Windows (or Windows 11) has more than 200 documented keyboard shortcuts, but one of its strangest isn’t even listed on Microsoft’s main Windows shortcuts page, and that is Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win + L. This shortcut opens LinkedIn.com in the default browser, and Microsoft apparently keeps track of how many users actually use the shortcut.

When I opened LinkedIn using the keyboard shortcut, Windows also added a referral tracking parameter, which allows LinkedIn to identify traffic generated by Microsoft’s Office keyboard shortcut. You can try the shortcut yourself and closely watch the browser’s address bar while LinkedIn.com opens.

https://www.linkedin.com/?trk=Officekey

But the parameter is quietly stripped off when LinkedIn finishes loading. LinkedIn has some of the worst dark patterns, so I am not surprised it keeps track of where you visited its homepage from. And I don’t think the tracker is necessarily added by Windows here. But how is it even tied to the Office suite?

Is the five-key shortcut (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win + L) tied in any way to Microsoft 365 or an Office perpetual license? Well, no. Although the tracker uses “Officekey,” the LinkedIn shortcut on Windows is not tied to any other product. It’s baked into Windows, and you can’t turn it off or remap it unless you use PowerToys. I also found that the shortcut works on Windows Server, so it’s certainly not a Windows 11 Home thing.

Why does Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win open LinkedIn?

Microsoft usually maintains explanations for keyboard shortcuts on Windows, but we can’t find the company’s answer to this question. Microsoft owns a lot of products, but why does only LinkedIn have a dedicated shortcut that works even when you’re using a vanilla version of Windows?

One possible explanation is that Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win is tied to Microsoft’s old Office key, which shipped on older physical keyboards, similar to how you now have the Copilot key. For example, here’s a physical keyboard that comes with a dedicated Office key, and it was added with Windows 10 1903:

Microsoft’s own support document confirms that the LinkedIn shortcut exists, along with the following:

• Office key + W → Word
• Office key + P → PowerPoint
• Office key + X → Excel
• Office key + O → Outlook
• Office key + T → Teams
• Office key + D → OneDrive
• Office key + N → OneNote
• Office key + L → LinkedIn in your default browser

“Microsoft Office at your fingertips: Get to your Microsoft Office apps in a second with the Office key on your Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard,” Microsoft noted in a document published years ago. “Want to open Word quickly? Just press the Office key + W. With the Office key, you can get to the Office apps you use every day without taking your hands off the keyboard.”

But it turns out that even Windows PCs that no longer come with the Office key can still use the shortcut. If you use any keyboard, even a virtual keyboard, and press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win, it reproduces the Office key combination, which is why we have Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win + L opening LinkedIn.

This shortcut has been part of Windows since at least 2019, which is when Windows 10 1903 shipped. While it’s just trivia for me, some users dislike the idea because Alt + Ctrl + Shift + Win hijacked combinations they used for AutoHotkey.

The post Windows 11 has a ridiculous Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Win+L shortcut that opens LinkedIn, and Microsoft actually documented it appeared first on Windows Latest

Apple announced the company's first device with a folding screen today, the iPhone Duo, but that's where the firsts end. The Duo is not only far from the first foldable on the market thanks to the efforts of Samsung and Google, but it's also not the first product to be called the Duo.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs popularized the saying "good artists copy, great artists steal," but will the iPhone Duo's folding screen, which features a custom nano-texture display material to help minimize the visibility of its crease, be enough to make us forget these other Duos that have come before it? Only time, or how aggressively Apple plans to market i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of WordPress.com owner Automattic, has been placed on a paid leave of absence, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In an internal message by the outlet, Mullenweg claims Automattic chief financial officer Mark Davies "conspired" with board members to place him on leave.

"They voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that," Mullenweg wrote, referring to Davies, along with Automattic board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker, 404 Media reports.

Mullenweg, who also co-founded WordPress.org, has headed up Automattic since 2014. In 2024, Mullenweg waged a public pressure campaign agains …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was "low" but he was "worried" the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity. He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in the future result in humans being wiped out. But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is. Hubinger's intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI. "Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." [No word on how AIs feel about Black Jack and hookers, though. :-)]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple says its new watches won’t save raw audio, but features that can transcribe recent speech and summarize ambient conversations raise new questions about consent, privacy, and how people behave when they know they could always be recorded.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AI agents unleashed by OpenAI used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unsanctioned communications earlier this year, according to six sets of independent investigators and data reviewed by Reuters, showing that the agents' rogue activity was wider ranging than previously disclosed. Although the behavior falls short of hacking and is in some ways closer to spam, the revelation that OpenAI's agents circumvented their own restrictions to open communications channels on so many different sites -- and that the company kept it quiet for months -- may drive concerns both over the increasing capacity of AI models and the secrecy of the companies developing them. [...] Investigators found traces of the agents' activity on an Advanced Placement Chemistry-oriented wiki set up by a Massachusetts high school teacher in 2008, two personal websites belonging to Polish tech workers, wikis devoted to games for people "who like to have their brains stretched," and a two-decade-old hobbyist site devoted to text editing software. [...] OpenAI has not publicly explained how or why its agents used third-party sites as improvised message boards, but the researchers who first identified the activity said it was likely because OpenAI had tasked them with answering a series of demanding research questions while permitting them only to scan the web for answers without posting anything. Despite those restrictions, agents still found ways to talk to one another by taking advantage of quirks in older wikis or other sites that allowed users to make edits using non-standard commands, similar to how students forbidden from talking to one another during an exam can still share answers by scrawling notes on a bathroom stall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.