Rethinking password security

A new study by Plymouth University suggests that using a combination of pictures and one-time numerical codes could be more secure and easier to use than today's commonly used multi-factor methods that rely on passwords.

The new multi-level authentication system is called GOTPass. One of the advantages is that it doesn't require potentially costly hardware systems or accessories like USB authenticators. Instead, users would choose a unique username and draw any shape on a 4x4 unlock pattern, which isn't unlike your typical smartphone lock screen. They would then be shown four random themes with 30 images each and be required to pick a single image from each one.

Once that's been taken care of, future login attempts would consist of the user typing in their username and drawing their unlock pattern. They'd then be shown a screen with 16 images containing two of their selected pictures, six associated distractions, and eight random decoys. After selecting the two correct images, the user would be given a randomly generated eight-digit code to log into their account.

It's basically a new take on two-factor authentication, but without additional hardware. And though it sounds like a complicated process, it's pretty easy after the initial setup. It's also more secure, the study says -- in a series of security tests involving 690 hacking attempts, there were 23 break-ins using this method. Only eight of those were genuinely successful, with the other 15 "achieved through coincidence."

"Traditional passwords are undoubtedly very usable but regardless of how safe people might feel their information is, the password s vulnerability is well known. There are alternative systems out there, but they are either very costly or have deployment constraints which mean they can be difficult to integrate with existing systems while maintaining user consensus. The GOTPass system is easy to use and implement, while at the same time offering users confidence that their information is being held securely," PhD student and study lead Hussain Alsaiari said.

Expect to see more of this kind of thing as companies look for more secure methods than simple password input. Companies like Google and Yahoo (Account Key) have been testing alternatives, and according to a survey earlier this year, most people are open to the idea of moving on from passwords as a whole.

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Ron Gilbert says that puzzles will be the focus of his retro adventure game Thimbleweed Park, and it turns out that one of those puzzles involves a phone and a bunch of answerphone messages. Thanks to a comment on Kickstarter, you can soon leave Gilbert a voice recording that could show up in the game, presumably as a fun easter egg when players get the puzzle wrong.

Here's Gilbert explaining how the puzzle came to be.

"One of the Kickstarter reward tiers was to appear in the Thimbleweed Park phonebook. During the Kickstarter, someone in the comments suggested that it would be neat if they could also record a voicemail message. Not being above stealing a good idea, we quickly added that and pretended we thought of it all along.

"We've delayed [gathering] all the names and voicemail messages because we wanted to make sure we were getting all the right information. We've implemented the phonebook and puzzle with dummy information and now we're ready to start gathering names and voicemail recordings."

Understandably, Gilbert and co. want people to test the voicemail system first, before the website goes live in mid-January. You can sign this form now to help do that, but be aware that you'll probably need to re-record your message when the time comes, as "any information submitted during the test will not be used in the game".

You can test the voicemail system whether you were a Kickstarter backer or not, though it's not clear whether the same will be true of the website, when that launches in January.

The makers of popular XCOM mod The Long War (you can read Chris' take on that here) have formed a development studio. It's named, pretty cannily, Long War Studios, and its first game is a strategy title where you have to defend Earth during an alien invasion.

It's not called YCOM, ZCOM, or even XCO.UK; Long War's game is titled Terra Invicta, and it'll be more of a "grand strategy" than Firaxis' smaller-scale operation. Here is everything we know about it so far (there are no images yet), before Terra Invicta heads to Kickstarter sometime in the future:

"Terra Invicta is a grand strategy game in which the player leads the defense of Earth during an alien invasion.

"An alien force has arrived in the far reaches of Solar System and begun probing Earth's defenses and building an invasion fleet. The player must assemble a council of scientists, politicians, military leaders and operatives who can unite Earth's squabbling nations with the ultimate goal of taking the fight to the aliens in the high ground of outer space."

It sounds like a more strategic, less fighty XCOM, and if it's even slightly like Europa Universalis but with space aliens, I think we would all be happy with that, right? (Thanks, NeoGAF.)

