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New White House efforts help secure your payments
American banks and stores may already be planning to tighten your payment security, but the White House wants to give those efforts a boost. President Obama has signed an Executive Order that will require the federal government to both issue more secure chip-and-PIN (aka EMV) payment cards and upgrade terminals to match. This isn't just for protecting day-to-day staff expenses -- it also means that pensions, Social Security and veteran payments (all of which tend to go through official debit cards) should be safer. There should also be fewer risks when you're buying from federal locations like national parks and the passport office.
'Whisper' app accused of not hiding whistleblowers
Whisper lets you share secrets without the fear of it getting traced back to you. At least that's the pitch. Now, according to a Guardian report, the service is tracking the location of users that didn't want to be tracked. The report, which deep dives on several issues regarding user privacy and security, adds that Whisper is apparently also sharing info with the US Department of Defense and is retaining posts and user data in a searchable database. Responding to the claims, Editor-in-chief Neetzan Zimmerman says that Whisper "neither receive(s) nor store(s) geographical coordinates" from users who opt out of geolocation services. "User IP addresses may allow (a) very coarse location to be determined to the city, state, or country level."
South Korean data breaches leave every citizen's ID at risk
There are big data breaches, and then there are massive, nation-changing data breaches. South Korean officials have warned that hacks targeting the country's national ID number system were so damaging that the government may not only have to revamp how it issues ID numbers, but hand out new ones to every citizen. That could cost the equivalent of $650 million by itself, and businesses might have to spend billions of dollars upgrading their systems to match -- you need that ID for many basic tasks in South Korea, so it's not just a question of a simple software fix.
Assassin's Creed: Identity launches in NZ, coming soon to an iOS device near you
Assassin's Creed is a massive console franchise that has never really fully embraced smartphones and tablets. Sure, there are several Assassin's Creed games (and some comics as well) on the App Store, but nothing that matches the look and feel of the open-world games that have made the franchise famous. Assassin's Creed: Identity, which just launched in the New Zealand version of the App Store, is looking to change that. Identity looks a lot like the console versions of Assassin's Creed, placing you in the Italian Renaissance period. Spying, researching your targets, and ultimately killing them off is obviously the core gameplay here, but there's also the same pseudo-historical flavor of past games, with backstories of real-life locations as well as period-accurate characters. As many publishers have gotten in the habit of doing, the game launched in NZ as a test market before wider release, but the fact that it's available to the public means it's rapidly approaching a broader release. MCV notes the game is slated for an early 2015 launch. [via Joystiq]
Google lawsuit highlights the danger of not managing your online presence
Hey small-business owner, you're pretty savvy. I know you're pretty savvy because you're reading this website on the internet, like the savvy small-business owner above. But some of your colleagues aren't quite as connected as you are. And sometimes that disconnected crowd faces serious real-world implications as a result: Take former restaurant owner Rene Bertagna for instance. His long-standing Virginia restaurant, Serbian Crown, closed last year "after nearly 40 years" due to, he believes, an error in Serbian Crown's Google Maps listing. The error was grievous, he tells Wired, and he's now suing Google in a Virginia court.
Estonia will hand out digital ID cards to non-residents
Digital ID cards are still a rarity in most countries, but they're a staple of everyday life in Estonia -- locals use them for everything from e-voting to buying mass transit tickets. You currently have to live in the country to take advantage of these cards, however, and that's creating a real problem for non-residents wanting to set up shop. To solve this, Estonia now plans to hand out this identification to non-residents at the end of 2014, making it the first country to have a globally relevant digital ID. So long as applicants can provide the same biometric data and documents (along with a fee of around €30 to €50), they'll get either a card or a digital-only equivalent they can store on a smartphone's SIM card.
The Daily Grind: Do you mask your gender when playing MMOs?
Last month, Polygon published an article about the invisible privileges some gamers enjoy without realizing it. The author, Jonathan McIntosh, included among those privileges the idea that men "probably never think about hiding [their] real-life gender online through [their] gamer-name, [their] avatar choice, or by muting voice-chat, out of fear of harassment resulting from [their] being male." Granted, he was specifically talking about gender; plenty of men online have every reason to hide aspects of their identities to avoid being harassed on the basis of their nationality or ethnicity or religion or handicap or sexual orientation or age, for example. But gender itself is generally pretty safe for straight male gamers compared to female gamers. We've asked before whether you roll characters that match the gender you identify with in the real world, but today, we're expanding that question: Do you go out of your way to hide your gender when you're playing MMOs? Do you avoid voice-chat, lie about your name, or alter your avatar choice, as McIntosh suggests, to avoid the potential for harassment? Or are MMO players just more socially well-adjusted than the typical gamer such that this is less a problem for us? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Navy sailor pleads guilty to hacking from an aircraft carrier
You may think that the US Navy's biggest digital threats come from the outside, but that's not always the case. Former Navy serviceman (and leader of the hacking group Team Digi7al) Nicholas Paul Knight has pleaded guilty to charges that he and co-defendant Daniel Kreuger conspired to steal identities from numerous internet sites, including a Navy personnel relocation system. Knight was caught after investigators realized that someone in Digi7al was posting on Twitter from the Navy's internal network -- as it turns out, the sailor was breaking into databases while he was a system administrator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman.
