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Submission + - Netflix Edits 'Bill Nye' Episode: Removes Segment on Chromosomes and Gender (freebeacon.com) 4

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes: When uploaded to Netflix, an episode of the educational children's show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" was edited to remove a segment saying that chromosomes determine one's gender.

In the original episode, titled "Probability," a young woman told viewers, "I'm a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2."

The 1996 segment appears to contradict Netflix's new series "Bill Nye Saves the World", which endorses a socially liberal understanding of gender, under which gender is defined by self-identification rather than genetics.

Submission + - GoDaddy CEO: Americans Won't Be Smart Enough to Fill Tech Jobs for Decades

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: A day after his company joined the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook in the Technology Companies amicus motion and brief against Trump's Executive Order on immigration, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving advises Americans in FORTUNE that If You’re Against Outsourcing, You Should Support U.S. Visas For Skilled Foreigners. "With so much technical illiteracy in the US," Irving writes, "the H-1B visa program has become America’s secret weapon warding off economic catastrophe. Though STEM education is the clear long-term solution, the US is not going to see a vastly greater pipeline of domestic technical talent coming from our universities anytime soon. It will take us years, if not decades, to educate a new wave of students from elementary thru their advanced degrees. Until that next generation enters the elite technical workforce in mass, the most technical jobs (all 545,000 of them) will simply sit open if H-1B visas shrink or disappear." If Irving's piece gives you a sense of deja vu, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly argued in 2012 that "an effective national talent strategy therefore needs to combine long-term improvements in STEM education in the United States with targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms." To bring this about, Smith suggested producing a crisis (video) would be key: "Sometimes when a small problem proves intractable, you have to make it bigger," Smith explained. "You have to make the problem big enough so that the solution is exciting enough to galvanize people’s attention and generate the will to overcome the hurdles that have been holding us back. I believe that if we can combine what we’re doing with respect to education with what we need to do with respect to immigration we have that opportunity ahead of us." So, is Big Tech now trying to make lemonade out of Trump's immigration lemons?

Submission + - EU Prepares Easing Of Netflix Geoblocking

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Parliament is now finalising legislation which will allow EU residents to access their paid subscriptions for online media – such as video streaming, games and music – whilst visiting other EU countries. Under the new rules, companies will not be able to arbitrarily block subscribers from accessing the content catalogue of their home countries whilst visiting other parts of the European Union, with country of origin to be established by various possible methods besides IP address, including payment details, public tax information and ‘checks on electronic identification’. The issue was brought to a head last year when Netflix began blocking the known IPs of VPN providers, often used by subscribers to access the catalogues of their home countries while travelling.

Submission + - Netherland abandons machine vote counting as insecure (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: Following revelations about the lack of security of the software, the Dutch government has decided to abandon the use of it to count the ballots at the forthcoming election in March. (For comparison the UK has NEVER had machine counting)

Submission + - OPNsense 17.1 Released, Based On FreeBSD 11 (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OPNsense 17.1 is now available as the newest release of this network-focused FreeBSD-based operating system forked from pfSense. It's now been two years since the first official release of OPNsense and to celebrate they have out a big update. OPNsense 17.1 re-bases to using FreeBSD 11.0, there's now a SSH remote installer, new language support, more hardening features used from HardenedBSD, new plugins, integrated authentication via PAM, and many other improvements. Some of the new plug-ins include FTP Proxy, Tinc VPN, and Let's Encrypt support. Those interested in OPNsense for a BSD-based network-oriented OS can find out more about the big 17.1 update via OPNsense.org.

Submission + - Hacktivists: How to Hack Donald Trump's Smartphone (techworm.net)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The hacktivist group Anonymous on Friday attached a screenshot in a tweet explaining how the newly elected U.S. President, Donald Trump’s smartphone is vulnerable to a potentially devastating hack attack as the device runs on Android 4.4 OS, which is out-of-date with existing security requirements.

Anonymous posted the hacking guide after the New York Times disclosed that the President still uses an“old, unsecured Android phone”, which is believed to be a Samsung Galaxy S3. In their tweet, they warned Trump of the dangers and mentioned that software bug called ‘Stagefright’ could be used to crack into his smartphone by any potential hacker.

