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."

“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.

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.

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.

"There are no easy answers" to closing the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told a Women in Consumer Electronics event in New York. But she said Tuesday that companies in STEM industries need to collect more data on their workforce demographics. "What we have seen," she said in prepared remarks released Wednesday, "is a stunningly less diverse workforce than the population as a whole. These numbers are not what we want them to be. But collecting data is a start." Rosenworcel also said women need to start taking it upon themselves to bring more women to the industry and should show more support to women in economic and civic life. "That's how we start the process of changing a world where talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not," she said.

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.

Netflix stands by statements it will deliver high dynamic range content later this year when the first "certified" UHD Alliance and Dolby Vision sets come to market, spokesman Cliff Edwards emailed us Thursday in response to Amazon's announcement a day earlier that it had become the first video service to deliver HDR to its Amazon Prime customers (see 1506240038 or 1506240043). Amazon representatives haven't responded to our questions seeking specifics about its HDR offering, including which HDR technology it's using -- UHD Alliance or Dolby Vision -- and how much extra bandwidth its HDR layer will consume. Netflix is a founding member of the UHD Alliance; Amazon doesn't belong. The UHD Alliance's efforts to devise a product logo and certification program for HDR, among other Ultra HD attributes, should bear fruit this year, we were told at this month’s Display Week conference (see 1506030045). Sources familiar with UHD Alliance activities said it's possible the first Ultra HD TVs could begin landing HDR certifications by late summer.

Spotify extended its partnership with Ford through the integration of its music-streaming service into the vehicle manufacturer's new Sync 3 system, said a Spotify blog post. Sync 3 is expected to be launched this summer in the 2016 models of the Ford Escape and Fiesta, and will include updated options for voice-controlled music selection, Spotify said Tuesday.

Within five years, Ford will migrate driver-assist technologies across its product lineup as part of phase two of its transition to advanced engineering and autonomous driving, it said in a news release. Ford’s Research and Innovation Center Palo Alto in California is working on the Ford Smart Mobility Plan that will take the company “to the next level in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and big data,” it said. A global Ford team is working to make the required sensing and computing technology “feasible for production” and continuing testing and refinement of algorithms, it said. Ford also said Tuesday that Pre-Collision Assist with Pedestrian Detection technology will be available in the U.S. next year on an unnamed Ford-brand vehicle. The carmaker’s plan is to roll out the feature on most Ford products globally by 2019, it said. Ford also has been working to extend vehicle connectivity to wearables. An upcoming MyFord mobile app for smart watches will enable consumers to check from their wristbands driving range and battery charge for their plug-in vehicle and to find their parked cars, said the company.

Google released Chrome v 43.0.2357.130 for Linux, Mac and Windows to address multiple vulnerabilities Monday, one of which may let an attacker obtain sensitive information, said a U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team alert. “Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix,” Google Chrome Technical Program Manager Anthony Laforge wrote in a blog post Monday. “We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.”