Technology

Sometimes you just need to reboot or shut down right away-and we mean right away, with no waiting. Thankfully, If you need to reboot and you don’t feel like shutting down your apps one by one or waiting for Mac OS to walk you through them, press Ctrl+Cmd+Eject to reboot your Mac immediately, with no alerts or warning dialogs. If you need to shut down and run out the door, press Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+Eject to shut down immediately, also without alerts or warning dialogs. Be careful using these commands though: you won’t be prompted to save your work or review your open apps first.

You can also press Ctrl+Eject (or press the power button) to bring up the power management menu and select whether you want to reboot, shut down, sleep, or do nothing. Before you use any of these commands though, remember you can always press Cmd+Opt+Shift+Esc to force-quit the front-most application if that’s what’s making you want to reboot — via Lifehacker

Search dominates how we shop on the Web, Google dominates search, big names dominate Google results, and most people don’t bother looking beyond the first page of search results.

Those are the key, and remarkably unsurprising, results of a paper called What you don’t know can hurt you, researched and published by the Australia Institute, and sponsored by the Microsoft-led Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security.

Unlike you, I am not a security professional. However, we probably share a common human trait, namely that none of us enjoy looking like a fool in front of a large audience. I therefore chose the title of my talk to minimise the risk of ridicule: if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.

So what follows should be seen as a farrago of speculation by a guy who earns his living telling entertaining lies for money — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Bill Keller called him elusive, manipulative and volatile in his recent cover story for the magazine. Now we can add cat hater to Julian Assange’s biography. More negative news about Assange comes from the new book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, written by the former WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. In an excerpt published by Vanity Fair in February, one of the many accusations Domscheit-Berg makes against Assange is cruelty to cats.

All of which has been refuted by Renata Avila who points out that Domscheit-Berg appears to be on a campaign to smear Assange to promote his own Wikileaks alternative:

I can confidently say that, while visiting Mr Domscheit-Berg in Wiesbaden, I was able to meet and observe his cat. This was immediately after Mr Assange had been staying with him. I myself have a cat and from my observations it was a perfectly normal and healthy cat that, like all cats, enjoyed attention. Mr Domscheit-Berg was too busy to pay him much attention, as he was often on the telephone or on the computer, so I spent quite a bit of time playing with the cat. Mr Domscheit-Berg watched and replied, laughing fondly, that the way I was playing with the cat was “exactly the same way” as Mr Assange had played with the cat the week before. There was absolutely no mention from Mr Domscheit-Berg that the cat had been abused or mistreated in any way by Mr Assange. Therefore, it is very unlikely that a healthy animal, behaving normally and playing with strangers, had any disorder provoked by Mr Assange’s behavior, as suggested by Mr Domscheit-Berg.

I was alarmed by all the private details Domscheit-Berg was disclosing to journalists, irrelevant details that only yellow press or groups hostile to WikiLeaks or Mr Assange would care about. Useful details for someone willing to divert the attention from all the important information disclosed by WikiLeaks’ sources.

Bad journalism, NYT, no cookie for you — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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Patents are archaic, misunderstood and of little or no help to the entrepreneur, according to Mark Shuttleworth, who leads the Ubuntu Foundation, which is behind the open source operating system. In an interview with TechCentral, Shuttleworth was asked about the escalating patent battle in the mobile industry and he provided some choice quotes.

He said that while patents are promoted as a way to protect the innovations of small entrepreneurs trying to make something big, they’re being applied to the opposite effect. He said larger companies are using patents to keep new players from coming in and shaking up an established market. That, he said, is also playing itself out in the piling on of Android, which is the favourite target of a lot of tech companies right now — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An experimental aircraft that could fly from Sydney to London in less than an hour at blistering speeds of 20,921km/h is due to be tested this week.

The unmanned, arrowhead-shaped aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, will test new technology that would provide the US Pentagon a lightning-fast vehicle capable of delivering a military strike anywhere in the world in under an hour — via redwolf.newsvine.com