"The status quo in cybersecurity is not acceptable,” a senior Homeland Security Department official said at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., agreed cybersecurity is an urgent national defense issue. Meanwhile, committee Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Maine, pushed for modernization of the country’s emergency alert system.

The Internet Protocol version 6 Forum began a worldwide testbed for IPv6 products. “Boundv6” was named for the late Jim Bound, developer of Moonv6, a global, permanently deployed, multi-vendor IPv6 network led by the North American IPv6 Task Force and the University of New Hampshire-InterOperability Lab, the forum said Wednesday. Where Moonv6 was about vendor interoperability, the new program aims to create a permanent network initially connecting IPv6-ready, logo- and U.S. government-approved labs where IPv6 users can trial applications and devices “in meaningful test scenarios,” it said.

Sprint Nextel Tuesday joined the Department of Justice in suing to block AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile. Sprint sought injunctive relief against AT&T, T-Mobile and parent Deutsche Telekom, in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The lawsuit alleges that the proposed deal would violate Section 7 of the Clayton Antitrust Act. Meanwhile, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., a member of the Judiciary Committee, urged an objective court review of DOJ’s lawsuit against the deal.

Comments continued to pour in Tuesday as the deadline for filings on industry-proposed universal service and intercarrier compensation regime changes expired. Incumbent telcos were mostly fighting a holding action, while a handful of rural carriers recommitted to fighting against the broader industry consensus. The six companies behind the so-called America’s Broadband Connectivity plan (CD Aug 1 p1) said in a statement that they had come up with a “detailed and workable proposal for fixing the outdated and unsustainable universal service and intercarrier compensation programs.” The companies -- AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, CenturyLink, Windstream and FairPoint -- added: “Adoption of the ABC Plan will lead to greater broadband deployment in rural America. The plan enjoys broad support on issues that have paralyzed the industry for years."

The FCC should require that wireless carriers suspend the service of all subscribers whose cellphones are detected to be operating in a prison in violation of the institution’s rules, CellAntenna said in a petition filed at the FCC (http://xrl.us/bmcngg). CellAntenna, which makes devices that jam wireless signals, previously sought an FCC order sanctioning the use of cell signal jamming technology by prison officials. In the latest twist, the company filed a petition for rulemaking that focuses on detection rather than jamming.

The Department of Justice must disclose case information related to the government’s use of cellphone tracking in criminal prosecutions, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Tuesday. The three-judge panel reaffirmed a district court’s decision that the government should publish information about warrantless cellphone location surveillance. Such disclosures would “inform this ongoing public policy discussion by shedding light on the scope and effectiveness of cell phone tracking as a law enforcement tool,” wrote Circuit Judge Merrick Garland, in the court opinion.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Smartphones will be “the center of the consumer electronics universe” within a couple of years, Sony Ericsson’s chief technology officer said Tuesday. Large-screen TVs will run Netflix-style streaming from handsets, and their computing power will allow notebook computers to be reduced to keyboards, Jan Uddenfeldt predicted at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference. “From 3-inch to 100-inch, you have the same capabilities” across devices because of the huge computing power in phones, he said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Department of Transportation needs to figure out soon whether cellular carriers can meet the privacy needs for a massive communications system that would use vehicle, traffic signal and other data to prevent accidents, a federal official central to the effort said Tuesday. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is scheduled to decide in 2013 whether to start requiring manufacturers to begin building the technology needed into light vehicles, said Director Shelley Row of DOT’s joint program office for Intelligent Transportation Systems.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell Friday called for an investigation of the Wireless Priority Service (WPS) program in the wake of the Aug. 23 earthquake in Virginia and Hurricane Irene, which swept up the East Coast the following weekend, the latter taking out more cell towers than Hurricane Katrina five years earlier. WPS, part of the National Communications System (NCS), is designed to give priority to calls by public officials over other callers during times of network overload. Officials get a card with a number they input into their phone. Questions have arisen about how effectively the system worked, especially following the earthquake, McDowell said in an interview.

Google’s recent accord to buy Motorola Mobility hasn’t changed the stances of fans and foes of the AllVid rules the FCC is seeking. The $12.5 billion purchase plan could represent a type of integration achieved by acquisition that some hope AllVid rules will spur widely in the consumer electronics and multichannel video programming distributor industries, executives on both sides of the debate acknowledged in interviews. They contend the deal doesn’t alter the equation for whether regulation is or isn’t needed -- because of what’s happening in the rest of the CE-MVPD market. That might change much later though if Google keeps Motorola’s set-top business or if the two companies are run by the same managers, executives on both sides of AllVid said.