Public domain, via penbentley on Flickr

Earlier this week, the New York Academy of Sciences released a new report that focuses on what it terms the STEM paradox. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, and it's generally used to describe high-tech and research-oriented education and careers. If you talk to people looking for jobs in academia, you'll typically hear that we produce too many STEM graduates, leaving many struggling to find jobs. If you talk to people who represent companies like Google and Microsoft, we produce too few, and need to relax visa restrictions in order to bring in more from overseas.

This strange situation—a simultaneous glut and shortage—is what the NYAS report calls the "STEM paradox." Both problems are real, and they're the result of mismatched priorities. As Jeanne Dunn, vice president of Learning@Cisco put it when the report was introduced, when it comes to STEM graduates, "there's a huge imbalance of talent—where they are and the types of things they are skilled in."

So, even though our graduate schools may be producing highly qualified researchers, the research they're prepared for is often only appropriate in an academic setting; commercial entities end up looking for a different set of skills. Industry also ends up looking for more people at early stages of their careers—the bachelors and masters levels—but only if they have a relevant skill set. For the most part, undergraduate educations don't provide those. The result of these is part of the imbalance that Dunn mentioned.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

jao asks:

From the Code Complete book comes the following quote:

Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mount Rushmore near Keystone, South Dakota. Liz Lawley

Of all of the drone incidents reported at national parks across the United States over the last year, one stands out: a small aircraft spotted over the Mount Rushmore site in South Dakota in September 2013. Within hours, in the shadow of the famous four busts of American presidents, National Park Service (NPS) employees confronted a group of six individuals at a park ice cream shop and seized their passports, memory cards, and mobile phones.

Drones have become something of a scourge at various national parks. In June 2014, the NPS banned the use of drones in all of its parks, following an initial ban in Yosemite National Park in California the previous month. Since then, rangers have taken notable steps to enforce the ban.

Earlier this week, a German man was sentenced to a one year ban from Yellowstone and was ordered to pay a $1,600 fine after he crashed a drone into Yellowstone lake. A Dutch tourist was ordered to pay over $3,200 after he crashed his drone into the Grand Prismatic Hot Spring. One more case against an Oregon man remains pending in federal court in Wyoming.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Despite Apple's recent missteps in patching iOS 8, iPhone and iPad users may want to upgrade to the Apple's latest available mobile operating system to fix some serious security issues.

Among the most critical is a vulnerability — CVE-2014-4377 — in how iOS processes PDF files as images. An attacker who exploits the flaw could use a malicious Web page viewed by the user in Safari to run code on the victim's device, according to a description of the problem posted this week by Argentinian security consultancy Binamuse.

A proof-of-concept attack is "a complete 100% reliable and portable exploit for MobileSafari on IOS7.1.x," Felipe Andres Manzano, principal consultant at Binamuse, stated in the company's analysis.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mount Ontake in Japan erupted on Saturday, sending a large plume of ash into the sky.

Well designed surroundings can make a big difference to the lives of people with dementia, so one school teaches simple techniques to make homes dementia friendly.

The BBC's Shumaila Jaffery reports from a remote village in Pakistan to speak to one woman who was told she had to marry her cousin at the age of 13.

It's now bash-a-mole. Sakura - flickr.com

Remember when we said that a new patch had fixed the problems with the last patch to fix the rated-highly-dangerous “Shellshock” bug in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash)? You know, that bug that could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on a Linux or Unix system running some configurations of Apache, or perhaps the Git software version control system, DHCP network configuration or any number of other pieces of software that use bash to interact with the underlying operating system? Well, the new patch may not be a complete fix—and there may be vulnerabilities all the way down in the bash code.

Here's how the Shellshock vulnerability works, in a nutshell: an attacker sends a request to a Web server (or Git, a DHCP client, or anything else affected) that uses bash internally to interact with the operating system. This request includes data stored in an environmental variable. Environmental variables are like a clipboard for operating systems, storing information used to help it and software running on it know where to look for certain files or what configuration to start with. But in this case, the data is malformed so as to trick bash into treating it as a command, and that command is executed as part of what would normally be a benign set of script. This ability to trick bash is the shellshock bug. As a result, the attacker can run programs with the same level of access as the part of the system launching a bash shell. And in the case of a web server, that's practically the same level of access as an administrator, giving the attacker a way to gain full control of the targeted system.

