Month: May 2017

Enlarge (credit: Git)

Back in February, Microsoft made the surprising announcement that the Windows development team was going to move to using the open source Git version control system for Windows development. A little over three months after that first revelation, and about 90 percent of the Windows engineering team has made the switch.

The switch to Git has been driven by a couple of things. In 2013, the company embarked on its OneCore project, unifying its different strands of Windows development and making the operating system a more cleanly modularized, layered platform. At the time, Microsoft was using SourceDepot, a customized version of the commercial Perforce version control system, for all its major projects.

SourceDepot couldn't handle a project the size of Windows, so rather than having the whole operating system in a single repository, the Windows code was actually divided among 65 different repositories, with a kind of virtualization layer on top to produce a unified view of all the code. Some of these 65 repos contained nicely isolated, standalone components; others took vertical or horizontal slices through the operating system; others were just grab bags of different code. As such, the repo structure didn't correspond with OneCore's module boundaries.

Enlarge / If Niantic detects your bot account, common Pokémon like this Pidgey are all you'll be able to see in the game.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic appears to have opened up a new front in its ongoing war against third-party tools and trackers that use bot accounts to reveal where in-game Pokémon are hiding in the real world. Players are reporting that detected and flagged accounts are being limited so they can only see common Pokémon—not the most coveted, rarer beasts.

Pokemon Go Hub reported on the new security measure earlier this week, showing screenshots where two different accounts in the same exact location showed different Pokémon on their "nearby" lists. The site estimates that tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts may have been blinded in this way, based on reports from inside the Pokémon Go hacking community.

That said, reports suggest the enforcement has been somewhat sporadic, with "some botters claiming zero accounts blinded, and others reporting complete annihilation of their account farm," according to Pokémon Go Hub. And while bot-makers can create free new accounts to try to get around the blinding, The Silph Road subreddit reports that many new accounts seem to be blinded quickly and automatically, signaling a change from the more manual ban waves Niantic has issued to bot makers periodically. Some suspect Niantic is making use of machine-learning algorithms to detect bots quickly while limiting false-positive punishments on legitimate accounts (the company was publicly searching for a Machine Learning Engineer last year).

Enlarge / Just imagine how many 20-minute Game of Thrones episodes you could watch if you lived as long as Melisandre. (credit: HBO)

As AT&T prepares to purchase Time Warner Inc., AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has an idea for HBO's Game of Thrones: cut the hour-long episodes down to 20 minutes for mobile devices.

AT&T's $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner would give the telco HBO and other lucrative programming properties. Stephenson discussed his thoughts yesterday at the annual JP Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Boston.

“I’ll cause [HBO CEO Richard] Plepler to panic,” Stephenson said. But “think about things like Game of Thrones. In a mobile environment, a 60-minute episode might not be the best experience. Maybe you want a 20-minute episode.” Instead of showing full-length episodes on all devices, it might be best to "curate the content uniquely for a mobile environment."

Enlarge / A UHS-owned psychiatric facility in Pennsylvania (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

At least three federal agencies are now investigating Universal Health Services over allegations that its psychiatric hospitals keep patients longer than needed in order to milk insurance companies, Buzzfeed News reports.

According to several sources, the UHS's chain of psychiatric facilities—the largest in the country—will delay patients' discharge dates until the day the patient's insurance coverage runs out, regardless of the need of the patient. Because the hospitals are reimbursed per day, the practice extracts the maximum amount of money from insurance companies. It also can be devastating to patients, who are needlessly kept from returning to their jobs and families. To cover up the scheme, medical notes are sometimes altered and doctors come up with excuses, such as medication changes, sources allege. Employees say they repeatedly hear the phrase: “don’t leave days on the table.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has been investigating UHS for several years, as Buzzfeed has previously reported. UHS, a $12 billion company, gets a third of its revenues from government insurance providers. In 2013, HHS issued subpoenas to 10 UHS psychiatric hospitals.