Apple adjusted its App Store review guidelines to loosen restrictions on iPhone and iPad games that stream directly from the internet and in-app purchase rules that have frustrated developers. From a report: The changes mean Apple will approve games that stream from the web, versus from content installed on a device, for the first time. That reverses a rule that frustrated companies including Microsoft. The new rules will still require games to be submitted individually. That means companies still won't be able to launch all-you-can-eat streaming game services on Apple's platform. However, these services can now offer a catalog that directs users to other streaming games from the same developer. But that catalog must point players to the App Store to download those other games individually. Apple is also no longer imposing its in-app purchase requirements on online teaching apps, such as tutoring or workout offerings.

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Chess has a reputation for cold logic, but Vladimir Kramnik loves the game for its beauty. "It's a kind of creation," he says. His passion for the artistry of minds clashing over the board, trading complex but elegant provocations and counters, helped him dethrone Garry Kasparov in 2000 and spend several years as world champion. Yet Kramnik, who retired from competitive chess last year, also believes his beloved game has grown less creative. From a report: He partly blames computers, whose soulless calculations have produced a vast library of openings and defenses that top-flight players know by rote. âoeFor quite a number of games on the highest level, half of the game -- sometimes a full game -- is played out of memory," Kramnik says. "You don't even play your own preparation; you play your computer's preparation." Wednesday, Kramnik presented some ideas for how to restore some of the human art to chess, with help from a counterintuitive source -- the world's most powerful chess computer. He teamed up with Alphabet artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, whose researchers challenged their superhuman game-playing software AlphaZero to learn nine variants of chess chosen to jolt players into creative new patterns. In 2017, AlphaZero showed it could teach itself to roundly beat the best computer players at either chess, Go, or the Japanese game Shogi. Kramnik says its latest results reveal beguiling new vistas of chess to be explored, if people are willing to adopt some small changes to the established rules. The project also showcased a more collaborative mode for the relationship between chess players and machines. "Chess engines were initially built to play against humans with the goal of defeating them," says Nenad Tomasev, a DeepMind researcher who worked on the project. "Now we see a system like AlphaZero used for creative exploration in tandem with humans rather than opposed to them." People have played chess for around 1,500 years, and tweaks to the rules aren't new. Nor are grumbles that computers have made the game boring.

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Joanna Stern, reviewing the Surface Duo for the Wall Street Journal: It isn't always clear when something is ready. Take my grilling. Sometimes I remove steak well before or after I should've. You might say it's a "tough" call. But there's nothing tough about stating this: The new two-screen Surface Duo is undercooked. Microsoft's new $1,400 book-like phone-tablet thingy is not ready for me and not ready for you. Unless, of course, you want an Android device that repeatedly ignores your taps on its screens, randomly slows down, struggles to figure out its own up, down and sideways positioning, and abruptly rearranges parts of its own interface. If that is your dream, well, then it is ready. Somehow, Microsoft disagrees. "We had been testing for some time. We wanted to get it out. We thought this was the right time for us," said Matt Barlow, Microsoft's corporate vice president of modern life, search and devices. With OneNote, I've loved brainstorming and taking notes with the $100 Surface Pen (sold separately). I'd love it even more if the pen could keep up with my writing. Another performance issue. Unfortunately, key Microsoft apps like Excel and Skype haven't been optimized for two screens. Microsoft and Google are also working with third-party app developers. The Kindle app, for instance, places a page on each screen to make this one adorable little e-reader. (Or at least it should. It glitched midway through testing, but began working again later, after I complained to Microsoft.) You can also launch one app on each screen -- Edge browser on left, Word on right, for instance. One of my favorite features is App Groups, which lets you pair two apps together to simultaneously launch. I have Twitter and TikTok in one with the label, "Bad for My Brain." One screen is still better suited to many of our current needs, and that makes this wide device feel awkward more often than not.

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Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige. Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem. His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to "regularity structures," so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation. Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An exciting new vacancy has opened up that will likely tempt some IT leaders into freshening up their CV: the UK is recruiting a Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO), who will be working at the highest levels of the Cabinet Office to lead the digital transformation of public services in the country. All of this and more, for 200,000 pound ($255,000) a year. The job is the biggest one in government tech so you'd expect the recruiters at the Cabinet Office to be deluged with applications from hyper-qualified aspiring GCDOs, who got tech goosebumps from just reading the role description. Yet strangely enough, the GCDO job has been open for almost a year now. "We sought out candidates for a similar role last autumn," confirmed Alex Chisholm, the chief operating officer of the civil service, as he announced the new vacancy. And indeed, a similar vacancy went live last October albeit with a slightly different name -- Government Chief Digital Information Officer (GCDIO) -- but almost exactly the same responsibilities. In both versions of the job, the successful candidate is expected to "enhance Her Majesty's government's reputation as the world's most digitally-advanced government." This includes leading the Government Digital Service (GDS), a branch of the UK Cabinet Office dedicated to the digital transformation of government, and heading the 18,000-strong Digital, Data and Technology Profession department.

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Beijing opposes a forced sale of TikTok's U.S. operations by its Chinese owner ByteDance, and would prefer to see the short video app shut down in the United States, Reuters reported Friday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the matter. From a report: ByteDance has been in talks to sell TikTok's U.S. business to potential buyers including Microsoft and Oracle since U.S. President Donald Trump threatened last month to ban the service if it was not sold. Trump has given ByteDance a deadline of mid September to finalise a deal. However, Chinese officials believe a forced sale would make both ByteDance and China appear weak in the face of pressure from Washington, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. ByteDance said in a statement to Reuters that the Chinese government had never suggested to it that it should shut down TikTok in the United States or in any other markets. Two of the sources said China was willing to use revisions it made to a technology exports list on Aug. 28 to delay any deal reached by ByteDance, if it had to.

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An anonymous reader writes: Newly released DOJ records show that multiple top members of Mueller's investigative team claimed to have "accidentally wiped" at least 15 phones used during the anti-Trump investigation after the DOJ OIG asked for the devices to be handed over.

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rastos1 writes: Starting with Windows Insiders preview build 20211, WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2, which enables you to access filesystems that aren't natively supported by Windows (such as ext4).

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Sales of vinyl records surpassed those of CDs in the U.S. for the first time since 1986, marking a key turning point for the format's nostalgia-fueled resurgence. From a report: People spent $232.1 million on limited-play and extended-play records in the first half of the year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, eclipsing the $129.9 million they spent on compact discs. Vinyl was the most popular way people listened to music throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, at which point it gave way to tape cassettes -- followed by CDs and digital formats. Each new format was more convenient than the last and suppressed interest in vinyl.

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Facebook sought to derail proposals by the Irish data protection watchdog that the tech giant warns could curb transfers of vast amounts of commercial data across the Atlantic. From a report: The social network giant said it sought a judicial review of the Irish Data Protection Commission's preliminary decision that the company may have to halt trans-Atlantic data transfers using the most commonly used EU tool still available to firms. "A lack of safe, secure and legal international data transfers would have damaging consequences for the European economy," Facebook said in a statement Friday. "We urge regulators to adopt a pragmatic and proportionate approach until a sustainable long-term solution can be reached." In an investigation into Facebook's data transfers, the Irish authority told the company that so-called standard contractual clauses "cannot in practice be used for EU-US data transfers," according to a blog post by Facebook this week.

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One of the largest camera collections in the world is hidden away in a village hall in a Fife coastal town -- but hardly anybody knows it is there. From a report: At least 3,000 cameras, including some dating back well over a century, belonged to the late Neville "Jim" Matthew. He retired to the picturesque East Neuk village of St Monans after a career that took him around the world. He took over the former Salvation Army hall to store his treasured collection. Inside the hall, row after row of cameras, accessories and memorabilia fill the shelves. They include stereoscopic and 3D cameras as well as East European models, including many that were rare in the West. At the heart of the collection is an array of Kodak Brownie cameras - featuring almost every model ever produced. The Brownie was the first affordable camera and could be bought for just one dollar when it was first sold in 1900. Jim had wanted his collection to be an open attraction, but he was getting older and in ill health, and the task posed too big a challenge. Instead, he was limited to opening once a year for the village festival and for occasional private viewings.

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We're still debating whether Woodward should have said anything when he had the president on the record about the real threat of the virus.

Last night Jay Rosen weighed in.

• I am unconvinced by the criticisms of Woodward, and by the claim that he could have saved lives but chose not to. I also think we are failing to credit him for putting the fullest story he felt he could tell before voters during election season, when it would count the most.

I hear this from other people, so my response is well-rehearsed.

