Launching New Content As More Learners Move Online: 2 Degrees, 8 MasterTracks, and 100 Guided Projects

By Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO Coursera The profound impact of COVID-19 has forced us to rethink many aspects of our lives. Overnight, the global education system had to find ways to mitigate the impact of more than 1.5 billion students seeing their campuses closed. Since then, it has been heartwarming to witness the heroic efforts of […]
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2019 Sees More Geeky Advent Calendars

It’s the first day of December, which means the return of an annual geek tradition: the computer programming advent calendars! An anonymous reader delivers this update:
It’s the very first year for the Raku Advent Calendar (using the language formerly known as Perl 6). Meanwhile, Perl 5 still has its own separate advent calendar. Amsterdam-based Perl programmer Andrew Shitov is also writing…

Becoming Environmentally Conscious: Meet the edX Sustainability Team

The Sustainability Team, a group of people committed to making the edX workplace more environmentally sustainable, was formed during Hackathon XXII—a quarterly event with the goal of driving innovation and problem solving. The team’s first initiative was measuring edX’s carbon footprint and collecting potential projects to make a positive impact. The group has since grown, and has taken on a wider…

Forbes Raves Upcoming Linux Desktop Will ‘Embarass’ Windows 10 and macOS

Forbes senior contributor Jason Evangelho dedicated a whole article to a coming update for one Chinese-domestic Linux distribution: If you haven’t been paying attention to a little Linux desktop distribution called Deepin, it’s time to put it on your radar. Nevermind that Huawei chose Deepin to ship on their MateBook laptop lineup. Nevermind that Deepin Cloud Sync [for system settings] is…

Chrome Promises ‘No More Mixed Messages About HTTPS ‘

“Today we’re announcing that Chrome will gradually start ensuring that https:// pages can only load secure https:// subresources,” promises an announcement on the Chromium blog. It notes that Chrome users already make HTTPS connections for more than 90% of their browsing time, and “we’re now turning our attention to making sure that HTTPS configurations across the web are secure and up-to-date.”…

Volkswagen’s Bold Plan To Create a New Car OS

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VW Group is now consolidating its software all under one new internal group, similar to the way that financial services or the ride-hailing Moia exist alongside individual vehicle brands. And that means in the future, a single unified automotive OS will run on everything from a VW Polo to an Audi A8….

Coming Full Circle: From IBM Data Science Professional Certificate to IBM Internship

Sarah is a senior at Louisiana State University who knew she wanted to find her way from food service into a data science career. In her words, she shares how she gained hands-on experience that fast-tracked her path into data science in less than 6 months. When I started the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate, […]
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Chrome and Firefox Changes Spark the End of ‘Extended Validation’ Certificates

“Upcoming changes in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox may finally spark the end for Extended Validation certificates as the browsers plan to do away with showing a company’s name in the address bar,” reports Bleeping Computer. When connecting to a secure web site, an installed SSL/TLS certificate will encrypt the communication between the browser and web server. These certificates come in…

Investigating Some Subscription Scam iOS Apps

Security engineer Ivan writes: For some reason Apple allows “subscription scam” apps on the App Store. These are apps that are free to download and then ask you to subscribe right on launch. It’s called the freemium business model, except these apps ask you to subscribe for “X” feature(s) immediately when you launch them, and keep doing so, annoyingly, over and…