"Players will no longer be limited by which heroes they can afford, so when a line-up calls for a certain hero, you can answer the call and focus on what's important in each game of HoN.”
Nice. This puts HoN on a par with Dota 2's system, which lets players pay for visual customisations and announcer packs. The other major MOBA, League of Legends, offers a rotating selection of characters for free, but permanent access for has to be bought or unlocked.
“This change is equally important in our mission to revitalize the myriad of game modes in HoN. HoN offers so many other fun twists, options, and strategies outside of All Pick that any passionate fan can attest to. We recognize this and don't want players to be turned away from these modes due to restriction. With all heroes and game modes, players will have the complete HoN experience at their disposal,” Konran adds.
If you'd like to try HoN, you can download the client and sign up for an account on the official Heroes of Newerth site .
Saints Row Undercover is a canceled title for Sony's handheld PSP. Publisher THQ dropped the game for some undoubtedly complicated business reasons, despite studio Volition having virtually completed development on the title. Flash forward to the year 2016, and not only is Saints Row Undercover a thing we know about, but we can actually play it, too, so long as you have a PC (of course you do) and a PSP emulator (easy to get).
Following a livestream earlier this week demonstrating the build, Volition handed the .iso file to Unseen64, a website dedicated to the preservation of canceled and / or obsolete games. PSP emulator PPSSPP reportedly runs the game smoothly on PC, so if you're keen to take a look, download the emulator and give it a crack.
I've not tested the game myself, so I can't confirm whether it's worth checking out or not. My gut feeling is, if you're interested in the history of abandoned video games, you'll want to have a look no matter what.
According to Unseen64, "the plan for Undercover was to create something similar to the GTA games for the PSP, keeping the core gameplay of the series, with crazy gameplay, a fun world to explore, character customization and coop multiplayer. The game would have had 20 main story missions to complete, along with the usual SR side activities to earn respect points."
There used to be songs about running to the mailbox, but these days we tend to approach postal deliveries with more apprehension. Bills and other unpleasantries like unsolicited mail outnumber handwritten letters, which have been replaced by texts, and magazines that now arrive on tablets. But for some 400,000 giddy Birchbox subscribers, a small box filled with five delightfully unknown items appears every month.
"We call it 'the surprise and delight,' but to make it more concrete is the fact that you don't know what's coming," says Birchbox co-founder Hayley Barna.
Founded three years ago by Harvard Business School friends Barna and Katia Beauchamp, Birchbox is a discovery method for beauty, grooming, and lifestyle products that mails customized packages of product samples to subscribers each month. It's $10 per month for women and $20 for men, who get a more luxe lifestyle item like a tie or belt for the extra dollars they pony up. "People often say, 'My Birchbox has arrived! It's a free gift of samples you pay ten dollars for,'" Barna says. "You know there's a contradiction in that but they actually do feel like it's a gift for themselves even though they paid for it."
If you really love the samples you can buy full-sized items on the Birchbox site. "We saw this trend; a lot of categories' spend was shifting from offline to online but it wasn't happening as quickly for beauty because it's a category that you need to touch, try, and feel," Barna says.
Once Birchboxes started arriving in mailboxes, growth was organic. "People wanted to share it," Beauchamp says. "I think there's something interesting about beauty and sharing, too. As a category, it seems to be something that you're just more comfortable sharing. You might not say, 'this shirt's from Target,' or something like that but you're willing to kind of overshare about 'I found this amazing brow pencil or an exfoliator that changed my life.'"
Birchbox has certainly changed the lives of Beauchamp and Barna, who've gone from packing boxes in their apartments to a loftybut still homeyfloor in the Flatiron district (right above PCMag!) filled with about 100 employees, and offices in Europe with about another 50.
PCMag decided to take the short elevator ride upstairs to settle into Birchbox's "Living Room" conference space for a chat with the founders.
Hayley Barna: Katia and I met in business school, on the first day of class. We were in the same section and we were friends before we were business partners. But in our second year of business school we were really inspired by people starting businesses that were really changing the way people shop. And what I mentioned before, if we saw a lot of trends, it was offline. So my roommate right after college, when I lived in New York, is my friend Mollie [Chen], and she was a beauty editor at Condé Nast and she used to give me presents out of the beauty editor's closet. And she would not just give me those presents, she would tell me how to use themlike, you know, put this here, use this oneand she'd tell me stories behind the brands. And Katia noticed that I had all these great products and she'd be like, "how'd you get that?" Because I never went to a department store, you know I wasn't a big beauty shopper but I had all this cool stuff. And I was like, "Mollie gave it to me, Mollie gave it to me." And the insight was that creating a service that gave people a beauty editor best friend could be a great way to solve the problem of finding awesome products.
HB: Globally we have over 400,000 subscribers. Still crazy to say. And a ton more are just shopping and reading our content online.
HB: Super important. So Mollie, who was part of the inspiration for our Birchbox was actually our first hire.
Katia Beauchamp: When we thought about our journey for discovering beauty products, we felt like it's very true that you want to touch, try, and feel the productthat's so important. But what actually gets you over the edge is somebody telling you why it's special, whether it's how to use it, or the ingredient, or the founder's so cool. And when you have a friend who's like, "Oh my gosh you have to try this, this is why," or you read an article that's like, "You have to try this, this is why," that's when you have momentum.
And so for us, we really felt like editorial is actually the part that gets you over the hill of 'do I want this?' because we put it in the context of you and your life. So we tell you a little bit about how this product could be relevant to you or what's the best way to use this product based on what's in style right now, I guess. And for us brands really kind of have an experience with us that isn't just about a new way of sampling, but it's a new way of telling a story. And the story is very much about the product and your experience with it but shaping that experience and then creating this kind of user-generated campaign around people who are all experiencing something very similar.