They wrote: “A Galaxy S3 does not meet the security requirements of a teenager, let alone the purported leader of the free world.

Submission + - Vivaldi CEO: 'Stop your anti-competitive practices with Edge, Microsoft!" (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Microsoft is no stranger to pissing people off, particularly when it comes to Windows 10. There have been endless cries about forced updates, complaints about ads, moaning about privacy, and now the CEO of Vivaldi has lashed out at the company for its anti-competitive practices with Microsoft Edge.

Jon von Tetzchner says that Microsoft has forgotten about the "actual real-life people that use technology in their daily lives." He takes particular umbrage at Windows 10's continued insistence of resetting the default browser to Edge.

Indicating that his patience has now run out, von Tetzchner points to a 72-year-old friend who was confused by the change and unable to reverse things. He says that Microsoft is failing to respect the decisions made by users, and this is something that needs to stop.

Submission + - Remarkable New Theory Says There's No Gravity (bigthink.com)

Submitted by Jeff Socia
Jeff Socia writes: Gravity is something all of us are familiar with from our first childhood experiences. You drop something — it falls. And the way physicists have described gravity has also been pretty consistent — it’s considered one of the four main forces or “interactions” of nature and how it works has been described by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity all the way back in 1915.

But Professor Erik Verlinde, an expert in string theory from the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute of Theoretical Physics, thinks that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature because it's not always there. Instead it’s “emergent” — coming into existence from changes in microscopic bits of information in the structure of spacetime.

Submission + - Inside The NYPD's Attempt To Build Community Trust Through Twitter (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: When the NYPD rolled out its Twitter presence a couple years back, it didn't go so smoothly: the @NYPDNews account tweeted a request: “Do you have a photo with a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD,” and by midnight the same day, more than 70,000 people had responded decrying police brutality. At Backchannel, Susan Crawford looks at the department's attempt to use Twitter to rebuild community trust, noting that while the NYPD has a long ways to go, any opening up of communication is an improvement on the traditionally tight-lipped culture.

Submission + - Three college students were behind BBC, Trump cyberattacks (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How many hackers does it take to bring down one of the world's largest websites? Turns out, only three, and two of them are still in college.

Several sources have told ZDNet that despite claiming to have dozens of members across the world, the New World Hackers' consists of just three core members who carry out the bulk of the group's cyberattacks — the youngest of which is still a teenager.

The group also targeted and downed Donald Trump's campaign website and banking giant HSBC's website in separate attacks.

Submission + - How Broken Classroom Discussions Contribute to Our Vitrilioc Political Climate (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: If colleges can’t lead productive discussions of sensitive topics in their classrooms, can we expect the discourse in future elections to be any better than the election we just suffered through?

At Harvard Law School, where admission is a veritable pass to a life of leadership, longtime professor Charles Nesson says the Internet has been “crippling” for classroom discussions. “Even when laptops are closed, you still feel the danger of being in a completely connected environment,” he observes. “People are cautious on issues that engage real diversity and real difference. I think it’s tremendously challenging to law teachers, to socratic teachers. A lot of faculty are feeling that we weren’t trained for this.”

Nesson recently started experimenting with an approach he hopes will help. He's asking his students to enter an anonymous online chat room — while sitting together in class — so they can speak freely.
Others, though, say the secret is to push students to be braver in facing tough subjects in the classroom, so people can work through issues before they hit the real world.

Submission + - UK Government Warns Growth Of AI Increases Reidentification Risk

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new report from the UK’s Government Office For Science warns that the explosive growth in artificial intelligence, driven by Big Data, could make anonymised individuals in datasets extraordinarily easy to re-identify, due to the interlinking of vast semi-supervised systems and sets. Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Sir Mark Walport wrote in the report: 'As the volume of publically available data increases...and more powerful artificial intelligence techniques are developed, what was a ‘remote’ chance of re-identification may become more likely, and organisations will periodically need to revisit the protection they have in place.'

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