LifeLock pulls its wallet apps, deletes data in light of security worries
Wallet apps are typically more convenient than trying to keep tabs on a slew of identity and payment information yourself. However, that assumes that the apps are secure in the first place -- and unfortunately, LifeLock is learning this the hard way. The ID protection firm has both pulled the LifeLock Wallet mobile app and deleted user data after learning that its tool (based on recent acquisition Lemon Wallet) "may not be fully compliant" with payment card security standards. While there's no sign of a breach, the company says that it would rather play it safe and only restore the apps once people can trust them "without question."
Gender in World of Warcraft
Sometimes I flail around to try and come up with a way to start talking about a subject. So this time, I'm just going to go straight to the link - this article by Slate about why people play the characters they do in World of Warcraft, especially the genders they choose, interested me. One of the reasons is because it confirms with actual research an argument I've heard a lot as I've played the game. To quote the article: Because players see their avatars from a third-person perspective from behind, men are confronted with whether they want to stare at a guy's butt or a girl's butt for 20 hours a week. Or as the study authors put it in more academic prose, gender-switching men "prefer the esthetics of watching a female avatar form." This means that gender-switching men somehow end up adopting a few female speech patterns even though they had no intention of pretending to be a woman. There's more to it, though - what I really find interesting is that when men choose to play women in game, (which they do far more often than women do - 23% of men play female characters, while only 7% of women play male characters) they tend to start talking like women, or at least, like what they believe women talk like. But the paper discussed that while the men use language that fits their stereotype of what women behave like, they can't emulate how women actually move their characters in game. Men, according to the study from Information, Communication and Society that prompted the article, tend to stand further away from groups, back up more often, and jump more often, and this behavior doesn't change when they're playing woman characters. I find the study a little limited. There's a lot more to gender and identity than it covered. But I do find it interesting that so many male WoW players play as women, for the reason that's been accepted all along, but in a way no one expected. The idea that these men, deliberately or not, emulate how they believe women communicate while playing a character that is one, whether or not they actually do communicate that way, but are betrayed by a kind of body language unique to the game world is fascinating. I'd love to see more work done on this. Why do so few women play as men? Why do those women that do play as men make that choice? What about gender identities that aren't so binary, how do the differences between cisgendered and transgendered players factor into it? In a way, World of Warcraft can serve as a distillation of the real world (remember the corrupted blood plague was used by researchers to model how virus outbreaks work in the real world) and I'd like to see more work done on it. With thanks to my nemesis Chase for the tip
HTC hires marketing exec who led Samsung to smartphone dominance
It's no secret, HTC has an image problem. Despite consistently creating some of our favorite phones, it's failed to reach the heights of popularity of manufacturers like Samsung. That could soon change. In what is almost certainly not a coincidence, HTC has hired Samsung's former Chief Marketing Officer, Paul Golden. The Verge confirmed the rumor, first picked up by Bloomberg, earlier this afternoon. Golden, who "created and launched the highly successful Galaxy brand for Samsung," according to his LinkedIn profile, was reportedly hired on as a consultant to Chairwoman Cher Wang.
What is Heartbleed, anyway?
If you're an IT professional, gadget blogger or token geek in your circle of friends, chances are, you've been hounded relentlessly over the past couple of days about "this Heartbleed thing." "Do I need to update my antivirus?" "Can I login to my bank account now?" "Google already fixed it, right?" We've heard them all, but the answers aren't all that clear or simple. In an attempt to take the pressure off -- it is the weekend after all -- we've put together a primer that should answer all of those questions and a few more. Next time someone asks you about that "Heartbleed thing," just shoot them in our direction.
This is Your Life: Facebook and the business of identity
"The story of your life." With that phrase, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the company's new Timeline profile in the fall of 2011. The social network's original profile page, he explained, was the first place where most people "felt safe expressing their real self" on the internet, but it was only the "first five minutes of your conversation." A major redesign in 2008 extended that to "the next 15 minutes." Timeline, though, was the "next few hours." Your true self, in full. To illustrate the point, Zuckerberg went on to show a promotional video that put This Is Your Life to shame by recapping one man's life from his own birth to the birth of his child (and then some) in just over a minute. Facebook has always wanted to be your online identity -- your internet, in many ways -- but it was now also bringing something else to the fore that once had a tendency to fade into the background; your memories.
You Don't Know Jack maker Jellyvision becomes Jackbox Games
Jellyvision Games has been making variations of You Don't Know Jack for a while now, which is of course the irreverant and very popular trivia game. The title originally began as a series of PC and Mac games, though, of course, Jellyvision has taken the series to consoles, and then more recently to Facebook and iOS. Now, after nearly 20 years of work, the company has decided to rebrand itself, and Jellyvision is going to become Jackbox Games. The new branding makes a lot of sense: It definitely allows the company to focus on You Don't Know Jack and that brand, and it sets the company up as a multiplatform studio. Jellyvision always was, but this should give Jackbox a chance to do more with the upcoming next-generation platforms, as well as other devices like Roku and Ouya. Additionally, Jackbox has two more upcoming apps to release, in addition to the recent Lie Swatter. It is sort of a bummer to see a longtime brand pass on. But Jackbox is doing good work, and hopefully it'll be able to build an even stronger reputation with its new identity. Show full PR text JELLYVISION GAMES, MAKERS OF YOU DON'T KNOW JACK, RE-BRANDS AS JACKBOX GAMES Indie Trivia Game Developer Expands into New IP and New Generation Publishing, including Ouya CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – June 5, 2013 – Independent developer Jellyvision Games today announced its re-branding initiative with the new moniker: Jackbox Games. After nearly two decades of entertaining players with their landmark YOU DON'T KNOW JACK franchise, the former PC and console developer has expanded into a full-fledged new-generation publisher for multiple games on social and mobile platforms, Roku, and now Ouya. "The rebranding of our studio represents the completion of an evolution," said Mike Bilder, GM. "Today, Jackbox Games not only has the creative and technical resources to make great games, but we're seizing on the opportunity presented by new generation platforms to bring more games to market ourselves - however and wherever they best fit." In May 2012, YOU DON'T KNOW JACK was launched on Facebook as the studio's first social title, and it was met with critical acclaim – winning SPIKE TV's "Social Game of the Year." December 2012 saw the launch of the franchise on mobile, starting with iOS, and last spring the first new IP from the publisher hit the market in the form of Lie Swatter™. Last week, Ouya announced that the YOU DON'T KNOW JACK franchise will be ported to the Android-powered console platform as a launch title. The studio has also announced two upcoming apps for 2013: Clone Booth™ and Word Puttz™. "The big payoff for us has always been the engagement people feel when playing YOU DON'T KNOW JACK, which is really born out of our commitment to innovative design, top-notch writing, and high production values," said Harry Gottlieb, founder. "Our move to self-publishing on all these new platforms really frees us up to make a whole lot more of the kinds of games we like to play and to get them into the hands of the players who really want them." The Chicago-based studio has reached critical and commercial success since its 1995 introduction. The studio has sold more than five million units of YDKJ for PC and console. Last year, there were 3.5 million installs of YDKJ through Facebook, IOS and Android. The company's products have been showered with praise and hold more than 50 industry awards including the aforementioned SPIKE TV award and 2013 "Best Trivia Game" from the Best App Ever awards. As a mid-sized independent developer, the team has produced numerous significant industry innovations. YOU DON'T KNOW JACK was one of first games to use writing and audio to provide fully interactive gameplay, where players experience direct interaction with a virtual host. And now the studio has incorporated its brands directly into mid-sized games, previously the exclusive domain of mammoth publishers, expanding the independent monetization model.
Dropbox for Teams becomes Dropbox for Business, adds single sign-on for good measure
As often as Dropbox has been courting serious cloud storage users with Dropbox for Teams, it doesn't feel that the name reflects the company's loftier ambitions -- so it's giving the service a rebranding. Now called Dropbox for Business, it's pitched more directly at the suit-and-tie set. There's more than just talk involved in the new strategy, though. The shift also sees Dropbox build in identity management from five providers so that Dropbox users don't have to sign into the service if they're already logged in elsewhere: they can hop on to the corporate Active Directory service, for example and have Dropbox ready for action soon after. We doubt that the new moves by themselves will sway IT managers, but they may help would-be users who've been on the fence.
Facebook outlines its ad targeting strategy on one handy page, presents a complex privacy picture
To say that Facebook has to tread lightly around privacy issues is an understatement, especially with a targeted ad push underway. Rather than navigate that minefield once more, the social network hopes to skip it entirely by posting an overview of how the ad system tracks habits while retaining our anonymity. For the most part, Facebook walks the fine line carefully. Its Facebook Exchange auction system relies on a unique, untraceable browser ID to target ads to specific people without ever getting their identity; both a mechanism targeting ads beyond Facebook and a Datalogix deal to track the ad conversion rate use anonymous e-mail address hashes that keep advertisers happy without making the addresses readable to prying eyes. The initiative sounds like it's on the right course, although there's caveats at work. Opting out of any Facebook Exchange ads requires tracking down individual ad providers, which isn't likely to result in many of us leaving the ad revenue stream. Likewise, those who'd object even to the completely anonymous ad profiling don't have a say in the matter. With those concerns in mind, it's doubtful there will be many significant objections in the future -- Facebook knows its advertising money train can only keep churning if its members are comfortable enough to come along for the ride.