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 285. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

Deep in a theatre in rainy Prague, bionic commando Adam Jensen is trapped in a closet. The door is the only exit, and that s guarded by a bipedal robot loaded up with machine guns. There must be a way out; Deus Ex is all about choice.

I search for a vent, because there s always a vent. But with the exception of a big bin, the room is empty. I have fled into the most featureless and poorly ventilated space in the Deus Ex universe. I consider my abilities: my electric dash will get me killed slightly faster than ambling into fire. Cloaking isn t going to help either. I press a button to bring up my gun. From here you can switch ammo types, add silencers and tweak your scope. No armour-piercing rounds. Damn. 

A frag grenade! Robots hate frag grenades. I open the door, toss the egg and close it again as the robot opens fire. WHUMP. I use my augmented vision mode to see through the wall and spot the robot lying still on its side. I crack the door. There s a terrible whirring noise. The robot stirs, righting itself in a hideous tangle of legs. It s not dead. It s not dead at all. 

I retreat into the room. This is Adam Jensen s life now, this room. It s an incongruous end for a man who has dedicated the two years since the events of Human Revolution to becoming the perfect walking weapon. Human Revolution Jensen was the improvised, slightly buggy prototype who could only punch two people before having to recharge his batteries. Mankind Divided Jensen is colder, harder and deadlier. Eidos Montreal refer to him as Jensen 2.0. 

Jensen 2.0 has just come up with a very stupid plan. With the right upgrades Jensen can lift huge objects, like the massive bin sitting in the corner. I open the door and grab the fridge-sized object, hugging it against my belly for dear life. The robot opens fire, and the bin soaks up the bullets—it s working! I bump the robot backwards. The robot s guns fire point blank into the bin as we perform an absurd rotating waltz into the corridor. I m a genius. I silently thank Prague council s commitment to bin sturdiness and slowly back away. I make it fi ve steps before the bin breaks. I m an idiot. 

I m also dead, but laughing. In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, even a tiny and almost featureless room can create moments of emergent absurdity. That s exactly the kind of story that we look for, gameplay director Patrick Fortier tells me. We really believe in the strength of spontaneous moments. They re really powerful, and we believe that they re as exciting for players as the big scripted moments.  

I m inclined to agree, and happy to discover that Mankind Divided is a solid continuation of the Human Revolution formula. In Mankind Divided Jensen flies all over the world as a special forces expert working for the Deus Ex equivalent of Interpol. The world is still reeling from Human Revolution s techno-virus outbreak that turned augmented individuals into frenzied cyborg killers. Now augmented people are oppressed, segregated and treated as an underclass in what Eidos Montreal awkwardly refer to as a mechanical apartheid . Jensen wants to track down the Illuminati members responsible for the state of the world, and punch them with his big metal hands. As executive narrative director Mary DeMarle puts it: he wants to meet the puppeteer, he doesn t want to just be the puppet anymore.  

The new hubs will be more populated and detailed than those of Human Revolution.

Mankind Divided will play out over a collection of hub zones, although Eidos Montreal hasn t confirmed how many yet. The Prague level I explored takes place in one corner of a sizeable area—roughly two or three city blocks in size. The rest of the zone was locked off so I couldn t explore first-hand, but the new hubs will be more populated and detailed than Human Revolution s, thanks in large part to Mankind Divided s new engine. 

It s definitely a bigger monster than Human Revolution was, says audio director Steve Szczepkowski. In Human Revolution we could put maybe twelve people on screen that were moving, and then maybe another six static that would just sit and do their occupation. Well, that s doubled. The amount of dialogue has grown as a result. I don t remember what the total actor count is, but I know we re already way over a hundred. And that s with unique characters and all the factions we have so there s a lot of voices. We ve done a lot for the acting economy here in Montreal.

