Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 to more PCs this week. After an initial launch to mostly new PCs earlier this month, Microsoft is gradually making the free Windows 11 upgrade available to more existing and eligible devices. From a report: "The availability of Windows 11 has been increased and we are leveraging our latest generation machine learning model to offer the upgrade to an expanded set of eligible devices," says Microsoft. "We will continue to train our machine learning model throughout the phased rollout to deliver a smooth upgrade experience." If you've been waiting for the Windows 11 upgrade to appear in Windows Update, you might find the above prompt this week. Anecdotally, we've been offered the upgrade on a variety of devices today, including a custom gaming PC.

Facebook said Thursday it's changing its name to Meta. "From now on, we''ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Oculus Connect event. "Over time you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services."

Microsoft on Thursday said it plans to work with community colleges across the United States to fill 250,000 cybersecurity jobs over the next four years. From a report: Microsoft said it will provide scholarships or assistance to about 25,000 students and will provide training for new and existing teachers at 150 community colleges across the country. The company also said that it will provide curriculum materials for free to all community colleges, as well as four-year schools, in the country. "Over the next three years, we'll put many tens of millions of dollars behind this effort," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a press briefing. "This is an opportunity for us to get started. This is not the ceiling on what we'll do."

Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a "metaverse" that will bring physically distant people closer together. From a report: Facebook has said this is its next major push, but it comes as the company is under intense scrutiny for how it is managing the impact of its existing services. The company is using its annual Facebook Connect conference to outline a series of new features and products, as well as some investments to spur adoption of the technologies. Among them:

Horizon Home: Facebook is making the home screen on Oculus Quest more social, allowing friends to gather, watch videos together and dive into games and apps.
Messenger calling in VR: This will start with being able to call from VR and eventually that will be a launch point for hanging out in virtual reality.
Bringing more 2D apps to VR: More than 20 apps are coming to Horizon Home, with the ability to be placed on a virtual screen. Apps include productivity titles like Slack and Dropbox as well as Facebook's own services, including Instagram. Developers will also be able to offer their own progressive web apps for use in VR.
Horizon Marketplace: The company plans to operate its own marketplace where creators and developers can sell their own virtual goods.
On the augmented reality front, Facebook is adding hand and body tracking to its Spark AR developer tools as well as Polar, a new app that allows people to create augmented reality filters without needing to code.

Photographs from a historic moment in tech news history, the day a Gizmodo reporter published hands-on pics of the then-not-yet-announced iPhone 4, are now missing. From a report: And they're not alone -- vast quantities of pictures from G/O Media sites like The Onion, Jalopnik, and Deadspin (as well as Gizmodo) have been removed, reportedly intentionally, according to Gawker. A recent Gawker report highlights that Buzzfeed has also been wiping many older images from the web. Still, Buzzfeed's reason for doing so is relatively apparent after management explained the copyright claims on old photos deemed some of them "high-risk." Both cases are examples of "link rot," where content on the internet is drastically changed because it either disappears entirely or because essential pieces have gone missing.

Google on Thursday warned some customers that antitrust bills targeting the tech giant could jeopardize the services small businesses rely on. From a report: By turning to its customers, Google could drum up opposition from small businesses that may give lawmakers pause in advancing legislation. Google is emailing small and medium sized businesses that use its advertising, analytics and free business profile tools, to tell them antitrust bills in the House and Senate could "cost your business time and money." Google said the dangers could include: Making it harder for customers to find businesses because listings, including address and business hours, may no longer appear in Google Search results or on Google Maps, and hurting the effectiveness of digital marketing if Google Ads products were broken up and disconnected from Google Analytics.

"[W]e're concerned that Congress' controversial package of bills could have unintended consequences, especially for small businesses who have relied on digital tools to adapt, recover and reach new customers throughout the pandemic," a Google spokesperson told Axios. Google declined to say how many businesses it contacted. Customers using some Google products will also see a prompt encouraging them to opt in to receive more information about the bills.

Physicists in China claim they've constructed two quantum computers with performance speeds that outrival competitors in the U.S., debuting a superconducting machine, in addition to an even speedier one that uses light photons to obtain unprecedented results, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journals Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin. Interesting Engineering reports: The supercomputer, called Jiuzhang 2, can calculate in a single millisecond a task that the fastest conventional computer in the world would take a mind-numbing 30 trillion years to do. The breakthrough was revealed during an interview with the research team, which was broadcast on China's state-owned CCTV on Tuesday, which could make the news suspect. But with two peer-reviewed papers, it's important to take this seriously. Pan Jianwei, lead researcher of the studies, said that Zuchongzhi 2, which is a 66-qubit programmable superconducting quantum computer is an incredible 10 million times faster than Google's 55-qubit Sycamore, making China's new machine the fastest in the world, and the first to beat Google's in two years.

The Zuchongzhi 2 is an improved version of a previous machine, completed three months ago. The Jiuzhang 2, a different quantum computer that runs on light, has fewer applications but can run at blinding speeds of 100 sextillion times faster than the biggest conventional computers of today. In case you missed it, that's a one with 23 zeroes behind it. But while the features of these new machines hint at a computing revolution, they won't hit the marketplace anytime soon. As things stand, the two machines can only operate in pristine environments, and only for hyper-specific tasks. And even with special care, they still make lots of errors. "In the next step we hope to achieve quantum error correction with four to five years of hard work," said Professor Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, which is in the southeastern province of Anhui.

In a project that could unlock the world's research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles -- including many paywalled papers. Nature reports: The catalogue, which was released on October 7 and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear. It is an effort to help scientists use software to glean insights from published work even if they have no legal access to the underlying papers, says its creator, Carl Malamud. He released the files under the auspices of Public Resource, a non-profit corporation in Sebastopol, California that he founded. Malamud says that because his index doesn't contain the full text of articles, but only sentence snippets up to five words long, releasing it does not breach publishers' copyright restrictions on the re-use of paywalled articles. However, one legal expert says that publishers might question the legality of how Malamud created the index in the first place.

Some researchers who have had early access to the index say it's a major development in helping them to search the literature with software -- a procedure known as text mining. [...] Computer scientists already text mine papers to build databases of genes, drugs and chemicals found in the literature, and to explore papers' content faster than a human could read. But they often note that publishers ultimately control the speed and scope of their work, and that scientists are restricted to mining only open-access papers, or those articles they (or their institutions) have subscriptions to. Some publishers have said that researchers looking to mine the text of paywalled papers need their authorization. And although free search engines such as Google Scholar have -- with publishers' agreement -- indexed the text of paywalled literature, they only allow users to search with certain types of text queries, and restrict automated searching. That doesn't allow large-scale computerized analysis using more specialized searches, Malamud says.

In response to mounting pressure from activists, parents and regulators who believe tech companies haven't done enough to protect children online, businesses and governments around the globe are placing major parts of the internet behind stricter digital age checks. The New York Times reports: People in Japan must provide a document proving their age to use the dating app Tinder. The popular game Roblox requires players to upload a form of government identification -- and a selfie to prove the ID belongs to them -- if they want access to a voice chat feature. Laws in Germany and France require pornography websites to check visitors' ages. The changes, which have picked up speed over the last two years, could upend one of the internet's central traits: the ability to remain anonymous. Since the days of dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms, people could traverse huge swaths of the web without divulging any personal details. Many people created an online persona entirely separate from their offline one. But the experience of consuming content and communicating online is increasingly less like an anonymous public square and more like going to the bank, with measures to prove that you are who you say you are. [...]

