Gadgetory

Barbie can be a computer engineer if only she didn't need men to do all her coding I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNET update if you want to encourage young girls to study science and math and become computer engineers you may not want to use a Barbie book for inspiration the internet is abuzz right now over a 2010 barbie children's book titled i can be a computer engineer you see the problem with the story is that in the book barbie doesn't know how to program and instead has two guys program for her and in the story she also infects her computer and her sisters skippers computer with a virus and she goes to her computer programmer friends to help recover the files this blew up online after screen writer pamela ribbon wrote a hilarious takedown of the book and now the internet is doing what the internet does best taking matters into their own hands and rewriting the dialogue in light of all this Mattel has issued a statement about the book the vice president of global brand marketing for Barbie said the portrayal of barbie in this specific story doesn't reflect the brand's vision for what barbie stands for we believe girls should be empowered to understand that anything is possible and believe they live in a world without limits we apologize that this book didn't reflect that belief all barbie titles moving forward will be written to inspire girls imaginations and portray an empowered barbie character well I'm glad to hear that if you have your own ideas on how this book should have been written there's a site where you can insert your own text into the book to give girls the inspiration to protect our cyber world of tomorrow in the meantime there are a few other tech stories for all you boys and girls out there Facebook has created yet another standalone app but this time it's just for Facebook groups Facebook isn't forcing you to download it like it did with the messenger app if any young girls grow up to become Facebook engineers I hope you stop this madness of unnecessary Facebook apps for separate functions and in other news some people are taking advantage of a new price matching policy at Walmart and have trick stores into selling PlayStation 4 game consoles for as low as $50 this holiday season Walmart is promising to match amazon's prices but some grinches out there have cheated and created bogus Amazon seller accounts listing ps4's for a fraction of their $400 price tag people are now tweeting about getting away with this cheat I'm sure Walmart and other stores will Weizen up and change the policies to avoid the scam that's your tech news update you can head to my blog post for links on where you can write your own feminist hacker Barbie book and email us with your new Barbie story from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey