July 2015

The Washington Post began testing a new feature called Knowledge Map, which gives readers an easier way to catch up on ongoing stories by quickly and seamlessly providing relevant background, additional information or answers to frequently asked questions, when the reader wants it. “We wanted to experiment with providing background information as a user reads a story to help bring context to a complicated topic, and we designed Knowledge Map to work in a way that would not interrupt the reading experience,” said Sarah Sampsel, director of digital strategy at The Post. “Knowledge Map makes reading the news a more personalized experience, giving readers access to additional information as they need or want it.”

As readers will see, Knowledge Map appears as a series of highlighted links embedded throughout the body of the article. When clicked or tapped, these links instantly surface more information. This additional content offers background and contextual information, as well as related links to other Post content on that subject, allowing users to get up to speed quickly, or dive deeper into a subject.

[Commentary] Why, exactly, are our mothers propagating this omg-you-won’t-believe-it drivel about dogs and public proposals and babies? Half of it is showing up, it would seem: According to eMarketer, there are just a lot of women older than 45 on Facebook. The site skews female anyway, and the general greying of Facebook’s user base means that a third of all users are now well into middle-age. On top of that, there seems to be something unique about how women, and particularly mothers, use Facebook -- something rooted in the fundamental, gendered communication styles we’re taught since birth.

Studies -- and, perhaps, your own listless scrolling through other people’s baby pictures -- suggest that ladies rely on the network to support relationships in a way that men simply don’t. They have more friends than men do, and they comment far more on their friends’ posts. Given all that, it kind of makes sense that moms are both “more clicky” and more eager to share, in the words of Viral Nova CEO Sean Beckner: To them, Facebook represents a highly intimate social club, a place to share pictures of your kids and requests for health advice and that video of a puppy sleeping with a baby that almost made you cry.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted a report and Order that modernizes and reforms polices designed to facilitate small business' ability to participate in spectrum auctions and the wireless marketplace. These polices are commonly known as the Designated Entity Rules. With the action, the FCC is taking the following steps to provide small businesses -- including enterprises owned by women and minorities -- with a better on-ramp into the wireless industry, to increase the participation of rural service providers in future auctions and to eliminate outdated rules that no longer reflect the developments in today’s wireless marketplace:

• Elimination of the attributable material relationship rule that limited the amount of spectrum a small business could lease in order to provide small businesses the flexibility to leverage leasing and other spectrum use agreements to gain access to capital and operational experience.
• Adoption of a first ever 15 percent bidding credit for qualifying service providers that provide commercial communications services to a customer base of fewer than 250,000 combined wireless, wireline, broadband, and cable subscribers and serve predominantly rural areas.
• Establishment of a first ever cap on the total amount of bidding credits that a small business or rural service provider can receive in any particular auction. The cap will vary on a service-by-service and auction-by-auction basis. For the Incentive Auction, the Report and Order adopts a cap of$150 million for small businesses and a $10 million ceiling on the overall amount that any entity -- either a small business or rural service provider -- can receive in smaller markets.
• Modifications to the FCC’s attribution rules to guard against unjust enrichment.
• Amendment of the competitive bidding rules to prohibit joint bidding and multiple applications by one party as well as parties with common controlling interests except in limited circumstances.

A major cybercrime forum was just taken down by coordinated action between law enforcement agencies in nearly 20 countries. But that site, called Darkode, is just one of many forums that have become the primary hub for criminal hackers. US Attorney David J. Hickton of the Western District of Pennsylvania said there are "roughly 800 criminal Internet forums worldwide" and that Darkode was "the most sophisticated English-speaking forum for criminal computer hackers in the world.” Some of the forums can only be accessed using the anonymous browsing tool Tor, Samani said, but others are searchable from the public Internet.

Darkode was a password-protected forum where prospective members were allegedly vetted by showing off their hacking skills, according to the Department of Justice. Some researchers and journalists, including Brian Krebs, were able to infiltrate the site -- as was the FBI. These forums and black markets offering physical goods as well as digital services -- such as the now defunct Silk Road -- have helped drive the popularity of cybercrime, because the sites contain almost everything someone would need to get into hacking for profit, Samani said. Even those without technical knowledge can visit the forums or black markets and hire people to do the individual components of a scam -- or outsource it altogether in a subcontractor-style set up, he said. As the Darkode takedown appears to show, forums can allow for international cybercrime collaboration.