Games like Metal Gear Solid V have changed our assumptions about what emergent sandbox games can be, but Deus Ex is about density rather than size. The Prague theatre is a warren, and there are plenty of ways in. You can climb in through a window into an office protected by a laser grid. Going left leads you to a couple of ladders that get you to the roof. There s a vent there that drops you right into the bowels of the building. Go right and there s a moving platform that you can activate using a biocell, the biological batteries used to recharge Jensen s abilities. I used this platform to get a huge box onto a ledge, which I then jumped on to find a second way onto the roof. You can even enter through the beautiful glass dome on top of the theatre. Alternatively, if you want to test your guns, just walk in through the front door.

The level of detail far exceeds Human Revolution, which always felt constrained by its engine. There s stuff to pick up and throw everywhere, which means I get to find out how guard robots respond to being hit with a traffic cone (they don t like it). The streets are dark, rainy and atmospheric. I lure the poor robot down to a grimy public toilet where it sets off an EMP mine I planted earlier. I leave it collapsed just outside the gents, but just have time to admire how grotty the place feels. Human Revolution s gold filter is gone, which frees the theatre s lavish interiors to feel substantially different to the grimy city streets.

Company logos and clothes subtly play on the recurring tessellated triangles motif of Human Revolution. There s a signature elegance to the technology.

This artful clutter gives Eidos Montreal more ways to teach you about the world. You can hack into terminals to read emails and pick up news-pads, of course, but I also found a TV in the Prague level that showed a full length news report presented by Human Revolution s news anchor, Eliza Cassan. If you know the truth about Eliza from Human Revolution, you might sense just a little bias in her reporting.

The leap in world fidelity means more graffiti, newspaper front pages that blow around the streets, and more detailed books, posters and road signs. It s a richer place, and full of neat designs for weapons, robots and augmentations. Company logos and clothes subtly play on the recurring tessellated triangles motif of Human Revolution, and there s a signature elegance to the technology. I couldn t stop looking at Jensen s arms—dark and tightly coiled, like armoured vipers.

Those arms can do marvellous things, and Prague is a great playground for Jensen s new abilities. As in Human Revolution, he can cloak. He can use an aug that helps him to move silently. Titan armour can deflect bullets for a time. His close-combat retractable elbow chisels can now be fired at enemies. His knuckles can deploy multiple homing electrical shock bolts to a group of guards. Jensen is a heavily militarised Inspector Gadget, and feels remarkably powerful.

The power trip is sustained by a redesigned energy system. No longer are you constrained to a handful of energy pips. Instead, you have a bar of energy that depletes a little every time you activate an ability. For continuous abilities such as cloak, the remaining bar will gradually drain as you remain invisible. Energy used sustaining continuous abilities conveniently recharges, but the initial energy chunk you blow on ability activation can only be restored with a biocell.

With more juice, you can chain abilities together into monstrously satisfying combos. I used my Icarus dash to leap into the middle of a group of guards, and then immediately deployed my typhoon attack. The camera popped into third person and Jensen spun, shedding a spray of miniature warheads from his arms. You can combine abilities simultaneously with good results. Activate your silent feet aug and then dash, and you can quickly and silently close in for a close combat KO, for example. Close combat attacks still pop you into third-person view for a brutal miniature cutscene—Jensen has learned an especially handsome uppercut since Human Revolution.

Mankind Divided s augmentations have been redesigned to solve a key issue with the first game, where choosing a stealthy, non-lethal approach mostly prevented you from using the game s loudest and coolest toys. Mankind Divided tackles this by giving augmentations multiple functions, and non-lethal variants when necessary. If you choose, the typhoon attack can fire a spray of green gas bombs that incapacitate guards without killing them.

Every time we add new augmentations we try to see how versatile they can be, says Fortier. Even something like the nano-blade—which thematically is more offensive because it s a blade—you can still use it as a distraction as well, if you want to maintain stealth. We re trying to think about augmentations in that way, that they can serve multi-purposes.

