Password Manager LastPass to Debut New Family Plan Later This Summer

Popular password management LastPass today announced plans to introduce a new family plan, LastPass Families. The new plan is designed to allow up to six family members to store and access all of their passwords and documents from any device.

With LastPass Families, family members can share access to bank accounts, credit cards, and more, for every day use or in case of an emergency. According to LastPass, each individual family member will have access to unlimited shared folders with family members, emergency access, and a family dashboard where the family manager can add and remove members. Family members will also have a private, personal vault for storing passwords that are not shared.

LastPass plans to launch LastPass Families later this summer, but customers can sign up now to get early access to the feature. All LastPass Premium customers will also get a chance to try LastPass Families for free for six months.

LastPass Premium is priced at $12 per year, but family pricing has yet to be announced.

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Doomfist is set to punch ‘Overwatch’ off a ledge on July 27

Why it matters to you

Doomfist is the most anticipated hero yet to join the ranks of Overwatch heroes, so console players in particular are eager to try him out.

Doomfist, long-speculated to be the next character coming to Blizzard’s blockbuster hero shooter Overwatch, will officially join the game on July 27 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. After being announced earlier this month with a badass anime short, Doomfist has been active on the PC Public Test Realm server for several weeks, but this will mark the first time that console players get to put on his powered-up gauntlet.

Doomfist has been a part of Overwatch lore since the beginning. In the newly released behind-the-scenes video, developers relate how Blizzard vice president Chris Metzen gave the name as an example for the sorts of villains they needed to come up with, and everyone found it so evocative that it stuck. His gauntlet appears in the game’s first cinematic trailer, in which heroes Winston and Tracer fend off Widowmaker and Reaper’s attempt to steal it from a museum for the then-disbanded Overwatch organization. Evidence of Doomfist also litters the Numbani map, which features posters of him in the starting area and his eponymous fist on a car as the payload to be defended.

Players started seriously expecting Doomfist to join the roster earlier this year, leading to a fan campaign to cast football-player-turned-actor Terry Crews in the role, with which the actor himself (a professed PC gamer) was involved. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan shut down speculation that Doomfist was imminent at the time, since the next hero then was in fact the tank Orisa. Doomfist has finally followed as the 25th hero in the game’s roster, and we’re very excited to play with him.

We’ve already fooled around with Doomfist in the PTR server, and can confirm that he’s a blast to play. As his name suggests, Doomfist is an offense hero that’s all about punching with his huge, robotic fist. His secondary attack (and perhaps signature move) is the Rocket Punch, in which he charges up and blasts forward in a straight line, fist first, knocking anyone he hits back (and doing extra damage if they slam into a wall, which leaves a radius of gnarly cracks).

He can also uppercut enemies directly in front of him high up into the air, jumping up with them to follow up with a slam attack that throws Doomfist forward a bit, stunning and pulling enemies in front of him on the ground in toward him. Dealing damage with any of his special fist abilities also has an added benefit of giving him temporary armor. His primary weapon, perhaps his most underwhelming feature, is knuckle-mounted shotgun blasts on his smaller hand, which carry four charges and regenerate about one per second. Lastly his ultimate ability sends Doomfist up into the air, giving him a targeting reticle to choose a place and slam down, damaging anyone beneath.

He’s a lot of fun to play, and his punches are very viscerally satisfying to land. As a highly mobile, up close fighter he’s sort of like a beefier Genji. The developer video talks about how he’s sort of an ode to 2D fighting games, which feels apparent in the different ways you can combo his abilities together as the situation demands. His high mobility and up-close punishment make him a natural fit for the so called “dive comp” wherein teams use heroes like Winston and Lucio to aggressively jump onto the enemy team and focus them down.

He’s not a tank, so it can be risky to throw him around recklessly behind enemy lines without support. Wielded strategically, however, Doomfist will be exceptionally good at getting in the enemy team’s face and forcing them to deal with him.

Start-up app Enke puts its self-destructing videos on the map

Why it matters to you

You can find out what’s going on nearby with the geotagged videos on Enke, as long as other users are uploading content anyway.

Short video clips are the basis for tech like Snap’s Spectacles and the now defunct Vine, but one start-up is literally putting video clips on the map. Enke is a new iOS app that allows users to see what’s happening nearby by arranging 10-second video clips on a map.

