Tech

It's the third Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurer targeted in recent years

Hackers have targeted yet another healthcare company.

CareFirst Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a healthcare insurer that provides service for residents in Maryland, Washington and parts of Virginia, said Wednesday that it’s suffered a cyberattacking compromising the records of 1.1 million customers. Modern Healthcare reported Wednesday that hackers compromised a company database last year and could have accessed member usernames, names, birth dates, e-mail addresses and identification numbers.

Social security numbers, financial records, passwords and credit card numbers were reportedly not accessed, CareFirst said in a statement.

The security firm Mandiant discovered the attack occurred in June of last year and was hired to examine the company after hackers targeted other healthcare insurers in recent days, including Premera Blue Cross and Anthem. According to the article, “CareFirst is the third Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurer to acknowledge a cyberattack this year, following record-breaking hacks at Premera and Anthem, which affected 11 million people and 80 million people, respectively.”

“We deeply regret the concern this attack may cause,” said CareFirst CEO Chet Burrell in a statement. “We are making sure those affected understand the extent of the attack—and what information was and was not affected.”

Promoted tweet urging transgender people to kill themselves sparks outrage

Twitter has suspended a fake account following outrage about a promoted tweet encouraging transgender people to kill themselves.

An unidentified account holder impersonating an Australian feminist bought offensive promoted tweets from the social media company, which ran them despite internal policies that ban such messages. The account holder also tweeted similar anti-transgender messages using Twitter’s traditional news feed.

After receiving multiple reports about the abusive tweets, Twitter suspended the account on Tuesday and deleted the ads.

This isn’t the first time that the victim of the impersonation, Caitlin Roper, had been targeted with fake accounts. She’s also been attacked by men’s rights groups, including A Voice For Men, for her political and philosophical views. However, it is not clear whether any of them were behind Tuesday’s incident.

In December, Twitter announced improvements to the way users report abuse on the service after intense criticism that it did too little to delete abusive posts. Users can now flag inappropriate without jumping through as many hoops. Twitter also made it easier for users to report abuse of others and introduced new filters to help them block threatening content before it reaches their feeds.

Though the reporting system seems to have worked in this case, it’s still unclear how the promoted tweet slipped through Twitter’s advertising program.

When reached for comment, Twitter told The Guardian: “As soon as we were made aware we removed the ad and suspended the account.”

The writing's on the wall

Apple is expected to refresh the font used across its devices, 9to5Mac reported Wednesday.

Apple currently uses the new font, called San Francisco, in the Apple Watch. Now, it could make its way to iPhones, iPads, and Macs, replacing Helvetica Neue. San Francisco was developed for the Apple Watch to improve readability on the device’s small screen.

It’s unclear exactly when the font switchover might happen. However, it could be announced during Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference, set for early next month. While Apple’s annual WWDC events are geared towards software developers, the company often uses the occasion to announce new products, as well as new features for its existing offers.

Still, nothing’s a sure bet. As 9to5Mac notes, “Apple could ultimately choose to retain Helvetica Neue this year and push back or cancel its plans for San Francisco.”

After a decade, it's finally coming out

The upcoming Warcraft movie—an epic fantasy drawn from one of the most popular video game franchises in history—doesn’t have to be great. It just has to be better than the next biggest action-tastic blockbuster scheduled for June 10, 2016.

Think of it as a little like the two campers chased by a bear (the bear, in this case, symbolizing critical presumptions that any film based on a video game must by definition be dreadful): you don’t have to beat the bear, you just have to outrun the next guy. What do we know about the film so far, aside from the fact that its fellow runners-from-bear include an Angry Birds film, a Ratchet & Clank film and an Uncharted film? Here’s the breakdown:

It’s been in the offing for nearly a decade

That’s the nature of projects like these: sometimes they bounce all over creation before coming to fruition. Blizzard announced plans to develop a live-action Warcraft film back in May 2006. The film resurfaced intermittently, in various stages of development, for years after, but didn’t really move forward until 2013, when Blizzard announced it had brought esteemed filmmaker Duncan Jones onboard.

Its director’s last two films were solid

We can thank Warcraft director Duncan Jones for both 2009’s Moon and 2011’s Source Code, two totally different (one introspective, the other a little gonzo) science fiction films that had one thing in common: they didn’t suck. Jones seems a deft hand both behind the camera and in front of a word processor (he wrote the story for Moon, and co-wrote the screenplay for Warcraft).

Jones surfaced on the project after Blizzard parted ways with the film’s former director, Evil Dead‘s Sam Raimi. Blizzard’s properties couldn’t be less in his wheelhouse, tonally and historically speaking, but he’s a coup (for Blizzard) by any measure.

And Jones seems to understand a crucial tenet of contemporary filmmaking

“I hear this ‘CGI in film sucks,’ mantra again & again,” wrote Duncan a few months ago on Twitter, rejecting the blanket claim that computer generated imagery wrecks movies. “It doesn’t,” he continued, arguing that “It’s a tool like any other. It can be done well & it can be done shit. The best CGI has you forgetting its CGI, and accepting the visual as whatever it is supposed to be. Like props. No one has an issue with ‘props’ in film, do they?”

Blizzard’s own Chris Metzen wrote the story

Metzen is to Blizzard as George Lucas to the Star Wars saga: the world-builder responsible for Blizzard’s iconic Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft narrative universes. It’s his story vision that Jones and co-screenwriter Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) distilled into the film’s script.

