreements with competitors, in guidance sent Thursday to human resource professionals aimed at protecting workers against anticompetitive conduct. The advice is meant to educate HR professionals and others on how antitrust laws apply to businesses’ employment practices, the antitrust agencies said. “HR professionals need to understand that these violations can lead to severe consequences, including criminal prosecution,” said DOJ Antitrust head Renata Hesse in a news release: The "guidance provides HR professionals with information to prevent violations and report potentially unlawful activity, furthering the Justice Department’s commitment to protect workers from harmful conduct that stifles competition.” The agencies cited three tech sector-centric cases, saying agreements among employers not to recruit certain employees or not to compete on terms of compensation are illegal. They include a 2010 case against Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar, a 2011 case against Lucasfilm and a 2014 case against eBay and Intuit. “In all three cases, the competitors agreed not to cold call each other’s employees,” DOJ and the FTC said: “In two cases, at least one company also agreed to limit its hiring of employees who currently worked at a competitor. All three cases ended in consent judgments” against the tech companies.

The FCC should extend a waiver of accessibility requirements for videogame software until January 2018, the Entertainment Software Association said in a petition posted Wednesday in docket 10-213. The waiver of the advanced communication systems requirements of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act is to expire in 2016 (see 1509170006) and was granted in 2012. Without the waiver, ESA said members would have to make their products accessible to those with disabilities. Extending the waiver is in the public interest, ESA said; it would allow industry to continue to work on developing accessibility technology, ESA said.

New England AV dealer Maverick Integration joined Home Technology Specialists of America, said the group Monday. Maverick, founded in 2003, has locations in Nashua, New Hampshire, and Waltham, Massachusetts, with a third to open soon in Mashpee, Massachusetts. HTSA's 20th anniversary fall conference is at the Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago this week.

The ITU approved a standard for a universal charger for laptops and other portable devices that’s designed to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste, it said in a news release. Recommendation ITU-T L.1002, "External universal power adapter solutions for portable ICT devices," specifies principles for the “eco-design” of laptop chargers to reduce no-load power consumption by five times lower than the norm, said ITU. The applicability of the charger to multiple devices, plus design principles for the efficient use of raw materials, will “greatly increase their lifetime and reduce the e-waste resulting from their disposal,” it said.