Amazon, Apple stop taking key account changes over the phone after identity breach
By now, you may have heard the story of the identity 'hack' perpetrated against Wired journalist Mat Honan. Using easily obtained data, an anonymous duo bluffed its way into changing his Amazon account, then his Apple iCloud account, then his Google account and ultimately the real target, Twitter. Both Amazon and Apple were docked for how easy it was to modify an account over the phone -- and, in close succession, have both put at least a momentary lockdown on the changes that led to Honan losing much of his digital presence and some irreplaceable photos. His own publication has reportedly confirmed a policy change at Amazon that prevents over-the-phone account changes. Apple hasn't been as direct about what's going on, but Wired believes there's been a 24-hour hold on phone-based Apple ID password resets while the company marshals its resources and decides how much extra strictness is required. Neither company has said much about the issue. Amazon has been silent, while Apple claims that some of its existing procedures weren't followed properly, regardless of any rules it might need to mend. However the companies address the problem, this is one of those moments where the lesson learned is more important than the outcome. Folks: if your accounts and your personal data matter to you, use truly secure passwords and back up your content. While Honan hints that he may have put at least some of the pieces back together, not everyone gets that second chance.
Breakfast Topic: Is that you?
As is often the case with Breakfast Topics, I write about what interests me, asking commenters questions that I genuinely want to know the answers to. So it should be no surprise that I read the comments pretty religiously, and often they will spark ideas that lead to more Breakfast Topics. You've only yourselves to blame for being such interesting folk. On a recent BT about gender in WoW, two commenters got my attention. Dez and Nagaina, thanks for replying! The parts that caught my eye from their comments were as follows: Dez wrote: I know some players consider their toons to be extensions of themselves (1st-person narrative), but personally I see them more as other people whose adventures I am following (3rd-person narrative). Nagaina wrote: I'm principally a roleplayer. When I create a character, I'm usually doing so for storyline related reasons not representing myself in game related ones. I personally consider my characters to be extensions of myself. When I refer to them, mentally I'm thinking, "I'm over here," "I'm getting my face chewed off by a murloc," or "I'm going to get myself a kickass new cloak." When I'm talking in game, I do much the same. The idea of the character as a third person fascinates me. I suppose it might be reflected in games like The Sims where you control the life of a character in a different way or maybe in FPS games where you're controlling a character with a predefined story. Or perhaps it's something that is a big part of roleplaying, creating a story for a character that is (maybe by definition) not your own story. I freely admit to knowing barely anything about roleplaying, so of course there is the strong possibility that all that might be utter nonsense! What do you think? Are your characters extensions of yourself? Are you representing yourself in game? Or, like Dez and Nagaina, are you following a third person? And why?
Moving Brands reveals proposed HP brand redesign, HP remains noncommittal
HP has gone through some big changes in the past year, and it turns out it's also been considering a rather drastic change to its identity -- one that may or may not yet be adopted. That's been revealed by the team at Moving Brands, who began working with HP on a complete redesign of the company's brand in 2008, and have now shown off what they've come up in an exhaustive case study on their website. At the heart of it is a new logo, which traces its history to HP's original 1941 design, but takes on a decidedly more modern appearance; gone are the familiar circle and rounded corners, and in are some sharp lines and hard edges. According to Moving Brands, the goal was to make the brand "digitally native, context-aware and ever evolving," with the lines in the logo itself echoing the same 13 degree angle of the original while also "recalling the forward slash used in programming." Just what would this new HP look like? You can get a pretty good idea of that at the source link below -- we've also included a small taste after the break, including two of Moving Brands' videos.
Picasa, Blogger to get renamed: now with more Google?
Google's reportedly trying to put all of its product eggs into one self-branded basket. According to Mashable, two of its most popular services -- Picasa and Blogger -- may go under the branding knife and come out the other side looking like 'Google Photos' and 'Google Blogs.' With the exception of the latter's planned UI overhaul, both services should function exactly the same. The move -- alleged to take place within the next six weeks -- would unify the search king's user offerings ahead of the public launch of Google+. And if that social service's rumored July 31st launch date pans out, we could be seeing this overhaul very soon. But don't expect crown jewel YouTube to receive similar treatment, that site's brand equity already sent its ugly step-sister -- Google Video -- to the grave.