Critics of the age checks say that in the name of keeping people safe, they could endanger user privacy, dampen free expression and hurt communities that benefit from anonymity online. Authoritarian governments have used protecting children as an argument for limiting online speech: China barred websites this summer from ranking celebrities by popularity as part of a larger crackdown on what it says are the pernicious effects of celebrity culture on young people. "Are we going to start seeing more age verification? Of course," said Hany Farid, a professor of engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has called for more child safety measures. "Because there is more pressure, there's more awareness now, on how these technologies are harming kids." But, Mr. Farid said, regulators and companies need to proceed with caution. "We don't want the solution to be more harmful than the problem," he said. Further reading: 'Banning Anonymous Social Media Accounts Would Only Stifle Free Speech and Democracy'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stripe is signing up to pay for carbon-removal technologies that haven't been invented yet. The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer. It will pay DSV startups $500,000 each up front to capture and store carbon, then a further $1 million if they meet performance milestones.

The new partnership marks an expansion of Stripe's effort to provide a market for unproven technology that could potentially help limit the damage of global warming. The United Nations' scientific panel on climate change says the least-bad global-temperature scenarios depend on people removing billions of tons of planet-warming gases from the atmosphere. It also cautions that companies and governments may never be able to deploy the technology on the scale required to make that happen. Since August 2019, when it promised "to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage," Stripe has committed $9 million to 10 carbon-removal projects.

Stripe's carbon-removal procurement is led by Ryan Orbuch, who was a product manager before focusing on climate, and the team's projects are vetted by a panel of industry experts. Costs vary, with the most expensive service costing more than $2,000 per ton of carbon removed. Scalability is more important than current pricing. Stripe says technologies should have the potential to remove half a gigaton of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 at a cost of $100 per ton, and store it for at least 1,000 years. Stripe has tethered its core business of operating payment infrastructure to its side project. Stripe Climate, a tool introduced in October 2020, lets Stripe's customers divert a percentage of revenue to the carbon-removal pot. Roughly 9,000 of Stripe's millions of business users have enrolled contributing nearly $3 million a year collectively, and roughly 8% of new Stripe users sign up [...].

Abstract of a paper written by Michael Navarrete of University of Maryland: The United States experienced an unprecedented increase in unemployment insurance (UI) claims starting in March 2020, mainly due to layoffs caused by COVID-19. State unemployment insurance systems were inadequately prepared to process these claims. Those states using an antiquated programming language, COBOL, to process UI claims experienced longer delays in benefit disbursement. Using daily card consumption data from Affinity Solutions, I employ a two-way fixed effects estimator to measure the causal impact of COBOL-induced delays in UI benefits on aggregate consumption. The delays caused a 4.4 percentage point relative decline in total card consumption in COBOL states relative to non-COBOL states. Performing a back-of-the-envelope calculation using 2019 data, I find that real GDP declined by $181 billion (in 2012 dollars).

Advocates will once again be granted a DMCA exception to make accessible versions of texts. They argue that it's far past time to make it permanent. From a report: It's a cliche of digital life that "information wants to be free." The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities -- the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments -- are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled. Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.

Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill. On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

"As the mainstream has embraced ebooks, accessibility has gotten lost," says Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind. "It's an afterthought." Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.

At this year's Android Dev Summit, Google announced an upcoming update for devices with larger screens, which includes tablets, foldables, and devices that run ChromeOS. From a report: Google is calling the update 12L, and it's supposed to make Android 12 run smoother on big screens. We first heard the possibility of a "12.1" update in late September, and it looks like many of the rumored features are true. 12L optimizes the layout of a device's UI, adjusting the placement of the home screen, lock screen, notifications, Quick Settings, and more. Google notes that any screen 600 density-independent pixels (dp) and above will display a two-column layout that makes use of the entire screen. In the example Google shows, the Quick Settings menu is pushed towards the left side of the screen, while the notifications panel is locked to the right, giving you the ability to access both simultaneously -- all without opening one app and closing another. 12L also introduces a new taskbar that makes it easier for users to quickly switch between different apps. Dragging and dropping an app from the taskbar opens it up in split-screen mode, which Google notes it has enabled for all apps, whether they're resizable or not.