The videos are time-stamped and disappear after 24 hours, allowing users to see what’s happening around them that day. Content is sorted by category, including food, night life, and shopping, allowing anyone to explore what’s happening nearby.

Enke founders Ivan Dodd and Sheran Gnanapragasam say they envision the app creating a platform for anyone to see what’s going on at any particular area before deciding where to go. The idea originally started as a way to explore nearby bars and clubs, but the pair quickly realized the app could encompass a much larger range of events.

The app was developed using Google Firebase alongside Google Places and Maps. All content is user uploaded — users upload a 10-second video, tag a location, and post. Each user’s video becomes a map of what’s happening, and since the videos disappear after 24 hours, the platform aims to display only current events that are likely still happening.

The video clips are paired with other details on the location, including ratings, hours, and contact information for businesses at any tagged location. The app also lists how many users are attending the event. The app’s mix of reviews and static content with always-changing shots of what’s going on that same day is what sets Enke apart from other location based apps, the developers said.

“We realized during development that there were a number of scenarios Enke would be useful for that fell outside the original scope of what we wanted,” Dodd said. “Some of those uses would require functionality we hadn’t originally thought to build-in.”

Expanding the app’s scope beyond the night scene meant the development took about twice as long as the team originally anticipated, but increased the program’s potential user base.

The start-up is privately funded by both founders. Dodd formerly worked with Jet.com while Gnanapragasam owns the development firm Ardent Peak.

Available free on iOS, the start-up plans to release an Android version before the end of the year.

China’s cybersecurity crackdown has taken aim at WhatsApp

Why it matters to you

Communication via WhatsApp has just been made much more difficult for users in China, continuing a dangerous trend for social apps in the region.

Reports have emerged out of China that the government’s strengthened cybersecurity laws have claimed yet another victim: WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned messaging app, known for its worldwide reach, has been at least partially blocked, according to The New York Times. The move has crippled users’ ability to send photos and video, and even hampered texting as well.

While the government has shown no reservations in the past in shutting down Facebook and Twitter inside its borders, WhatsApp managed to outlive both of them. While the app isn’t necessarily as popular in China as it is elsewhere in the world — Tencent’s WeChat dominates in the region with an estimated 500 million users in China alone — it is particularly handy for international communication as well as its built-in encryption feature.

Facebook was blocked by the government in 2009, and Instagram faced a similar fate in 2014. With WhatsApp’s prospects also looking grim, the social giant is in danger, more than ever before, of being completely forced out of China. The company attempted to repair the relationship beginning in 2014, but has backed off over the past year.

Why the sudden attack on WhatsApp? Recently passed cybersecurity laws in China require companies that provide software in the country to register with the government and store data on local servers. Meanwhile, users are required to use their real names in social applications. The government has consistently justified the measures, colloquially termed “The Great Firewall,” as necessary to curb cyberterrorism.

While the disruption of the messaging app is emblematic of a wider policy, it is fairly clear that WhatsApp was specifically targeted. Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, confirmed as much to the Times.

“According to the analysis that we ran today on WhatsApp’s infrastructure, it seems that the Great Firewall is imposing censorship that selectively targets WhatsApp functionalities,” Kobeissi said.

WhatsApp, of course, isn’t alone. Even WeChat users haven’t had total success sending and receiving messages and media. The government has also cracked down on virtual private networks, or VPNs, which are commonly used to route internet traffic to servers in other countries, and earlier this month, mobile carriers in the nation were ordered to cease all access by February 2018.

Casio ProTrek Smart review: Adventure watch

Casio gets a lot more attention than some other watchmakers on the MrMobile channel, and that’s because it’s one of the few companies doing something different with Android Wear. Last year, I reviewed the company’s feature-packed but pricey WSD-F10 outdoor smartwatch, and this summer’s sequel has ditched the clunky model number for a (slightly) streamlined brand name.

Much else is familiar though; the ProTrek Smart keeps the chunky frame, water resistance and the high price point – not to mention the confusing lack of both a heart rate monitor and an ambient light sensor. But there’s one major addition that puts the Casio ProTrek Smart firmly in “what last year’s model should have been” territory: baked-in GPS.

Does the addition of standalone navigation make this colossal chronometer worth its price tag? Tune in for the Casio ProTrek Smart Review by MrMobile to find out!

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Huawei Watch 2 Classic review: Leather is better

With the Huawei Watch 2 Classic, a metal body and leather strap make all the difference.

It’s no secret that we weren’t big fans of the Huawei Watch 2, a plastic-and-ceramic successor to a metal legacy that left us feeling dejected and a little confused over the company’s seemingly half-baked plans for wearables.

Well, after having used the Huawei Watch 2 Classic for some time, I can safely say the issue lies largely with branding and marketing than with the series itself. While the Classic is by no means a true visual successor to one of 2015’s best Android Wear devices, its use of actual metal around the frame and replaceable 22mm bands certainly gets it close.

Like the Watch 2, the Classic is equipped with a bunch of top-notch specs for a modern smartwatch, including a super-sharp 1.2-inch OLED panel at 390×390 pixels, a Snapdragon 2100 processor, 768MB of RAM and 4GB of storage (which can be used to store and play music offline), a heart rate sensor, a GPS radio, IP68 water resistance, and a 420mAh battery that’s quoted for two days (but is closer to a day and a half).

All it lacks compared to the Watch 2 is an integrated LTE radio and eSIM, which provides 4G service with a compatible carrier.

But here’s what you gain: a much more attractive and “public-friendly” timepiece that, at just 60.5 grams, is considerably lighter than much of the competition. And while I don’t love the fake chronometer bezel that doesn’t spin despite looking like it should, overall I find the Huawei Watch 2 Classic extremely easy to wear, and quite enjoyable to use.

Android Wear 2.0 was worth the wait.

Of course, it comes with Android Wear 2.0 included out of the box, which took some time getting here but the wait was worth it: this is a much more polished experience than what debuted in 2014. Google took its time to figure out exactly what was needed from its nascent wearables ecosystem, and the result is a platform that can stand on its own — with GPS you can take this running sans phone and record a run while listening to locally stored music — but is best when paired to an Android phone.

The Huawei Watch 2 Classic does come equipped with a quick release mechanism for its included leather band, which is appreciated since the inclusion of a second button on the right side and a GPS radio primes the watch for running, which doesn’t go so well with the leather strap.

Huawei’s included Workout app, which launches with a press of that bottom button (say that five times fast!), is quite impressive, though Google Fit Workout and Runtastic were also included on my version.

Any other app that isn’t included can be downloaded directly from the now-local Play Store, a move that, as mentioned, brings additional independence to the Android Wear platform.

In reality, the only real differentiation here is something I’d rather try to overlook: the watch faces that don’t fit at all with the Watch’s aesthetic. They’re garish and skeuomorphic and feel out of place on this still-sporty metal design. Instead, I’d recommend diving into the deep, deep library of available third-party watch faces.

Of course, notifications are still Android Wear’s strong suit, and the Watch 2 Classic performs that duty with aplomb. Without delving too deep into the app or workout side of things, I was able to stretch the Classic’s battery life to just over a day and a half.

The Huawei Watch 2 Classic makes up for the missteps of the mainline Watch 2, and that’s good enough for me to keep it on my wrist for the next little while. I prefer to it the gargantuan size of the LG Watch Sport, and though I could live without the fake chronometry around the admittedly large bezels, the fundamentals are excellent.

At close to $360 on Amazon right now, this is not a small investment, but if you’re looking for a high-end Android Wear watch in 2017 with a GPS and a reasonable footprint, the Huawei Watch 2 Classic is your best bet.

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Doomfist is here for the punching on July 27th

Doomfist is the most anticipated new character to hit Overwatch since the game landed one year ago, and players finally know when they can get their hands on him: July 27th. Doomfist is the fourth addition to the roster, but he’s been in the game’s lore from day one. His golden glove was featured in the first trailer for Overwatch, teasing an extremely powerful, punching villain — and that’s exactly what players will get later this month.

Doomfist has five main abilities, plus a temporary shield that generates when he does ability damage. He has a short-range hand cannon, an airborne uppercut move, a “Hulk smash!” kind of ability, a rocket punch that charges up and flings people into walls, and finally an ultimate move, where he jumps into the sky and comes crashing down, hurting any nearby enemies.

Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at Overwatch’s newest hero!

Doomfist arrives: 7.27.2017

Learn more ↪️ https://t.co/SgzOdU0Nlb pic.twitter.com/ZVUg9al3St

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) July 18, 2017

In the game’s story, he’s a 45-year-old mercenary based in Nigeria, real name Akande Ogundimu. Akande is highly intelligent and charismatic, the heir to a successful prosthetic-technology company, and a martial arts master. He’s also intent on engulfing the world in war.

With his cybernetic enhancements and a powerful gauntlet, Doomfist is a designed to be a damage-dealing offense character, rather than taking on a tank, support or defense role. The most recently added character, a tank hero named Orisa, hit the game in March and we took her for a spin live on Facebook. Before that, players got the hacker Sombra (offense) and the healing sniper Ana (support).

Source: @PlayOverwatch

Google adds security features to help block unverified apps

After dealing with security concerns like the Google Docs phishing debacle, Google has been adding quite a few new security features for its services and apps, including better protection for Gmail accounts and whitelist procedures for G Suite users. Now, the company is adding a new warning screen for any apps from developers that haven’t gone through Google’s app verification system, yet.

Apple has a similar process in place for OS X called Gatekeeper (which isn’t without its flaws), and Windows 10 blocks non-store apps, as well. When you come across an unverified app, you’ll get a notification alert of that fact. To proceed, you’ll need to type in “continue” in the provided field, which lessens the chance you’ll just hit an “ok” button and potentially get exposed to malicious code. As TechCrunch notes, the warning also contains the name of the app and its developer to further help you screen out phishing attempts. Developers can also test out their apps without having to wait for verified status, either, since users can bypass the warning.

“We’re committed to fostering a healthy ecosystem for both users and developers,” writes Google’s Naveen Agarwal and Wesley Chun in a blog post. “These new notices will inform users automatically if they may be at risk, enabling them to make informed decisions to keep their information safe, and will make it easier to test and develop apps for developers.”

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Google

New ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ site manages the rules so you can just play

Dungeons & Dragons, the quintessential pen-and-paper game, is more popular than ever, thanks to Twitch channels like Geek and Sundry and podcasts like The Adventure Zone. But it’s one thing to listen or watch a presentation crafted by seasoned gamers and another to actually run your own adventure. Players may get frustrated by the hundreds of pages of rules and quit before they’ve even had their first goblin encounter. Wizards of the Coast and social gaming firm Curse aim to fix this with the launch of D&D Beyond, a website and app intended to take care of all the fine print and number crunching, leaving dungeon masters and players free to focus on crafting a good story.

While Curse specializes in video game add-ons and communities, D&D Beyond is a different kind of project — a digital companion for a tabletop game. At launch it will mostly consist of a compendium of the rules and world information from D&D’s fifth edition, broken down into sections like “spells” and “monsters” that can be either browsed in a list or searched, with plenty of filters to narrow down the exact information required.

The current Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide may give you all the information you need to play an adventure, but anyone who’s ever used the books can attest to how hard it is to find anything in them. Many players end up turning to outside wikis and forums to get the information they want instead. Wizards of the Coast has tried over the years to provide some limited online help: Dungeons & Dragons has had digital content since its second edition, and the tools provided for the fourth edition did rather well with players. One thing all of these sites had in common is that they’ve always been meant as a supplement to the game — you still needed to buy the books to play.

The eventual goal is for D&D Beyond to completely replace the physical books. That doesn’t mean paper devotees are out of luck — the guides will stay in print as long as there’s demand. But players who prefer to keep everything on their computer or phone will have an official way to do that. While seasoned players will appreciate things like easier-to-access game minutia, it’s newbie adventurers who will benefit the most.

For example, character creation has been boiled down to a step-by-step process on the Beyond site that walks you through choosing a race, class and so forth. I used the builder to make an elven ranger and was impressed with how easy it is: After each selection it’ll give you drop-downs for things like expertises and languages, with the weapons and armor you can use clearly marked. When I copied my gnome bard from the game I currently play with friends, it actually showed me a few skill roll bonuses I had missed when I leveled up my character by hand.

The sheer complexity of Dungeons & Dragons is what’s made it so hard to build effective digital tools for it, but Project Lead Adam Bradford notes that it’s not the depth that makes it so hard to digitize but the breadth. The game is an open world, ultimately only limited by the imagination of its players. The rules are written as a guide, not a rigid framework for adventurers to operate in. To support freedom of ideas the site allows plenty of manual input, ranging from things as mundane as dice rolls to full-blown homebrew content that can be uploaded to the site’s database. There’s an entire section dedicated to sharing user-generated content where gamers can upvote the best submissions and add anything they find to their “collection.”

