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Webcast The idea of the paperless office has been with us since, probably, the invention of paper. But like the 15-hour working week and the flying-car commute, it always seems to be just over the rainbow of practicality.…

Properly FOSS version of XenServer promises at least five years of support for next release, maybe more

XCP-ng, the crowdfunded effort to deliver an open-source version of XenServer, has matured to the point at which it will offer the world a version with long-term support.…

Big blow to big whistleblower

The US government's Department of Justice has won its multi-million-dollar claim to Edward Snowden's Permanent Record book royalties as well as any future earnings and public speaking fees.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: For the first time, scientists have observed an interaction of a rare and baffling form of matter called time crystals. The crystals look at a glance like "regular" crystals, but they have a relationship to time that both intrigues and puzzles scientists because of its unpredictability. Now, experts say they could have applications in quantum computing. [...] Researchers say they've collided two time crystals to see what happens next. "Our results demonstrate that time crystals obey the general dynamics of quantum mechanics and offer a basis to further investigate the fundamental properties of these phases, opening pathways for possible applications in developing fields, such as quantum information processing," they explain in a new paper. In their experiments, they placed two time crystals in superfluid and mixed magnons between them. Magnons are a magnetic quasiparticle that, in this case, led to "opposite-phase oscillations," while the crystals themselves stayed phase stable. What's cool (and, literally, supercooled) is how the matter acts within predictable quantum mechanical ways despite the central quality of wild oscillation patterns over time. "Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact," lead author Samuli Autti, of Lancaster University, said in a statement. "Controlled interactions are the number one item on the wish list of anyone looking to harness a time crystal for practical applications, such as quantum information processing."

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He masterminded $7m scam from halfway house, Feds claim

A convicted fraudster was out on parole when he allegedly conned victims into giving him millions of dollars to place surefire sports bets on their behalf using special software that didn't actually exist.…

Fujtisu kit on the floor tho bourse takes the blame for day-long dead zone

Tokyo’s Stock Exchange (TSE) went offline for most of Thursday, its longest-ever outage and a very unwelcome one as it is the world’s third-largest bourse, when measured by market capitalisation.…

According to a Netflix support document, an Apple T2 Security chip is required to stream Netflix in 4K HDR on a Mac. "What that hardware requirement means is that only recent Macs have the ability to play UHD content from Netflix," reports Engadget. From the report: Here's the full list of T2-equipped Macs: 2018 or later MacBook Pro, 2018 or later MacBook Air, 2018 Mac mini, 2019 Mac Pro, iMac Pro and 2020 iMac. If you're not sure whether your Mac has the necessary hardware, you can find out by following the steps Apple details on its website. The Verge suggests the requirement could have something to do with the T2 chip's ability to process HEVC encoded videos. On its webpage for the iMac, Apple says the coprocessor can transcode HEVC video up to twice as fast as its previous generation T1 chip. If Netflix is encoding streams using HEVC, that could explain the requirement. Whatever the case, we've reached out to both Apple and Netflix for more information, and we'll update this article when we hear back from them. There are some other requirements too. In addition to having a T2-equipped Mac, you'll need macOS Big Sur, a Premium Netflix subscription, and the Safari browser -- other browsers will limit you to 720p on a Mac.

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Microsoft is testing a new feature for Windows 10 that will alert you if your SSD drive is failing. Microsoft is also testing an update to Your Phone that will allow it to work with multiple devices. PCWorld reports: Both features arrived as part of Windows 10 Insider Build 20226 for the Dev Channel, Microsoft's laboratory for future features. The Dev Channel is truly experimental, meaning that these two new features may or may not become official features of the operating system. Fortunately, both are straightforward. An aftermarket SSD may ship with utility software that monitors an NVMe SSD drive's health, but Windows itself does not monitor the drive. In this test feature, Windows 10 will add NVMe SSD drives to its monitoring processes, and let you know if it's about to fail. If you then go into the Windows 10 Settings menu for Storage, you'll see that the SSD drive in question is listed as unreliable. In that case you're advised to back up everything. "Attempting to recover data after drive failure is both frustrating and expensive," Microsoft said in a blog post. "This feature is designed to detect hardware abnormalities for NVMe SSDs and notify users with enough time to act. It is strongly recommended that users immediately back up their data after receiving a notification."