Phoronix: Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions. First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system. Microsoft Windows 11 Pro with all stable updates as of 18 October was used for this round of benchmarking on Intel Rocket Lake. The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Arch Linux (latest rolling), Fedora Workstation 35, Clear Linux 35150. All the testing was done on the same Intel Core i9 11900K test system at stock speeds (any frequency differences reported in the system table come down to how the information is exposed by the OS, i.e. base or turbo reporting) with 2 x 16GB DDR4-3200 memory, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe solid-state drive, and an AMD Radeon VII graphics card.

Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro. But for the TLDR version... Out of 44 tests run across all six operating systems, Windows 11 had just three wins on this Core i9 11900K system. Meanwhile Intel's own Clear Linux platform easily dominated with coming in first place 75% of the time followed by Fedora Workstation 35 in second place with first place finishes 9% of the time. The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.

A new startup backed by funding from AOL founder Steve Case and Laurene Powell Jobs wants to break up broadband monopolies across the country. From a report: Internet access has been crucial during the pandemic, but it's not ubiquitous, and it can be both slow and unaffordable in swaths of the country. Underline, a community infrastructure company, began building its first open access fiber network in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last week. Under the open access model, Underline builds and operates the fiber network while multiple service providers can use it and offer service to customers. Residential service will start at $49 per month for a 500 megabits per second connection, with a gigabit connection available for $65 per month. That's much faster than the 25-Mbps benchmark the Federal Communications Commission uses to define high-speed internet service. Underline chose Colorado Springs for its first project by evaluating several factors, including households that lack internet access, the number of existing providers and how angry customers were with their current internet options, CEO Bob Thompson told Axios.

A blowout first quarter has brought Microsoft back into contention in the race for the world's most-valuable listed company. From a report: The software behemoth is less than $60 billion away from dethroning Apple for the first time since May 2020, based on a 3.1% gain in early U.S. trading. That gives Microsoft a market value of $2.40 trillion compared with $2.46 trillion for Apple. The stock was boosted after Microsoft reported estimate-topping results for an 11th straight quarter. Several analysts raised their price targets, saying the earnings were very strong across the board.

Encrypted email provider Protonmail has hailed a recent Swiss legal ruling as a "victory for privacy," after winning a lawsuit that sees it exempted from data retention laws in the mountainous realm. From a report: Referring to a previous ruling that exempted instant messaging services from data capture and storage laws, the Protonmail team said this week: "Together, these two rulings are a victory for privacy in Switzerland as many Swiss companies are now exempted from handing over certain user information in response to Swiss legal orders." Switzerland's Federal Administrative Court ruled on October 22 that email providers in Switzerland are not considered telecommunications providers under Swiss law, thereby removing them from the scope of data retention requirements imposed on telcos. The victory comes after controversy over a previous (and not directly related) Swiss court order that forced the company to collect mobile device push notification identifiers from a specified user's account. That user was later arrested by French police, who had asked their Swiss counterparts to obtain the surveillance order. Protonmail chief exec Andy Yen told The Register his business doesn't routinely collect such data on its users.

During Adobe Max 2021 today, the company announced new features for Creative Cloud's various iPad apps, two more applications running natively on Apple Silicon Macs, and new web versions of some apps, among other things. Ars Technica reports: Adobe said it is adding or improving AI-driven tools across the suite, including an updated Object Selection Tool for Photoshop on Desktop. And some AI tools previously seen in Photoshop, like the Sky Replacement tool, are headed to Lightroom on Mac, iPad, and iPhone for the first time. The iPad version of Photoshop will gain support for RAW images and is getting several new tools and the ability to convert layers into Smart Objects. Illustrator for iPad is getting some improvements, too, most notably the ability to vectorize images and track version history and revert to earlier iterations. Further, After Effects and InDesign are getting Apple Silicon support on recent Macs.