How excited should that make you? If you’re not a Warcraft wonk, it’s impossible to say. And if you are, ask yourself this: How excited have you been about the frame stories (not the gameplay) that Blizzard’s been telling in these games for the past two decades?

It’s about orcs fighting humans

Blizzard’s first Warcraft game was called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. That pretty well sums up the film’s elevator pitch: humans versus orcs! (Or “the alliance” versus “the horde,” in Warcraft-speak.)

Okay, so with Jones attached, we’ll hopefully get a bit more storytelling subtlety than the games provide, ideally something more introspective and character-driven that capitalizes on Warcraft‘s basic two-sided racism trope.

It has a few female actors, but the cast is mostly guys

It looks like Paula Patton (Déjà Vu, Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol) and Ruth Negga (Breakfast on Pluto, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) are the only two women of note. If you want to see a bunch of guys getting their Gladiator on, on the other hand, box presumably checked.

The guy who scored HBO’s Game of Thrones is doing the music

That would be Ramin Djawadi, also known (and respected) for his work on films like Blade: Trinity, Iron Man and Pacific Rim, as well as TV shows like Prison Break and Person of Interest.

It was originally due this December

We can thank Star Wars: The Force Awakens for Warcraft‘s bump to mid-2016 (not the film’s production—filming itself ended back in May 2014). Not even an estimated $100 million film based on a video gaming juggernaut (the highest grossing game of all time, with revenue eclipsing the highest grossing films of all time) could stand against Disney’s upcoming take on a galaxy far, far away.

Analyst also points out one troubling sign

For Apple Watch sales, bigger is better.

The bigger, 42mm version of Apple’s new smartwatch is selling way better than the smaller, 38mm version, according to a new research note by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities. The Apple-watcher blog Appleinsider reported the note earlier Wednesday.

Kuo, who has a reputation for accurate Apple predictions, said big Apple Watches could make up 80% of all watch orders. Kuo speculated that men tended to order the bigger watches—suggesting that men are buying most of the Apple Watches.

The bad news for Apple is that “market demand for Apple Watch may be slowing down” since Apple started taking watch orders in late April, Kuo wrote. Kuo slashed KGI’s forecast for watch orders through September by 20% to 30%, meaning Apple could ship less than 15 million units during that time, according to the blog 9to5Mac. That’s a good bit less than some industry forecasts that Apple could ship 20 to 30 million watches in that stretch, according to 9to5Mac.

Kuo compared the Apple Watch to the iPhone, saying it had “potential” but could take a little while to catch on, according to Appleinsider.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has already said it won’t reveal sales numbers for the Apple Watch. Apple’s share price wasn’t responding—it was flat in early afternoon trading on Wednesday.

The unmanned spacecraft is on its fourth journey, and has a mystery mission

The U.S. Air Force sent its unmanned X-37B spacecraft into orbit for the fourth time on Wednesday

The X-37B is one of two spacecraft, built for the Air Force by Boeing, first launched in 2010. Its mission? That’s a secret.

The two planes have been on three journeys to date: one from April to December of 2010, then from March 2011 to June 2012, and finally a third flight from December 2012 all the way until this past October.

The Air Force has remained mum despite long-running speculation about the purpose of these two spacecraft, the New York Times reports, and in 2010 the Pentagon denied that the planes have anything to do with weapons. Wednesday’s launch of one of the spacecraft (it is also unknown which of the two launched) happened at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The X-37B spaceplane was carried into the sky by an American Atlas V rocket. Watch a video of the launch below:

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

This is a far cry from the days of hoping your Discman didn't skip

You can check the grade of your hospital to see how it stacks up against others

Using websites like Yelp, people can look up ratings and reviews for virtually any restaurant or bar. But what about hospitals, where the quality of treatment is far more important than checking whether the Caesar salad is any good.

On Wednesday, a new website premiered that lets you check how good a hospital is. But instead 0f relying on reviews by the public, it rates hospitals based on data from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, which collects information about all medical facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funds.

People can pull up the profile of most any hospital in the country to see its strengths, weaknesses, and overall grade. Most of the information is focused on three areas: the hospital’s emergency room, patient satisfaction, and in-patient cost efficiency.

For example, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles got a C+ overall grade, and ranks in the 34th percentile in the country. Massachusetts General Hospital, located in Boston, fared a bit better, earning a B- and ranking in 44th percentile.

Brent Newhouse, co-founder of analyticsMD, the startup that created the index, explained that he chose to narrow the focus to a few areas like emergency rooms, for example, because “emergencies are often the first place we interact with hospitals.” Doing so also made it easier for his company to create the index and for regular people to navigate it.

Similar ratings are also available through iVantage’s Hospital Strength Index, which also uses data from CMS, among other sources.

AnalyticsMD, a two-year-old startup from Palo Alto, Calif., has built software that helps hospitals make their operations more efficient. It uses data to provide hospital administrators and staffers with suggestions like how to avoid patient bottlenecks and schedule staff. Among the company’s handful of paying hospital customers are El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., and Mercy Health Hospitals, which haw several locations in the US.

For analyticsMD co-founders, Newhouse and Mudit Garg, building the hospital index has two purposes. One goal is to provide a yardstick for hospital administrators to not only take a step back and see how they’re doing, but also compare their performance to their peers. The other goal is to make hospital quality and efficiency a priority for both patients and health care providers.

“If we can get this out to folks, we can get a conversation started,” Newhouse said.