1. It would have made a difference. Hearing the president say in his own words, in a tone of respect the public never hears from him, was eye opening. In February or March it would have been transformative. No doubt it would have saved many lives.
2. We've learned a lot about the ethics of medical trials lately. If they're testing a drug and discover it saves lives without harmful side-effects, they're obligated to stop the test and give everyone the drug. No more control group. No more placebos.
3. Similarly, a programmer who waited months to report a security flaw would have a lot of explaining to do.
4. An attorney general who is aware that an officer of the government is compromised by a foreign adversary is obliged to report it.
5. Woodward's excuse that he didn't know if it was true is lame on lame. It was true that the president said it. And it was clearly a contradiction of what he was saying publicly both in substance and tone. That's enough to get it on the record, and let the public decide how it wants to proceed.
6. If you’re writing a book, hoping for a blockbuster, and accidentally uncover information that can save lives you are imho similarly obligated. The book isn’t more important than the lives the information can save. I remain unconvinced myself that there is any justification for holding on to the information.
7. This is about our humanity. The people who died had families, people who were devastated by their death. They had painful deaths. And for crying out loud -- they died! What higher cost is there. The deaths continue.
8. In March we weren't yet polarized on this subject. Hearing the president's respectful voice could have kept it from being political, for at least some people, and thus saved some of their lives.
9. What higher calling is there for a journalist, even for the legendary Woodward, who every journalist cites as the example they hope to live up to, than saving lives.
10. The president for some reason wanted to impress Woodward. That was some rare good luck for the American people, at the beginning of a very dark year, and a member of the Church of the Savvy, maybe the High Priest of Savvy, decided they couldn't have it. I don't think there's any question he did something wrong. I think he's as wrong as Trump himself.
11. Finally, water under the bridge you might say. But I want to know what other vital information reporters are sitting on, for whatever reason, and who has to pay with their life for their vanity. By giving Woodward, the role model, a pass, you excuse more Savvy reporting. And then who knows whose family will be hurt.

A question all tech companies should be prepared to answer and users should be asking. What's the plan for when your company goes away. What will become of what I created here? I am sure none of the companies we pour our lives into have any kind of plan here.

We're still debating whether Woodward should have said anything when he had the president on the record about the real threat of the virus.

Last night Jay Rosen weighed in.

• I am unconvinced by the criticisms of Woodward, and by the claim that he could have saved lives but chose not to. I also think we are failing to credit him for putting the fullest story he felt he could tell before voters during election season, when it would count the most.

My comments.

1. I don't think it's the reporter's job to convince voters.
2. It would have made a difference. Hearing the president say in his own words, in a tone of respect the public never hears from him, was eye opening. In February or March it would have been transformative. No doubt it would have saved many lives.
3. We've learned a lot about the ethics of medical trials lately. If they're testing a drug and discover it saves lives without harmful side-effects, they're obligated to stop the test and give everyone the drug. No more control group. No more placebos.
4. Similarly, a programmer who waited months to report a security flaw would have a lot of explaining to do.
5. Woodward's excuse that he didn't know if it was true is lame on lame. It was true that the president said it. And it was clearly a contradiction of what he was saying publicly both in substance and tone. That's enough to get it on the record, and let the public decide how it wants to proceed.
6. If you’re writing a book, hoping for a blockbuster, and accidentally uncover information that can save lives you are imho similarly obligated. The book isn’t more important than the lives the information can save. I remain unconvinced myself that there is any justification for holding on to the information. And when in doubt, imho, err on the side of disclosure.
7. This is about our humanity. Think of your family, then realize that the people who died had families too, people who were devastated by their death. They had painful deaths. And for crying out loud -- they died! What higher cost is there. And the deaths continue. In March we weren't yet polarized on this subject. Hearing the president's respectful voice could have kept it from being political, for at least some people, and thus saved some of their lives. Even if it's just potential, our humanity demands we see it in that light, no other.
8. What higher calling is there for a journalist, even for the legendary Woodward, who every journalist cites as the example they hope to live up to, than saving lives.
9. The president for some reason wanted to impress Woodward. That was some rare good luck for the American people, at the beginning of a very dark year, and a member of the Church of the Savvy, maybe the High Priest of Savvy, decided they couldn't have it. I don't think there's any question he did something wrong. I think he's as wrong as Trump himself.
10. Finally, water under the bridge you might say. But I want to know what other vital information reporters are sitting on, for whatever reason, and who has to pay with their life for their vanity. By giving Woodward, the role model, a pass, you excuse more Savvy reporting. And then who knows whose family will be hurt.

Idea for TV series. Law and Order style crime drama where all the crimes are against humanity.