Month: February 2017

Enlarge (credit: Git)

Git, the open source distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds to handle Linux's decentralized development model, is being used for a rather surprising project: Windows.

Traditionally, Microsoft's software has used a version control system called Source Depot. This is proprietary and internal to Microsoft; it's believed to be a customized version of the commercial Perforce version control system, tailored for Microsoft's larger-than-average size. Over the years, Redmond has also developed its own version control products. Long ago, the company had a thing called SourceSafe, which was reputationally the moral equivalent to tossing all your precious source code in a trash can and then setting it on fire thanks to the system's propensity to corrupt its database. In the modern era, the Team Foundation Server (TFS) application lifecycle management (ALM) system offered Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC), a much more robust, scalable version control system built around a centralized model.

Much of the company uses TFS not just for version control but also for bug tracking, testing, automated building, and project management. But large legacy products, in particular Windows and Office, stuck with Source Depot rather than adopting TFVC. The basic usage model and theory of operation between Source Depot and TFVC are pretty similar, as both use a centralized client-server model.

Enlarge / Uh, try not to let these guys grab you.

It's impossible for a fan of From Software’s Dark Souls or Bloodborne to not see Nioh so clearly mimicking those games’ distinct styles. But the franchises Nioh cribs from rely so deeply on repetition, muscle memory, and hundreds of total hours of perseverance that even the smallest changes in dodge timing or invincibility frames are incredibly obvious. And Nioh changes a whole lot more than dodge timing.

One immediate difference Souls fans will notice after booting up the latest from Team Ninja (Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden) is that it's not set in some ashy, dying Western fantasy world. While the tutorial starts in the Tower of London circa 1600, it's less than an hour before you wash up on the shores of a very vibrant-looking Japan. Don’t let the looks fool you, though—this locale is no less hostile than From Software's Lordran or Drangleic.

The time period places the game right at the tail end of Japan's Sengoku period, which is more important than you might think. Another of Nioh's departures from the Souls games is a plot that’s plainly presented, if not exactly straightforward.

You play as The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia "William," a character based on the real-world William Adams—the first Western samurai and one of only a handful to ever exist. Circumstances draw him to Japan, where he becomes embroiled in the war-torn politics of the era. The oddly descriptive, intricate plot is told partly through encyclopedia entries on the fictionalized historical figures William does business with, interspersed with dramatic shots of shoguns staring each other down in council chambers.

Enlarge / This connector, sometimes called an "Ultra Mini Connector" or "UC-E6," isn't new and it's not an Apple creation. (credit: Mitsumi)

A 9to5Mac report making the rounds today claims that Apple would be adding support for a new connector to its "Made For iPhone" accessory licensing program. Dubbed the "Ultra Accessory Connector" or "UAC" in Apple's documentation, the report claims this is a new port, smaller than Lightning or USB-C, that could be used to charge devices or transfer data.

In reality, the UAC is just Apple's name for a port that is already used in some digital cameras and other accessories—Apple has just given it a new moniker. Currently, it goes by a few different titles: Mitsumi calls it an "Ultra Mini Connector" and Nikon calls it a "UC-E6" cable. In any case, it appears to be just another connector for the regular-old USB spec. When contacted for comment, Apple told us that it was adding the port to the MFi program at the request of licensees, not because it's trying to push licensees to support a new kind of connector.

It's understandable that Apple's users would get worked up over the idea of a new port—the company's iDevices just made the jump from 30-pin connector to the small reversible Lightning connector in 2012. The Mac is still in the process of moving from a mix of USB, power, Ethernet, and Thunderbolt ports to USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. And Apple's iPhone 7 grabbed a lot of headlines for removing its standard 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of Lightning and wireless headphones.

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Uber has hired Mark Moore, a senior research engineer from NASA’s Langley Research Center. Moore will work on the flying-car vision, dubbed Uber Elevate, that Uber outlined in a white paper in October (PDF).