I still haven t found a clever second use for the amazing shock-blast, however. Human Revolution s PEPS gun is now built into Jensen s arm. Firing it hits the area in front of you with a massive concussive shockwave that sends enemies and any nearby detritus flying. It s Deus Ex s equivalent of Skyrim s Fus Ro Dah dragon shout. The Icarus landing system also returns, cushioning long drops with a deeply satisfying golden electric forcefield. If you tap as you fall Jensen releases the forcefield as a destructive blast.

If you prefer a more subtle approach, try the hacking game. Cracking a complex device like a workstation sends you into a familiar minigame in which you capture nodes on a web. Each node you seize carries the chance of activating a countermeasure system that races to turn nodes red before you can take control of the device. Bonus nodes grant you extra currency and hacking power-ups, adding a fun element of risk-reward brinkmanship.

With the right upgrades you can also hack smaller devices such as security cameras quickly and at range. Jensen makes a safe-cracking gesture at the target and a box appears showing a soundwave with several spikes, and a line moving rapidly from left to right. As the line moves over the spikes, you can tap to remove them all and activate a disruptive affect. A range-hacked camera shuts down. A hacked security robot is temporarily disabled. The minigame is basic, but it turns hacking into an offensive tool that you can use in the middle of a gunfight. It speaks to the evolved philosophy of the sequel, which says that whether you opt to play loudly, quietly, lethally or non-lethally, most of Mankind Divided s tools should be useful to you.

Even the core movement and cover systems have been refined. You can now dash a short distance from cover. The distance of the dash is indicated by a faint line. If it touches another point of shelter, a faint outline of Jensen shows that you ll snap into cover at your new location. You can also dash into open ground to quickly close with an enemy, or make a hasty dash to a ladder or a vent without being spotted. It minimises the amount of time you spend slowly squat-stalking guards and makes stealth movement faster and more decisive.

Mankind Divided feels familiar, but from the cover system to the new augs, almost every system has been touched up. The result is a sleek power fantasy with enough sandbox freedom to let you own your anecdotes. I still have plenty of stories from my hours in Prague. I threw a sniper off his rooftop perch at the guards below, stole his rifle and cleared out the lobby from the streets. I ve distracted guards with a traffic cone and walked right around them, invisible. All this in one small corner of the game. There s still plenty more to discover about the story and the conversation systems, but Mankind Divided is a few months of polish away from being another great Deus Ex. We definitely asked for this.

One router to rule them all?

Google's OnHub wireless router went on sale a few short months ago with a lot of hype. Google positioned the OnHub as the one router that would replace all routers, solve all your Wi-Fi woes, and never go down or skip a beat. Best of all, Google promised the best range and speeds.

After four weeks with the OnHub, and countless device connections, disconnects, and wild usage, here's what we've found.

First things first: The OnHub is not for those who want to dive deeply into router/NAT settings. You can't access any settings typically found in routers, such as port for MAC address filtering, setting wireless channels, or VPN setup. You can't even set your broadcast power. If you're looking for advanced router features, you'll have to look elsewhere. As a matter of fact, you can't even attach more than one Ethernet device without adding a switch to split up the single LAN port. There's a lone USB port on the OnHub, but it's currently disabled.

So, who exactly is OnHub for? According to Google, OnHub is for those people who just want working, stable Wi-Fi.

You may have already read how easy OnHub's setup is. In this circumstance, Google succeeds marvelously; there's not much to do. You download the OnHub app on your smartphone, connect to the OnHub, and set up a Wi-Fi device name and password. That's essentially it. Anyone can set up an OnHub and get their connection up and running in under five minutes.

Until recently, we've used several brands of routers: NetGear, ASUS, D-Link, you name it—the usual suspects. We've become accustomed to getting into the settings and modifying wireless channels to make sure we're not in a crowded space. With OnHub, Google won't let you do any of that. Instead, OnHub connects to Google cloud services and uses constantly updated algorithms to determine the best settings for your specific environment. We can't tell for sure what's happening on Google's end, but we'll take its word for it for now.

In order to test OnHub, we brought it into a 2,000 square-feet house, with three residents. That, however, wasn't enough to stress the OnHub, so we loaded Google's little tube with 33 simultaneously connected devices. That's right—33 devices.

