Fast Company

In recent years, people have become more aware of a type of cyberattack called "denial-of-service," in which websites are flooded with traffic—often generated by many computers hijacked by a hacker and acting in concert with each other. This happens all the time, and has affected traffic to financial institutions, entertainment companies, government agencies and even key internet routing services. A similar attack is possible on 911 call centers. In October, what appears to be the first such attack launched from a smartphone happened in Arizona. An 18-year-old hacker was arrested on charges that he conducted a telephone denial-of-service attack on a local 911 service. If we are to prevent this from happening in more places, we need to understand how 911 systems work, and where the weaknesses lie, both in technology and policy.

Over the last eight years, President Barack Obama has upended the way the executive branch of government interacts with technology. When President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House in January, he'll find the place buzzing with tech talent. As part of his legacy, President Obama will be leaving President-elect Trump with an in-house startup called the United States Digital Service that pairs the nation's top tech talent with public servants, and a consulting firm called 18F that government agencies can hire to build websites, manage data, or do user research.

But, it took a lot of effort to bring the government to this level of ease with technology. All of President Obama's hard work is now President-elect Trump's to preserve and push forward—or squander.

For Silicon Valley and the tech sector, the ground has dramatically shifted in the last seven days. In the months leading up to the election, the sector overwhelmingly contributed more money to Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump. There were persistent rumors that some of the Valley’s brightest minds, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, were being considered for top positions in a Clinton Administration. And Clinton’s tech platform read so much like the industry’s wish list that some joked that it was a love letter to the Valley.

To find out what else Silicon Valley and the tech sector want from the new administration, we asked dozens of executives and entrepreneurs for their wish lists. Most of them included comprehensive immigration reform, STEM education, smarter regulations, and incentives to increase technology development and to spur innovation.

[Commentary] For smart cities and smart cars to succeed, a legal framework needs to exist to undergird the technology. Officials will have to understand how the new technology will impact every corner of their state. States will have to create new rules of the road for autonomous and self-driving vehicles on all streets and highways. And federal officials at all government agencies will deal with unprecedented levels of tech integration in their areas of governance. They will need to understand next-generation technology and its ramifications as they’re asked to regulate a world where technology must be applied equally and fairly within their purview.

Unless our elected officials become more tech-savvy, they will only slow down the role technology will play in their cities, states, and the broader US. We will need our legislators at all levels to grasp how technology will impact their constituents so that they can make laws that work for everyone.

[Bajarin is President at Creative Strategies, Inc]

Clinton generally favors continuing Obama's cyber policies, while Trump calls for more cyber warfare and surveillance.

Verizon is acquiring Yahoo for $4.83 billion in cash—and along with it, Tumblr, the Internet’s quirky link sharing network with 65 million users. To any fan of the service, the reaction may be something along the lines of, "What will happen to Tumblr? Will Verizon ruin it? Or worse, will it shutter it?" In reality, Tumblr may barely be on Verizon’s radar right now. Meanwhile, even though Yahoo stayed true to its promise to leave Tumblr alone after acquiring it for $1 billion in 2013, some Tumblr editors think the company should have done more to push the envelope and keep the service relevant.

Maybe the real hope for Tumblr under Verizon is that the network isn’t forgotten or left alone, but positioned as a relatively untapped source of revenue for Verizon—something that could contribute billions of dollars for Verizon each year rather than fall short of projections. Leveraging the full weight of AOL’s properties, Tumblr could become the social glue holding all of these services together. Verizon’s Facebook, if you will. And with more investment—maybe in the mixed-media experimentation we see Instagram, Snapchat, and countless other platforms embracing—Tumblr could become an irresistible app again, distributed across Verizon’s monstrous network of Internet, TV, and smartphones. If Verizon revamps the UX and sells the right ads, Tumblr could still become a juggernaut in its own right.

[Commentary] I decided to hold my daughter’s hand as we waded into the Internet as it is. I explained to Bug that the Internet was like the outside world: There’s fun stuff there and there’s awful things kids shouldn’t see, so you can’t go without an adult.

When you’re out there, you don’t tell anyone your name. If they need a name to refer to you by, use a code name, so no one can trace it back to you. We demonstrated two important lessons: 1) Google is always trying to take your money, and 2) How to close pop-up ads.

Google said it is investing in a faster undersea cable that will connect cities on the US West Coast to two locations in Japan, potentially offering 60 terabits per second of bandwidth.

"[T]hat's about ten million times faster than your cable modem," Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure, wrote.

The agreement, signed by a consortium of six companies that also includes China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, will invest about $300 million in the so-called FASTER cable network. The FASTER network will connect Chikura and Shima in Japan to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

Teens haven't abandoned Facebook yet, and a new report finds Facebook continues to lead in social referrals by a wide margin. From June 2013 to June 2014, Facebook drove 23.4% of social referrals across the web.

Pinterest trailed at a distant second at 5.7%. Twitter, at 1%, came in third place, beating the combined referrals from StumbleUpon, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google Plus, according to content discovery company Shareaholic.

Facebook's traffic referral share increased 14 percentage points. Pinterest and StumbleUpon were the two other networks that saw a gain at 2.34 percentage points and 0.07 percentage points, respectively.

[Commentary] Google does it. So does Intel. But a significant number of major tech companies--including Apple, Twitter, and IBM--still haven't published information about how many women or minorities they hire. A new project from feminist coders aims to put pressure on them until they do.

The Open Diversity Data project, launched this past June by the feminist hacker space Double Union, keeps tabs on companies that do and don’t make their workforce demographics available to the public. Anyone can submit a request for ODD to add a company to the list. Once a company’s listed on the site, viewers can click to tweet thanks at the organization for being transparent, remind it to update its information, or ask that it publish employment diversity data for the first time.

Diversity data is much more difficult to come by than you might think. Organizations collect it regardless of external requests; those with more than 100 employees are required to report that information (in something called an EEO-1 form) to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission every year. But those reports stay guarded in filing systems far away from the public eye. If companies don’t make diversity data open, curious souls have to go through the arduous process of filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Labor.

The aim of ODD is two-fold: Double Union hopes that ODD will not only put pressure on companies to become more transparent, but also encourage legislators to free up EEOC reports to the public.