Even with so much of the game experience being moved online, Curse still envisions people sitting around a table to play Dungeons & Dragons, just with their laptops in front of them. Even if the entire game is run through Beyond, with future iterations of the site keeping track of combat turns, attacks and statuses, players will still need to talk to one another to describe what’s happening.

The company also sees the site as a way to make the game more accessible when you’re not playing. When you’re at work or in class you can look at your character, browse for new spells and read backstory anytime you want. By making those little things more accessible during downtime, the actual play sessions can be focused on story, socialization and performance.

The idea of Dungeons & Dragons as performance hasn’t always been a prominent part of the brand. Sure, you’re trying to amuse yourself and your friends, but no one was really playing for an audience outside gaming conventions. Now you can watch seasoned players run through campaigns like the Penny Arcade’s Acquisitions Inc. video series. Curse wants to help that phenomenon grow, especially after its sale to Twitch last year.

You need a Twitch account to sign up for D&D Beyond, because the company has big plans down the line for integrating D&D campaigns into the streaming site. The idea is that when you set up a stream it’ll be connected to the Beyond page for that particular campaign, displaying relevant infographics on the screen to give viewers a better idea of what’s going on. This will include interactive elements — each player will have her character name displayed, which can be moused over to look at that character sheet — and animations for things like spells or statuses. Games will look a lot more professional, and with most of the rules crunching going on behind the curtain, they will be a lot more entertaining to watch, with an increased emphasis on performance.

Features like interactive Twitch streams and the ability to run games completely through the site are big tasks, but Bradford says Curse is in it for the long haul. The first step is to get dungeon master tools up and running later this year, like combat and initiative tracking. There’s been a lot of demand for encounter building — that is, designing battles against monsters and other foes. Encounters form the core of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, with a typical session usually structured around one or two big battles. Wizards of the Coast sells predesigned adventures, but some players prefer something more customized to their group, especially if they have the type of friends who tend to step outside the box.

Beyond will let dungeon masters tweak existing monsters and build entirely new ones: As an example Bradford mentioned a Challenge Rating 12 Mind Flayer that had been separated from its colony. It would be weaker, but how would a player modify its stats? Beyond can eliminate the guesswork, even taking into account small things like how carrying certain magical items might affect the creature.

Unfortunately, these tools won’t be ready when Beyond comes out in August. Everything introduced in the current beta is what players should expect at launch. That’s the compendium, character builder and spell book, which will be available free of charge to registered users. Nothing needed to play will be locked away behind a paywall. Instead, the premium tiers will have features that make the site more useful, like the ability to store unlimited characters or use homebrew content. The site will also offer a lot of onetime purchases, like guides and special character classes. Dungeon masters who opt into the most expensive Master Tier will be able to share this content with their players with a click. It certainly beats having to carry around a backpack full of source books to every session.

Of course, some people like carrying around heavy bags of books and arguing about attack bonuses. Nothing has to change for them. But for players who really care about collaborative storytelling and love performing, D&D Beyond could be the push they need to give tabletop role-playing a try. It makes Dungeons & Dragons less about the math and more about being someone else for a little while.

Lede image: Vincent Proce / Wizards of the Coast

Clinton, Romney campaign managers unite to fight election hacking

The threat of hacks disrupting US elections is very real, and enough people are concerned that it’s creating some strange bedfellows. Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center has launched Defending Digital Democracy, a bipartisan effort to offer technology, strategies and other tools that can protect against election-oriented cyberattacks. And when they say it’s an across-the-aisle effort, they mean it. Campaign managers for former presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney will help lead the group, as will Facebook’s security chief, Google’s info security director and the co-founder of security firm CrowdStrike. The head of the group is Eric Rosenbach, who was Chief of Staff to recent Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

There are already a few early examples of potential solutions. The alliance will look at using blockchain technology to ensure the integrity of your vote, and wants to devise “playbooks” that campaigns and election overseers can use to beef up their security. Naturally, countering disinformation campaigns is important. The team even wants to explore methods for deterring cyberattacks in the first place, although that’s only going to have a limited effect on some perpetrators.

There’s no specific timetable for accomplishing these objectives, and there aren’t any immediate partners. Any success will hinge on rallying support. Still, it’s easy to see this getting some traction. The big names attached to DDD could help get its foot in the door, but there’s also a basic reality in the US: there isn’t a thorough, cohesive national strategy for protecting election infrastructure against cyberattacks. The group might not have all the answers, but it could establish a baseline level of security that makes it harder for hackers to run amok.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Belfer Center