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Earlier ban on H-1B, H-2B, J and L passes ruled an overstep of presidential power, middle-finger to Congress

President Trump's proclamation in June that barred companies and other organizations from bringing in foreign workers into the US under various visas like the H-1B has been temporarily, partially blocked.…

US tech firm Palantir, known for supplying controversial data-sifting software to government agencies, has fetched a market value of nearly $22 billion in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. The BBC reports: The firm, which launched in 2003 with backing from right-wing libertarian tech investor Peter Thiel and America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), builds programs that integrate massive data sets and spit out connections and patterns in user-friendly formats. The firm - sometimes described as the "scariest" of America's tech giants - got its start working with US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now supplies software to police departments, other public agencies and corporate clients. It is active in more than 150 countries, including the UK, where it was one of the tech firms the government enlisted this spring to help respond to coronavirus. In the first half of 2020, Palantir revenue rose 49% year-on-year, topping $480 million. And at its direct listing on Wednesday, in which investors sold some of their existing shares to the public, shares opened at $10 each - above the $7.25 reference price -- giving it a value of roughly $22 billion. Mark Cash, equity research analyst at Morningstar, who has estimated the firm's value at $28 billion -- even higher than the valuation reached on Wednesday -- said the firm is well-positioned in a growing industry. "Data integration at this scale for the government is very complex and I think if you tried to stop spending on that and it just goes away, you're going to have some big problems," he said. "We think it's very hard to switch away from once you're in as a customer." Due to the use of its technology by immigration authorities in the U.S., Amnesty International issued a report (PDF) saying the firm was failing its responsibility as a company to protect human rights with inadequate due diligence into who it is working for. "Palantir told Amnesty that it had deliberately declined some work with border authorities in the US due to the concerns," notes the BBC. "But the company has also vigorously defended its government work, maintaining that its clients own and control the data. It says it has a team focused on civil liberties issues, but it is government's job to craft policy, not Silicon Valley's."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: After the pandemic closed many libraries' physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March, boosting its membership by 20 percent. Some public libraries, new to digital collections, delight in exposing their readers to a new kind of reading. The library in Archer City, Texas, population 9,000, received a grant to join OverDrive this summer. The new ebook collection "has really been wonderful," says library director Gretchen Abernathy-Kuck. "So much of the last few months has been stressful and negative." The ebooks are "something positive. It was something new." But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry's big-five publishers -- Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan -- have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time -- two years, for example -- or number of checkouts -- most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period. The result: Libraries typically pay between $20 and $65 per copy -- an industry average of $40, according to one recent survey -- compared with the $15 an individual might pay to buy the same ebook online. Instead of owning an ebook copy forever, librarians must decide at the end of the licensing term whether to renew. The publishers' licensing terms make it "very difficult for libraries to be able to afford ebooks," says Michelle Jeske, director of the Denver Public Library and president of the Public Library Association. "The pricing models don't work well for libraries." "Librarians argue that digital lending promotes sales in the long run, by introducing readers to authors whose books they might not have bought otherwise," reports Wired. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, the project leader for the Panorama Project, adds: "I think one of the things we'll see in the postmortem of this year is that the importance of libraries is going to stand out. Any publisher that gets out of 2020 not missing their budgets too much -- they're going to owe that to libraries."

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Two RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, said this week that their iOS apps have been removed in China over content that deemed "illegal" by the local cyber watchdog. TechCrunch reports: Apps get banned in China for all sorts of reasons. Feed readers of RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, are particularly troubling to the authority because they fetch content from third-party websites, allowing users to bypass China's Great Firewall and reach otherwise forbidden information, though users have reported not all RSS apps can circumvent the elaborate censorship system. Those who use RSS readers in China are scarce, as the majority of China's internet users -- 940 million as of late -- receive their dose of news through domestic services, from algorithmic news aggregators such as ByteDance's Toutiao and WeChat's built-in content subscription feature to apps of mainstream local outlets. Major political events and regulatory changes can trigger new waves of app removals, but it's unclear why the two RSS feed readers were pulled this week. Inoreader, a similar service, was banned from Apple's Chinese App Store back in 2017. Feedly is also unavailable through the local App Store. The history of China's crackdown on RSS dates back to 2007 when the authority launched a blanket ban on web-based RSS feed aggregators. The latest incidents could well be part of Apple's business-as-usual in China: cleaning up foreign information services operating outside Beijing's purview, regardless of their reach.

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