change

If your iPhone was recently "Rickrolled" by a worm that targets jailbroken iPhones, the following six steps will show you how to change the root password--used to connect to your device via a Unix software secure shell--to protect yourself in the future.

Before starting, you will need to have MobileTerminal installed from the Cydia store. Then:

1. Tap the MobileTerminal icon to open a terminal window.

2. Enter su and press return.

3. Enter the current default root user password alpine and press return.

4. Type passwd and press return.

5. Enter a new password and press return.… Read more

The world faces a surge in energy costs, as well as in planet-warming carbon emissions, unless it can swiftly agree a climate change deal, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

Arguing strongly for a global deal at the U.N. Climate Change summit in Copenhagen in December, the IEA said use of fossil fuels will increase quickly if policies remained unchanged.

Without an international agreement on climate change, the ratio of energy spending to gross domestic product for the largest consumer countries would double by 2030.

The world would have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions … Read more

Researchers are two steps closer to creating a mass-market version of technology called phase-change memory that could change how computers of the future are put together.

Intel and Numonyx, the chipmaker's joint venture with STMicroelectonics that's focused on flash memory, announced Wednesday they've built a new type of phase-change memory chip they hope will help fulfill the technology's promise for small size and large capacity.

Its 64-megabit capacity isn't momentous on its own--Numonyx announced a 128Mb device in 2006 and Samsung said in September it's producing a 512Mb chip. But what is significant are two major advances in making the decades-old idea practical.

First, the researchers built a grid of wires into the chip so a computer can easily control the writing of a 1 or 0 in each of the 64 million memory cells. Second, they announced their manufacturing process lets them stack several layers atop each other so memory can be packed more densely in a given volume. … Read more

A-PDF Info Changer lets you change the primary file information of a PDF item without altering its content. The program has an incredibly basic layout and produces effective results.

We were surprised by how basic the black-and-white interface was, but we were not turned off by it. The program offered us no Help file, but was so intuitive we never worried about getting lost. The program's layout practically held our hands for the entire process, which took less than a minute to convert information. Once our file was selected, we simply filled in fields for Author, Title, Subject, and … Read more

Contraception would be the cheapest and most effective way to reduce carbon emissions worldwide between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the London School of Economics.

The report, "Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost," (PDF) determined that if contraception was made widely available between 2010 and 2050 to women and men around the world who wished to use it, the reduction in unwanted births could result in saving 34 gigatonnes (one billion tonnes) of carbon emissions. That's roughly 60 years worth of U.K. emissions or 6 years worth of U.S. emissions.

The cost … Read more

Editors' note: Declan responds to critiques of this post in a subsequent piece he wrote in his Taking Liberties blog at CBSNews.com: "Cap And Trade Redux: $1,761 Annually Per Family? Or Not?"

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper … Read more

When using your Macintosh the foremost window may periodically lose focus, which can be frustrating when you are typing or otherwise providing input to a window. This usually happens because another window is demanding your attention via an alert or dialogue box.… Read more

Hide is an ingenious program that allows users to hide various windows with the press of a button. Unfortunately, the program's unintuitive interface makes some of its features difficult to use, which is a major drawback.

The program's interface is basic, with a box labeled Currently Hidden Windows and another labeled Program Group. It's not immediately clear what a user should do from here, and there's no Help file, but a bit of clicking around reveals that the meat of the program's functions is contained in the Settings. Here, users can set hot keys for … Read more

It always happens when you try to do some good, doesn't it?

You try to help an old lady cross the road, and she looks at you harshly and says, "So I look old to you?" You tell that special someone that you love her, and she tells you that she's actually enjoying the company of your best friend.

Such is the painful, ironic circumstance at the United Kingdom's Met Office. ("Met" is short for "meteorological.")

You see, according to the Daily Mail, the agency's large weather brains decided to … Read more