Apparently Moore won’t be constructing an actual flying car system just yet but will instead work on addressing isolated problems specific to Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft like “noise pollution, vehicle efficiency, and limited battery life,” Bloomberg notes.

Moore has been thinking about flying cars for more than a decade—he wrote a white paper about “Personal Air Vehicles” (PDF) in 2003. A good system for shorter-distance flight, Moore wrote at the time, would evolve from the airport-based system we have now. But bringing the technology to market would require thinking about “ease of use, automated airspace control, affordable propulsion, economically viable concepts, low community noise, modern certification procedures, and near-all-weather capability while achieving a factor of ten improvement in small aircraft safety.”

Vizio, one of the world's biggest makers of Smart TVs, is paying $2.2 million to settle charges it collected viewing habits from 11 million devices without the knowledge or consent of the people watching them.

According to a complaint filed Monday by the US Federal Trade Commission, Internet-connected TVs from Vizio contained ACR—short for automated content recognition—software. Without asking for permission, the ACR code captured second-by-second information about the video the TVs displayed. The software then collected other personal information and transmitted it, along with the viewing data, to servers controlled by the manufacturer. Vizio then sold the data to unnamed third-parties for purposes of audience measurement, analysis, and tracking.

"For all of these uses, Defendants provide highly specific, second-by-second information about television viewing," FTC lawyers wrote in Monday's complaint. "Each line of a report provides viewing information about a single television. In a securities filing, Vizio states that its data analytics program, for example, 'provides highly specific viewing behavior data on a massive scale with great accuracy, which can be used to generate intelligent insights for advertisers and media content providers.'"

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel/Getty Images)

Can the US government demand that it be able to reach into the world's servers with the tech sector's assistance? International relations issues aside, the answer to that legally thorny question depends on which US court is asked.

Consider that a federal magistrate judge in Philadelphia answered that question Friday in the affirmative, ordering Google to comply with US warrants and transfer e-mail stored overseas to the US so the FBI could examine it as part of a criminal probe. Yet just two weeks ago, a New York-based federal appeals court let stand its highly publicized July decision that allowed Microsoft to quash a US court warrant for e-mail stored on its servers in Dublin, Ireland.

(credit: Dominik Meissner)

It's no surprise that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai rolled back some of the changes made by former Chair Tom Wheeler. After Donald Trump's election ensured that the FCC would switch to Republican control, Pai warned Wheeler against "midnight regulations" that can "quickly be undone" by new leadership. On Friday last week, Pai undid a few Wheeler-era decisions while saying that actions no longer supported by the commission's majority "should not bind us going forward."

But one decision in particular is galling to advocates for low-income Americans who can't afford broadband Internet service. As we reported, the FCC on Friday told nine companies that they can no longer provide subsidized broadband to customers who qualify for the Lifeline program. This 32-year-old program gives poor people $9.25 a month toward communications services, and it was changed last year to support broadband in addition to phone service.

FCC procedures make it easy to overturn any recent action, and these nine companies gained their Lifeline broadband approvals late in Wheeler's tenure. Pai's FCC says the commission wants to implement new measures to combat fraud and waste in the Lifeline program and that revoking the Lifeline designations will provide additional time to achieve that. But none of the nine providers was accused of fraud, and the FCC already has the power to investigate and punish any provider that defrauds the program. Pai could have let these companies continue selling subsidized broadband to poor people as long as they committed no fraud, but he chose not to.

Nanoracks

NASA has given a small, Houston-based company the green light to move ahead with development of a private airlock that will be attached to the International Space Station. The large, half-cylinder-shaped airlock, about two meters in diameter and 1.8 meters long, would become the first permanent commercial addition to the orbiting laboratory.

Ars first reported development of the commercial airlock a year ago, but now the company, Nanoracks, has made substantial progress toward flying the device in 2019. In addition to approval from NASA, the company has reached an agreement with Boeing to manufacture and install a “berthing mechanism” that connects pressurized modules of the space station.