It really does change the potential and when you're reading an article or watching a video from Birchbox and you have the momentum, you can act on it. So you can click and buy it. You can go from intent to customer very fast and Birchbox has your credit card information, it has your address; it is literally the lowest-barrier place to transact. And so we really felt like the full discovery experience has to have editorial. So trial, and for us we call the editorial piece the 'learn piece', and from there you can buy. So try, learn, buy is our three steps that we talk about as being full discovery experience, simplified. There's so much that goes into it.
From Google's Russian changes to Capcom's Street Fighter V, here's what you missed over the weekend.
Topping tech headlines over the weekend were reports that Google will pull engineers from its Russian office to avoid increasingly restrictive Internet freedom laws.
A group of employees will stay in Russia to focus on sales, business partnerships, user support, marketing, and communications. But everyone else is out, reportedly due to a new Russian law requiring information on local citizens to be stored in Russia data centers rather than around the world.
In other news, Capcom's latest Street Fighter iterationStreet Fighter Vreleased a new trailer. Unfortunately, the video focuses more on the franchise's history than digital fighting. Though the developer did show off a live demonstration of the upcoming title at the weekend's Capcom Cup professional gaming event.
Meanwhile, Facebook and Microsoft confirmed the end of the social network's support for Bing search results. The move is aimed at helping users find "what's been shared with them on Facebook," a spokesman said. Redmond added that the social network made the switch away from Bing some time ago. The companies will continue to work together, just not with Facebook's search capabilities.
This morning, meanwhile, there are some rumors about what the consumer version of Windows 10 will entail; for more, check out the video below. And be sure to check out a few other stories making headlines in the links below.
Zuckerberg: No Plans for 'Dislike' Button: During his second public Q&A, the Facebook CEO covered the real-name policy, New Year's resolutions, and more.
Xbox One Outsells PS4 in November: Microsoft's video game system has unseated Sony's PlayStation 4 to become the top-selling console in November.
Walmart Knocks $50 Off iPhone 6, 6 Plus: Walmart is dropping the prices of some of the hottest smartphones out there, including iPhone 6 and Galaxy S5.
YouTube Testing GIF Maker: Quietly rolled out last month, the GIF maker is now available to a small group of creators, including PBS.
Apple's Online Store Now Accepts PayPal: Buying an iPad for someone this holiday season? You can now pay with PayPal via Apple's online store.
Google Translate Learns 10 New Languages: Google's language translation service can now understand Burmese and nine other new languages.
Dating App Hinge Raises $12M to Help with International Expansion: Hinge is aimed at those folks looking to start an actual relationship.
Glitch Drops Cost of U.K. Amazon Items to One Penny: An issue with a third-party service called Repricer Express gave holiday shoppers quite a discount.
You can have the longest password in the world and enable all sorts of notifications to let you know if, or when, an unauthorized person logs into your PayPal account. That's not going to matter very much, though, if the weak link in the security chain is PayPal itself. At least, that's what recently happened to Brian Krebs, of the KrebsOnSecurity blog.
No matter what kind of security measures he used to protect his PayPal account, an attacker still found his way in via a fairly easy-to-dupe outlet: PayPal's customer service.
Although PayPal did end up locking the account before any funds were transferred, Krebs's account is locked until he can provide PayPal a photocopy (or scanned copy) of his driver's licenseoddly enough, that's more authentication requested for him, the account's owner, than PayPal asked of the original attacker. That's even after Krebs phoned PayPal after the first attack, and was told that the company would be monitoring his account for any subsequent attacks.
"In my second call to PayPal, I insisted on speaking with a supervisor. That person was able to tell me that, as I suspected, my (very long and complex) password was never really compromised. The attacker had merely called in to PayPal's customer support, pretended to be me and was able to reset my password by providing nothing more than the last four digits of my Social Security number and the last four numbers of an old credit card account," Krebs wrote.
"Let's leave aside for a moment the reality that all of this static information about Brian Krebs has been posted online by various miscreants over the years (and probably remains online): Any company that authenticates customers with nothing more than static identifiers  address, SSN, DOB, phone number, credit card number, etc.  is vulnerable to these takeover attempts."
The obvious solution to the ordeal is for PayPal to query a person via some other authentication method when said person calls up the company, asking to be let into an account. PayPal could have easily sent Krebs a text or used some kind of authentication via its smartphone app to further ensure that the person it was talking to on the other end of the line was actually Krebs himself. Great ideas, but all things that PayPal can't actually do (right now).
"Longer term, PayPal should review which of its users have already provided mobile phone information, and then seek to validate those contact numbers. Once that process is done, PayPal can start upgrading its authentication systems  and hopefully become less reliant on static (read: already-compromised) identifiers to validate customers. This would help cut down on account takeovers and reduce the threat of costly, fraudulent credit card donations via hacked accounts," Krebs wrote.
UPDATE: PayPal sent PCMag the following statement: "The safety and security of our customers' accounts, data and money is PayPal's highest priority. Due to our privacy policies that protect our customers, PayPal does not publicly disclose details about our customers' accounts or their specific cases. However, it appears that our standard procedures were not followed in this case. While the funds remained secure, we are sorry that this unacceptable situation arose and we are reviewing the matter in order to prevent it from happening again."
Unparalleled character-creation tools. Wonderfully paced matches. Excellent Steam Workshop integration. Large variety of match types. Smooth online play. Exciting new moves. Lets you import digital music files to use as background and entrance tunes.
HOBBICO Dromida Verso; S Verso zažijete zcela novou dimenzi letu s kvadrokoptérou. Pomocí jednoho tlačítka můžete také letět obráceně, možné jsou i obrácené vzlety a přistání. LED osvětlení pomáhá s…