Month: February 2016

At long last, the BBC has revealed the full cast for Top Gear, which is scheduled to return in May this year.

If you were expecting just one other presenter alongside Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, you're in for a surprise. Not only have Sabine Schmitz (the first female Top Gear presenter in 15 years!) and Chris Harris been confirmed, but there are also two more presenters joining the team: Formula 1 commentator Eddie Jordan, and Rory Reid. If we include the Stig that brings the total cast count to seven—almost as many as the original Top Gear series...

Sabine Schmitz is probably the most exciting addition to the team. The Queen of the Nurburgring made quite an impression when she previously appeared on Top Gear, driving a diesel Ford Transit van around the German track at a terrifying clip.

GitHub's octocat knows how to fly a jet pack but still has some gender issues. (credit: GitHub)

With over 12 million users, GitHub is one of the largest online communities for collaborating on development projects. Now a team of researchers has done an exhaustive analysis of millions of GitHub pull requests for open source projects, trying to discover whether the contributions of women were accepted less often than the contributions of men. What they discovered was that women's contributions were actually accepted more often than men's—but only if the women had gender-neutral profiles. Women whose GitHub profiles revealed their genders had a much harder time.

The researchers are American computer scientists whose work was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), a group that determines whether experiments on human subjects are ethical or not. They've published a pre-print of their GitHub analysis on PeerJ today and offered a deep look at how they did it.

Finding men and women on GitHub

First, they needed a dataset. Luckily the GHTorrent dataset contains public data on GitHub users, pull requests, and projects up to April 1, 2015. The group writes that they "augmented this GHTorrent data by mining GitHub’s webpages for information about each pull request status, description, and comments." But they had just one problem. GitHub profiles do not include gender information. So the researchers determined the genders of over 1.4 million users by linking their e-mail addresses with G+ profiles that list a gender. They write:

An estimated 63 percent of the encryption products available today are developed outside US borders, according to a new report that takes a firm stance against the kinds of mandated backdoors some federal officials have contended are crucial to ensuring national security.

The report, prepared by security researchers Bruce Schneier, Kathleen Seidel, and Saranya Vijayakumar, identified 865 hardware or software products from 55 countries that incorporate encryption. Of them, 546 originated from outside the US. The most common non-US country was Germany, a country that has publicly disavowed the kinds of backdoors advocated by FBI Director James Comey and other US officials. Although the Obama administration is no longer asking Congress for legislation requiring them, it continues to lobby private industry to include ways law-enforcement agencies can decrypt encrypted data sent or stored by criminal or terrorism suspects.

The authors said that they found no reason to believe the quality of encryption products developed abroad are any better or worse than their counterparts in the US or in the UK or France, whose officials have also hinted they favor encryption backdoors. The conclusion of their survey—which the researchers said represents the lower bound of the number of encryption products available worldwide—was that criminals or terrorists who are savvy enough to use encryption would also be smart enough to choose a product that isn't subject to mandatory backdoor laws. The result, the authors argued, is that US competitiveness would be harmed with little benefit to national security.