The FCC said it plans a webinar series aimed at helping seniors take advantage of broadband-enabled technology. The first session, called "Get into the Act ... Online," will be May 28, 1-2:30 p.m. Subsequent webinars will target digital literacy, broadband adoption and other issues affecting seniors, the FCC said Wednesday.

The tech industry, including her own company, "needs to do a lot more when it comes to diversity,” Google Vice President-People Operations Nancy Lee said in a blog post Tuesday. Google embedded engineers at historically black colleges and universities, partnered with Hollywood to inspire girls to work in the computer science industry, built local initiatives to introduce coding to high school students from diverse communities, and expanded its employee unconscious bias training, Lee said. “But these programs represent only a sampling of all the work that is going on behind the scenes,” Lee said. “If we’re really going to make an impact, we need a holistic plan.” Google’s four-part plan includes hiring diverse workers by doubling the number of schools where Google recruits; fostering a fair and inclusive culture by raising awareness around unconscious biases; expanding the pool of technologists by teaching kids the basics of coding and inspiring girls to work in computer science; and bridging the digital divide by ensuring more underrepresented communities have access to the benefits of the Web, Lee said. “Meaningful change will take time,” she said. “We’re gradually making progress across these four areas, and we’re in it for the long term.”

Katherine Race Brin was named FTC chief privacy officer, succeeding Peter Miller, Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said Wednesday. Brin's job will be "to ensure that the FTC complies with our privacy obligations,” Ramirez said. The CPO “coordinates efforts to implement and review the agency’s policies and procedures for safeguarding all sensitive information, and chairs its Privacy Steering Committee and the Breach Notification Response Team,” the agency said in a news release. Before becoming acting CPO, Brin was senior adviser to the director of the Consumer Protection Bureau, where she worked on legislative and policy matters involving privacy, security and technology, the FTC said. From 2007 to 2014, Brin was a staff attorney in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection and “played a key role in many of the FTC’s most significant privacy and data security cases,” the agency said.

Amazon and JetBlue said JetBlue will begin allowing Amazon Prime customers later this year to use its free in-flight Fly-Fi Wi-Fi service to access Amazon’s online video and music library. JetBlue had restricted HD video streaming to customers who bought the airline’s $9-per-hour premium Wi-Fi service because of capacity issues. JetBlue customers who don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime will be able to use Fly-Fi to buy and stream Amazon Instant Video content, the companies said Tuesday. Fly-Fi connectivity will be available in all of JetBlue’s Airbus A321 and A320 aircraft this year, and in all Embraer E190 aircraft in 2016, the airline said. JetBlue said it has no plans to block customers from using other streaming services like Netflix via Fly-Fi, but won’t be able to guarantee connectivity.

The value of the global digital content market will reach $154 billion annually by 2019, an almost 60 percent increase over the market’s value in 2014, Juniper Research said Tuesday. The biggest driver of market revenue in 2019 will be mobile and online games, which should garner about 38 percent of annual revenue that year, Juniper said in a news release about a research report. The researcher forecasts strong growth from online dating services and related apps, including Match.com and Zoosk. The bulk of digital content revenue is now collected post-download, with pay-per-download now accounting for 10 percent of revenue, Juniper said. The firm said consumers are now more interested in having access to digital content across a variety of platforms than in downloading content to one device. Over-the-top providers like Amazon and Google are in a prime position to capitalize on consumer demand for multidevice access to content via new cloud-based storage and access services, Juniper said.

