Governors considered the challenges of both FirstNet and cybersecurity during the winter meeting of the National Governors Association. Both public safety endeavors require sufficient state attention, speakers told governors as they gave recommendations on how to better coordinate and develop strategies in both the creation of FirstNet and in fighting existing cyberthreats.

The FTC said HTC America reached a tentative settlement over charges that the company’s failure, until at least November 2011 to take “reasonable steps” to secure the software used on its smartphones and tablets, constituted “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” (http://1.usa.gov/YHPOtt). The agency accused the maker of consumer electronics of not using “well-known and commonly-accepted secure programming practices ... which would have ensured that applications only had access to users’ information with their consent."

4G Americas marked the one-year anniversary of the 2012 spectrum law Friday with a letter urging the FCC to move forward on an auction of the 1755-1780 MHz band, long viewed by carriers as one of the most valuable bands for wireless broadband. Commissioner Robert McDowell said Friday he shares the group’s concerns.

Sirius XM will continue with “below market rate” music royalty payments despite a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision raising the amount it pays SoundExchange, said SoundExchange President Michael Huppe at the Digital Media Wire Music Conference in New York.

Like its larger industry peers before it, Charter is taking its cable systems “all digital” so it can reclaim bandwidth currently devoted to analog video and offer customers a more modern product, CEO Tom Rutledge said Friday on an earnings call. Unlike operators that made the transition by providing low-cost digital converters, or DTAs, to analog subscribers, Charter is planning to deploy as many full-featured set-top boxes as possible to analog homes, Rutledge said. The company has sought a waiver from some FCC CableCARD requirements while it develops a downloadable security feature (CD Nov 5 p5).

Fox asked the U.S. District Court, Los Angeles, to grant it an injunction against Dish Network, and stop the DBS company from allowing its subscribers to retransmit Fox’s live broadcast signal over the Internet and authorizing subscribers to make copies of Fox programs for use outside the home through its Hopper Transfers feature. Dish introduced Hopper Transfers in January, a system which allows users to move TV recordings from a DVR to an iPad and view them without an Internet connection (CD Jan 8 p5). Both of the services “breach Dish’s license agreement with Fox, and Dish’s Internet retransmission service also independently infringes Fox’s copyrights,” Fox said in a motion.

Federal agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures will have to draw up plans to make the results of federally funded research available free online a year after academic publication, the White House said Friday. A “We the People” petition filed at Whitehouse.gov in May, asking the administration to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research,” did not prompt the policy change but was “important to our discussions of this issue,” Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren said in an official response to the petition (http://1.usa.gov/VBjPwi).

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai made several proposals that he said would improve the commission’s internal procedures and let it act more efficiently. At an FCBA event Thursday, Pai proposed (http://bit.ly/YFdwGQ) new procedures for handling applications for review, combinations of adjacent carriers and deadlines that he said are frequently extended unnecessarily.

Human judgment is necessary in executing the FCC’s quantile regression analysis, since it “is currently and likely always will be inaccurate to such an extent,” said a white paper from Alexicon Consulting and Balhoff & Williams, filed with the FCC Thursday (http://bit.ly/Zv4j8K). The analysis determines telcos’ high-cost support and was implemented as part of the FCC’s November 2011 USF order. The report’s two authors are listed as Alexicon Principal Vincent Wiemer and Michael Balhoff, an attorney with Balhoff & Williams.

More work remains to develop a complete picture of the 5 GHz bands being studied by the FCC for Wi-Fi and other unlicensed use, NTIA Associate Administrator Karl Nebbia told the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee Thursday. It remains to be seen whether the 5350-5470 MHz and 5850-5925 MHz bands can be safely shared with government incumbents already operating there, Nebbia warned.