For advanced users, Google allows customization of settings such as dynamic/static IP addresses, port forwarding, and UPnP. For many people, these settings will be all they ever need; for advanced users, OnHub's options are severely lacking.

Google promises that OnHub devices will receive continuous updates over time, so there's always a possibility that your OnHub router will offer more advanced options. But as of now, you're going to have to seek other options if you want real configurability.

Testing

We wanted to see how the OnHub fared with range and wireless throughput. Previous to the OnHub, our network was using an ASUS RT-AC87U, which was fast in its own right.

Everyone's environment is going to be different, but our 2,000 square-feet house is a pretty standard design. The OnHub was placed near the rear of the house in one corner, which is actually the worst-case scenario, as you should always try to place your router in a central area to get the best coverage. But we wanted to put the router through a bit of punishment.

Multiple devices were connected: phones, laptops, desktops, tablets, a Nest thermostate, and four Nest cams.

The result? There wasn't a single spot in the house where our devices couldn't reach the OnHub with full bars. At the opposite corner of the house were a Nest cam and a laptop, and both were able to connect and remain connected to the OnHub without drops. Transfer speeds remained relatively quick. On the 5GHz band, our laptop managed to get a respectable 45MB/sec speeds on the downlink, and 42MB/sec on the uplink. The ASUS managed to connect but offered worse performance: 32MB/sec and 31MB/sec, respectively.

In close proximity, however, the performance of the two routers switched: the ASUS peaked out at 65MB/sec down throughput and 67MB/sec on the uplink. The OnHub fell short of the ASUS at 54MB/sec and 56MB/sec.

When we were on the ASUS router, there were times when devices would drop off. Connecting to the router would cause a limited connection; the device would establish a wireless connection but wouldn't be able to obtain an IP. This didn't happen very often, but it happened enough times that it was annoying. The OnHub didn't exhibit this behavior once, and we felt it was much more reliable—enough to load up the OnHub with more than 30 devices without issue.

So, essentially, what you're getting with the OnHub is a more reliable, long distance wireless connection at a slight cost to speed. The OnHub's more reliable connection to devices is probably more important, since having no connection means you're getting 0MB/sec.

Wi-Fi without worry

The ideal situation for us was using the OnHub in bridge mode, so that we could use a more advanced router to do routing duties. In our case, connecting the OnHub to a product like the pfSense gateway is the ultimate solution.

As for the OnHub itself, it's a really good first shot by Google at creating a simplified and easy to manage solution. All options—what few there are—are managed entirely on your phone. The OnHub is fast, stable, and good at giving you a sense of reliability. In the four weeks that we've used the OnHub, it's never crapped out on us or given us anything unexpected.

Google claims that the OnHub is smart. It uploads connection data to Google in an effort for Google to fine tune the OnHub using analytics, to better suit your personal setup. We don't know what exactly is being uploaded, but we do know as of right now, Google is doing something right.

If you already have a router with good NAT and LAN management features but gives you wireless issues, you can get an OnHub to serve purely as an access point. This setup defeats the entire intent behind the OnHub, but for advanced users, it works well. 

For the rest, who just want Wi-Fi that works, the OnHub does the job well. If and when Google updates the OnHub with more advanced features, we'll take a second look.

New today in the Golden Joystick Store's huge holiday sale:  Bioshock Infinite, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Civ V Complete — all at a massive 75% off! Plus you can still pick up Creative Assembly's tense Alien: Isolation for 75% off, as well as the brilliant, gorgeous adventure Bastion. You can also save 60% on Paradox's latest hits: Cities Skylines and Pillars of Eternity. Check out the featured offers below or visit store.goldenjoystick.com/sale to see all 250+ games on offer. 