“Tech jobs are creating significant opportunities for non-Asian minorities,” but not women, said a Progressive Policy Institute report by PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel and Economist Diana Carew. The report, released Thursday, said from 2009 to 2014 the number of blacks with a college degree employed in the tech industry grew faster than in healthcare. Employment in computer and mathematical occupations rose by 79,000 jobs compared with 76,000 in health care for blacks, a PPI news release said. Hispanics working in healthcare outnumbered those in tech industries, with 104,000 jobs vs. 81,000, but the report’s authors still said it was a significant increase. Women have only 26 percent of college-educated tech jobs, which the report’s authors said isn't an equal share. “Too few science-minded women are pursuing degrees in computer and information science (CIS), choosing instead to study healthcare," the release said. “Policies at the federal, state and local level must encourage more women and minorities to pursue tech careers,” it said. “It is imperative that our nation's higher education system heed labor market signals by providing more pathways into tech jobs,” Carew said.

U.S. policies are continuing to aid the Internet’s exponential growth 20 years after the start of the commercial Internet, said John Morris, NTIA Office of Policy Analysis and Development director-Internet policy, in a Friday blog post. The National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) was decommissioned April 30, 1995, ending the last restrictions on commercial traffic and “paving the way for the commercial use and private governance of the Internet,” Morris said. Key U.S. policies that have resulted in strong Internet growth include trusting in private sector innovation and a reliance on multistakeholder Internet governance, he said. NTIA and the Internet Policy Task Force have continually emphasized multistakeholder governance, including supporting ICANN’s ongoing process of spinning off its Internet Assigned Numbers Authority functions, Morris said. Other important U.S. policies have included “strong” IP rights policies, promoting high-speed broadband access and laws that protect against undue regulation like Communications Act Section 230, “which protects online platforms against claims arising from hosting information posted by users and other third parties,” Morris said.

New America's Open Technology Institute (OTI) released the first in a planned series of papers Thursday on issues and challenges for policymakers and the public in ICANN’s planned spinoff of its Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. The paper released Thursday provides basic details on those issues, including ICANN’s history of controlling the IANA functions, NTIA’s oversight role and related domain name system (DNS) policy issues that need to be addressed as work on the transition process continues. Future papers will expand on issues identified in the initial report, OTI said. “We support the U.S. government’s decision” to complete the IANA transition, said OTI Senior Fellow David Post, one of the paper’s authors, in a statement. “But before that happens, key challenges must be addressed to ensure that the DNS continues to run smoothly and that ICANN stays accountable to its many stakeholders and remains focused on technical coordination rather than broader Internet policy issues involving cybersecurity, copyright, online privacy, and the like.” The OTI papers are meant to “shed some light on the complexity of the process and help inform the public discussion that’s happening right now, because getting this transition right is very important -- especially if the United States wants to maintain its credibility in the broader global Internet governance ecosystem,” said OTI Senior Policy Analyst Danielle Kehl, the report’s other author, in a statement.

Phishing attacks succeed 45 percent of the time, which is why Google launched a free Password Alert Wednesday, Google Security Engineer Drew Hintz and Google Ideas Product Manager Justin Kosslyn wrote in a blog post. “Nearly 2 percent of messages to Gmail are designed to trick people into giving up their passwords.” Google’s new Password Alert protects Google and Google Apps for Work Accounts by warning if a site isn’t a Google sign-in page, but asks for a Google password, they said. The Chrome-extension remembers a “scrambled” version of the Google password for a consumer account, so if a password is typed into a site that isn’t actually a Google page, Password Alert will notify the consumer, Google said. For Google Work customers, an administrator can receive alerts when a problem is detected, they said. “This can help spot malicious attackers trying to break into employee accounts and also reduce password reuse,” Google said.

IEEE said a new amendment to its 802.3bm standard for ethernet supports recent advances in optical networking, “enabling migration to higher-density applications, reducing cost and power demand” of 100 Gbps devices and simplified metropolitan services. “Significantly higher Ethernet performance, capacity and reach in optical networking are needed especially inside and among data centers across metropolitan areas, given the ongoing proliferation of smartphones, video-on-demand, cloud computing and other bandwidth-intensive applications such as the Internet of Things,” said Dan Dove, chairman of the IEEE 802.3bm Task Force, in a Wednesday news release.