The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau indefinitely extended a waiver for “a narrow class of e-readers” of accessibility rules for advanced communications services (ACS), said an order released Monday and included in the next day's Daily Digest. “We conclude that this narrow class of e-readers, while capable of accessing ACS, continues to be designed primarily for reading text-based digital works, not for ACS.” The waiver was originally granted in 2014, and extended in 2015. “Commencing three years from the release date of this Order, we will conduct a review of the status and accessibility of ACS provided on the class of e-readers subject to the waiver,” the order said.

Whole-house music system company Autonomic, supplier of Mirage audio systems, joined the ProSource buying group, the Armonk, New York, supplier said Tuesday.

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs is encouraging parents to file a complaint if their Internet-connected baby monitors were hacked, said a Wednesday DCA news release. Commissioner Julie Menin warned parents to take the necessary steps to ensure their Internet-connected baby monitors aren't vulnerable to privacy or security risks. DCA is issuing subpoenas to several major manufacturers of video monitors that market their devices as secure, it said. DCA is investigating whether the companies have corrected known security vulnerabilities with their devices and whether their security claims violate the city’s consumer protection law, it said. Cybersecurity researchers have said many top-selling Internet-connected baby monitors, which are often marketed as secure, are easily exploited by hackers, DCA said. DCA didn't release the names of companies it subpoenaed.

CableLabs cut 27 jobs as part of its restructuring to focus more on long-term innovation work, CEO Phil McKinney said in a blog post Friday. CableLabs earlier this month announced it was putting less emphasis on its traditional bailiwick of shorter-term R&D work (see 1601150077). The job cuts have "allowed us to free up budget for investment in innovative pursuits, including opening new positions requiring the range of skills needed to build out and sustain our innovation pipeline," McKinney said. While not giving specific details on projects in its long-term pipeline, McKinney said the innovation work will involve "all of the areas that CableLabs has historically been responsible for such as high speed data, wireless, [Network Functions Virtualization/Software Defined Networking], next generation video, IoT, business services, security and many others." Meanwhile, he said, the discontinued R&D projects "were focused on near term activities already supported by our membership, or by the vendor community," saying CableLabs "will cover those same technical areas but look at them through an innovation lens that targets an impact three to eight years out."

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project’s (3GPP) Release 13 will include messaging support for terrestrial beacon system location technologies, compatible with NextNav’s metropolitan beacon system (MBS), said the company, which offers location accuracy technology, Tuesday in a news release. “NextNav has adopted MBS for its nationwide deployment, an innovative ‘terrestrial constellation’ bringing GNSS-like [Global Navigation Satellite System] positioning performance to indoor and urban environments where satellite-based positioning is either unavailable or significantly degraded,” NextNav said.

CableLabs' funding of various projects is increasingly focused on the long term, with "investment in innovation projects focused on three to eight years as being of equal importance to our traditional R&D projects focused on one to three years," CEO Phil McKinney said in a blog post Friday. Those long-range innovation projects will be the source for future R&D work, he said: "While most organizations spend a small portion of their budget on longer range innovation, we’ve made the deliberate decision to be aggressive in this transformation to ensure that CableLabs can rapidly build and sustain a significant innovation pipeline for the industry." McKinney said that since his start there in 2012, CableLabs also has focused on speeding up its R&D work, with an example being certification the first DOCSIS 3.1 modems announced earlier this week (see 1601130013). "We delivered DOCSIS 3.1 in record time, especially considering the new technologies that were added," he said.

The Wireless Broadband Alliance launched World Wi-Fi Day set for June 20 to focus industry, policy and public attention on addressing the divide between connected and unconnected societies. The alliance is encouraging cities, government bodies, fixed and mobile operators, technology vendors, Internet giants, service providers and retailers to unite to deliver “connectivity to everyone, everywhere.” The digital divide in developing nations and developed urban centers “is still a major issue,” said the alliance. Billions of people in developing nations are unconnected, and hundreds of thousands of people in developed markets like the U.S. are still struggling to gain Internet access due to poor infrastructure or slow Internet speeds, it said. “As the only universal unlicensed and affordable public access network, Wi-Fi connectivity will be the key to bridging the global digital divide -- connecting the unconnected and underserved,” said Wireless Broadband Alliance CEO Shrikant Shenwai.

Five cable modems were DOCSIS 3.1 certified in the first wave of certifications for the standard, CableLabs said in a news release Wednesday. The modems are from Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor and Ubee Interactive, CableLabs said. CEO Phil McKinney said the certification "represents the most rapid development and implementation cycle for a broadband technology development program ever delivered by CableLabs. Development of the initial DOCSIS 3.1 specifications to product certification has occurred in half the time of previous DOCSIS specifications.”

Ericsson said it’s partnering with Verizon to develop low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks for IoT applications. Verizon is going to use Ericsson’s Networks Software 17A software to scale its LTE network for expanded IoT use, which “will enable us to expand our coverage of low-cost IoT devices while supporting years of battery life,” Verizon Vice President-Network Technology and Planning Adam Koeppe said in a Thursday Ericsson news release. “Verizon's nationwide LTE network provides an ideal platform for the acceleration of IoT applications that benefit consumers, industry and cities. We're committed to simplifying IoT and have introduced a developer platform -- ThingSpace -- and new network advancements that do just that.” Joint Ericsson-Verizon IoT use case trials that began in 2014 are now set to continue through the end of 2016, Ericsson said.

Digital Entertainment Group members voted Best Buy the hardware retailer of the year for 2015, the group said Wednesday. Other 2015 retailer honors: (1) Amazon as digital retailer of the year; (2) Target as software retailer of the year, its second such honor in the past three years.