David A. Wheeler, a computer scientist who is an acknowledged expert in developing secure open-source code, posted a message to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) list this evening urging more changes to the bash code. And other developers have found that the current patch still has vulnerabilities similar to the original one, where an attacker could store malicious data in a variable named the same thing as frequently run commands.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard has been flooded after a water main burst on Friday.

Yahoo's homepage as it appeared in 1996 with the directory front and center.

As part of an ongoing effort to streamline and focus its business, Yahoo today announced that it was retiring its namesake product.

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." In March of that year, they gave it the name "Yahoo!," for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

In the early days of the Web, these categorized, human-curated Web listings were all the rage. Search engines existed, but rapidly became notorious for their poor result quality. On a Web that was substantially smaller than the one we enjoy today, directories were a useful alternative way of finding sites of interest.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The BBC's Chris Morris takes a look around Belgium's seven devolved parliaments.

World leaders have descended on New York for the United Nations General Assembly, but few are getting the treatment India's PM Narendra Modi is set to receive.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to begin an official visit to the US to boost bilateral trade and court the investment of US firms.

A week ago Samsung acknowledged the existence of the read performance bug in the SSD 840 EVO and I just received a note that the fixed firmware is in validation process and is expected to be released to the public on October 15th. Unfortunately I don't have any further details about the bug or the fix at this point, or whether the update is coming to the 'vanilla' SSD 840 and OEM models, but I hope to get more details as the public release gets closer, so stay tuned.

© General Motors

Over the past few months, General Motors and its Chevrolet dealerships have been selling the 2015 Corvette with an interesting feature called Valet Mode. Valet Mode records audio, video, and driving statistics of the person in the driver's seat when the driver isn't around, thus keeping low-life valets from being too loose with their filthy mitts while inside a Corvette owner's fancy car.

Trouble is that in a handful of states, using Valet Mode might be considered a felony.

Federal wiretapping laws generally require only one party to consent to a recording of an interaction. But in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, all parties involved in the recording must either consent to a recording or at least be aware that the recording is happening, depending on the state. So if a Corvette owner turns on Valet Mode in California and turns the car over to the unknowing attendant, that Corvette owner could be committing a felony.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Comcast executive Charlie Herrin is aiming to improve Comcast's legendarily poor customer service. Comcast

After months of getting bashed for treating customers poorly, Comcast today said it's going to make improving customer service its "number one priority." But the company admitted that "it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we’re known for."

Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast's cable division, wrote today that Comcast's customer service hasn't kept up with Comcast's focus on "product innovation," technology, and content. "But this is only one half of the customer experience equation. The other half is operational excellence in how we deliver service," he wrote. "The way we interact with our customers—on the phone, online, in their homes—is as important to our success as the technology we provide. Put simply, customer service should be our best product."

A longtime Comcast executive is being called upon to fulfill that goal. Smit announced the promotion of 15-year Comcast veteran Charlie Herrin to a new role as senior VP of customer experience. Herrin previously was senior VP of product development and led design of X1, Comcast's new TV user interface.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A group of Indian widows who were thrown out by their families after their husbands died return to their home city of Calcutta to raise awareness.

Update, 9/26 11:00 PM ET: The most recent patches issued for the "Shellshock" bug have apparently still left avenues of attack, based on the analysis of several open source developers. See the latest report for further information.

After the discovery that a patch designed to repair the “Shellshock” vulnerability in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash) still allowed for an attacker to execute commands on a remote system, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other Linux distribution providers have pushed out a second fix to the vulnerability. At the same time, security researchers and service providers have detected a surge in scans for systems with the vulnerability, as would-be attackers seek to take advantage of the bug.

“Shellshock” has been compared to the Heartbleed bug discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library in April because of its potential severity and its widespread nature. Like Heartbleed, the Shellshock vulnerabilities were introduced by errors in coding years ago—errors made by an unpaid volunteer writing code that would end up in millions of computer systems.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Please send information about releases of Linux-related products to [email protected] or New Products c/o Linux Journal, PO Box 980985, Houston, TX 77098. Submissions are edited for length and content.

Oklahoma police say a US man who is suspected of beheading a female colleague and wounding one other after being sacked is in hospital after being shot.