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Battle Chess was a very popular game, not because it was a particularly challenging game but for the way the pieces on the board would spring to life and do battle in gloriously animated brawls when they met. This was 1988, remember, and while the immutable rules of chess meant that the outcomes were never in doubt, it was fun to watch and added a little spice to a genre that had long been dominated by staid titles like Chessmaster and Sargon. (Bear in mind that "chess" was a pretty big genre back in the day, too.)

The original, developed by Interplay, was enough of a hit to spawn a sequel in 1991 and a remake that debuted on Steam in 2014, and today Brian Fargo revealed that he'd started work on a second sequel in the late 90s that ultimately never saw the light of day. Fargo co-founded Interplay in the early 80s, and while he's probably best-known as an RPG guy, he was the producer on the original Battle Chess.

In the late 90's I started to spec a Battle Chess 3 with camera movement & voice acting. This has never been seen.

https://t.co/ZEVaRB4biJ

— Brian Fargo (@BrianFargo) December 28, 2015

The fight in the video is clearly too drawn out to be of practical use in the game (I can't imagine sitting through a full one-minute combat sequence for every piece taken, anyway) but as a prototype I'm assuming that the intent was to demonstrate the principle rather than actual gameplay. The tone is certainly accurate, though: As you can see in this video of Battle Chess death animations, low blows, cheap shots, and goofy humor were par for the course in the original.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is all about the White Wolf, Geralt of Rivia. But what if you want to undertake his down-and-dirty adventures as someone else—specifically, as a woman? Now you can, to an extent, thanks to a mod that lets you replace the G-Man with Triss, Yennifer, Ciri, or Shani. 

It's not a perfect transition, or even complete: The mod doesn't work with the Nilfgaardian, Temerian, or Skelligian DLC armor sets, and it uses Geralt's animations in combat. More distractingly, your character will also continue to speak in Geralt's voice despite the change in appearance, which might pull you out of the moment a bit.

Even so, it's an impressive bit of work, as is the Spawn Companion mod, which enables you to bring Lambert, Eskel, Ves, Cirilla, or Kiyan along with you on your journeys. The latest changelog notes that its compatibility with other mods has been improved but is still not guaranteed, although as you can see in the video above, courtesy of Br34k, it works quite nicely with the Playable Triss mod. I haven't tried it myself, but Reddit says the companions can be helpful in combat. And hey, at least you'll have someone to talk to besides Roach, right?

A few other cool mods to lay your eyes on, in case you missed them: Better textures, Gwent fights, and the Infected Mode, which you should probably handle with extreme caution.

Thanks, Polygon.

Remember when Todd Howard said that Fallout 4 would give players the option to take a less-violent approach to life in the wasteland? Not entirely without bloodshed, of course, but one in which you can avoid [killing] a lot? He wasn't kidding, but it turns out that he wasn't entirely correct, either. As Kyle Hinckley demonstrates over a 37-part YouTube series, it is possible to get through the entire game—on Survival mode, no less—without snuffing out a single, precious life.

That's not to say that lives aren't snuffed, but Hinckley's high charisma means he's able to convince others to do the dirty work, so his hands remain technically clean. Naturally, there are numerous reloads over the course of the adventure, as he's forced to retry ability checks in lieu of simply blowing holes in things. But given the way the game pushes players into killing, and the tendency of companions to be quick on the trigger, I'd say it's a fair compromise, and the ultimate goal here is not to avoid death, but to avoid personally inflicting it. 

Despite Howard's promise of increased player freedom, Hinckley told Kotaku that he's disappointed in the lack of diplomatic solutions to problems, which he sees as a departure from the previous games in the series. My version of pacifism isn t really diplomatic, it s more exploitative of the game mechanics to achieve a zero-kill record, he said. In other [Fallout] games, you had a lot of alternatives for bypassing the combat, whether it was with sneaking, speech checks, or a back door opened with lockpicking and hacking. In fact, in previous games (at least 3 and NV), your companion kills didn t count towards your record either.

The last minute of Hinckley's final video proves his claim that he made it from start to finish with zero kills, but of course there are some spoilers along the way, and in the Kotaku interview as well. Consider yourself warned, and then watch the whole thing here.