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.

Cisco plans to buy OpenDNS, a San Francisco-based Internet security company, for $635 million in cash, assumed equity and retention-based incentives, to "add broad visibility and threat intelligence," Cisco said in a news release Tuesday. The purchase was spurred by Cisco's desire to "reduce the time to detect and respond to threats, and mitigate risk of a security breach" by combining its security capabilities with OpenDNS' "broad visibility, unique predictive threat intelligence and cloud platform," Cisco said. The buyer said it expects to complete the deal in Q1.

SoundHound announced Apple Music integration with its music app Tuesday. An “Apple Music -- Listen Now” option, available on the home page and within song pages, links to Apple Music, where users can stream music of artists discovered through SoundHound features including music identification, personalized history, top charts and music maps, said SoundHound. Users will also be able to stream Beats 1 Radio from within song pages, said the company.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Facebook released its updated employee demographic data Thursday and said in a news release that its work to create a more diverse workforce has produced "some positive but modest change" but "there's more work to do." The data show that, as of May 31, Caucasians make up 55 percent of Facebook's employees in the U.S. and Asians account for 36 percent, while African-Americans and Latinos combined for only 6 percent of its national workforce. Of those holding tech jobs with the company in the U.S., 94 percent identified as being either white or Asian and the remaining 6 percent identified as African-American, Hispanic or being of two or more races. It said 73 percent of U.S. employees in senior leadership positions are white. "While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it's clear to all of us that we still aren't where we want to be," Maxine Williams, Facebook global diversity director, said in the report on the company's diversity demographics. "It's a big task, one that will take time to achieve." Thirty-two percent of all Facebook employees worldwide are women, and women hold 16 percent of the company's tech jobs and 23 percent of senior leadership positions. The only category in which female Facebook employees outnumber men is in non-tech jobs, making up 52 percent of global workers in that capacity.