It's not all about native applications, though -- Adobe announced this week that it will bring versions of Photoshop and Illustrator to the web. The web versions won't be as robust as the desktop versions, but they will let you make minor edits and provide a way to share and discuss work with colleagues or clients. The apps will allow users to review work and leave comments without launching a native version of Photoshop -- think of it a bit like a stripped-down version of InVision that exists directly inside the Creative Cloud ecosystem. Adobe also said it's launching a system built into Photoshop that can, among other things, "help prove that the person selling an NFT is the person who made it," reports The Verge. "It's called Content Credentials, and NFT sellers will be able to link the Adobe ID with their crypto wallet, allowing compatible NFT marketplaces to show a sort of verified certificate proving the art's source is authentic."

Apple's privacy rules are "negatively affecting" Facebook, and its business, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed during its most recent earnings call. MacRumors reports: As a quick refresher, starting with iOS 14.5 and all newer versions of iOS and iPadOS, Apple requires that apps ask for users' permission to track them across other apps and websites. Under the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, the latest change gives users a choice on whether they wish to be tracked for ads or other purposes. [...] Continuing on its anti-Apple's privacy rules campaign, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to blame Apple for his company's lower than expected growth in the third quarter of the year. Kicking off the earnings call, Zuckerberg said Apple is "negatively affecting" Facebook but that he believes the company will be able to "navigate" the challenges Apple is presenting thanks to its long-term investments.

"As expected, we did experience revenue headwinds this quarter, including from Apple's changes that are not only negatively affecting our business, but millions of small businesses in what is already a difficult time for them in the economy. Sheryl and Dave will talk about this more later, but the bottom line is we expect we'll be able to navigate these headwinds over time with investments that we're already making today." While Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team hold Apple's changes accountable for this quarter's performance, it may also be an asset. Zuckerberg has in the past stated that ATT could ultimately help Facebook, and it's a sentiment he again repeated during the earning's call. Apple's changes, according to Zuckerberg, are making "e-commerce and customer acquisition less effective on the web." Still, Facebook could benefit from the lessened effectiveness as "solutions that allow businesses to set up shop right inside our apps will become increasingly attractive," Zuckerberg added.

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, also criticized Apple and its privacy rules, going as far as to claim that the new rules are negatively impacting Facebook while benefiting Apple's own advertising business: "We've been open about the fact that there were headwinds coming -- and we've experienced that in Q3. The biggest is the impact of Apple's iOS14 changes, which have created headwinds for others in the industry as well, major challenges for small businesses, and advantaged Apple's own advertising business." Despite Facebook facing an avalanche of pressure amid leaked internal documents and scrutiny, Sandberg pointed the finger at Apple for Facebook's lackluster performance this quarter. "Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth," Sandberg said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Oscar winning Dune screenwriter Eric Roth banged out the screenplay using the MS-DOS program Movie Master. Roth writes everything using the 30-year-old software. "I work on an old computer program that's not in existence anymore," Roth said in an interview in 2014. "It's half superstition and half fear of change." Roth wrote the screenplay for Dune in 2018 and explained he was still using Movie Master on a Barstool Sports podcast in 2020. That means Dune was written in an MS-DOS program.

In the video, he pulled up a DOS window in Windows XP and booted up Movie Master 3.09 on an ancient beige mechanical keyboard. "So now I'm in DOS. Nobody can get on the internet and get this," Roth said. "I have to give them a hard copy. They have to scan it and then put it in their computers and then I have to work through their computer because you can't even email mine or anything. You can't get to it except where it is. It has 40 pages and it runs out of memory." [...] Roth also said the 40 page limit helps him structure his screenplays."I like it because it makes acts," he said. "I realize if I hadn't said it in 40 pages I'm starting to get in trouble." Another writer to use MS-DOS is George RR Martin, notes Motherboard. He apparently used MS-DOS program WordStar "to slowly write ever single Game of Thrones book."