It’s critical when we’re facing crises that we protect our core values, including democracy. Democracies were already facing adversaries intent on using cyberattacks to disrupt our elections and democratic processes. Now, as the world battles the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen, and others have reported, that nation states and cybercriminals are taking advantage of the crisis by using virus-themed phishing attacks and other techniques to attack critical institutions. We must assume they will use these techniques to target our elections as well.

Today, we are announcing several steps our Defending Democracy program is taking to help our democratic processes become more resilient in light of all these threats. First, starting today, we’re expanding our Defending Democracy Program to include a new service, Election Security Advisors, which will give political campaigns and election officials hands-on help securing their systems and recovering from cyberattacks. Second, we are expanding our AccountGuard threat notification service to cover the offices of U.S. election officials and the U.S. Congress as many are working remotely. Third, we are extending Microsoft 365 for Campaigns to state-level campaigns and parties. And, finally, we are publishing our public policy recommendations for securing elections, including ways to secure them while confronting the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Introducing Election Security Advisors

Today, as part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, we’re announcing a new service called Election Security Advisors, bringing Microsoft’s cybersecurity preparedness and remediation expertise to election officials and political campaigns. Through Election Security Advisors, campaigns and election officials will be able to choose from two offerings from Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART). The first is an assessment of an organization’s systems and then providing expert help in configuring them securely to close any security gaps. The second is an incident response service helping these organizations find the cause of an attack, root it out and provide the direction required to restore their systems.

Microsoft founded the DART team in 2012 to provide proactive and reactive incident response and resiliency services to customers with the most challenging security needs, including investigation and remediation following attacks. The team currently includes a variety of cybersecurity experts including forensic investigators, reverse engineers and crisis experts across more than 33 cities on five continents who are able to rapidly deploy to customers around the world. These experts have been on the cyber front lines, addressing hundreds of incidents in 52 countries, spanning 26 industries and numerous government agencies. We published a case study of the team’s work today here.

Election Security Advisors is available today to all campaigns for federal office in the United States, state and local election officials, and private vendors serving the campaign and election community. These services have been packaged especially for the needs of the campaign and election community and will be priced significantly lower than comparable services for enterprises. We are also examining ways to bring these services to other democracies in the future. Those eligible for Election Security Advisors can learn more by emailing Protect2020@microsoft.com.

AccountGuard expansion

Since we announced our AccountGuard threat notification service in August 2018, we’ve expanded it to political campaigns, parties and democracy-focused non-profits in 29 countries around the world. It now protects more than 90,000 accounts. Starting today, AccountGuard is now also available to members of U.S. Congress and their staff as well as state election officials across the country, and sign up is available here. As many of these officials and their staff are engaging in their duties while working remotely, we hope this extra layer of security will help.

AccountGuard is a free service that notifies organizations of cyberattacks, tracking threat activity across email systems run by organizations as well as the personal accounts of its employees who opt-in. It’s open to Office 365 customers and can track threats targeting Microsoft’s consumer email services, including Outlook.com and Hotmail.  More on AccountGuard is available in our August 2018 announcement here. AccountGuard also includes access to cybersecurity training, and we’ve trained more than 1,500 campaign staffers and consultants on cybersecurity to date.

Microsoft 365 for Campaigns expansion

As we’ve continued to engage with those involved in the democratic process, one thing we hear routinely is that enterprise-grade email and filesharing services with world-class security are often too expensive for campaigns or are too difficult to set up and manage. Based on this feedback, last summer, we announced Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, bringing our best and most secure email services to political campaigns at the federal level.

Starting today, we’re bringing Microsoft 365 for Campaigns to anyone running for political office and political committees at the state level in the U.S., including those running for state legislatures and gubernatorial races. Those wishing to sign up can do so here. As campaigns and committees think about working remotely to support upcoming elections, we believe this will give them the world-class productivity, email, file-sharing and conferencing tools to do so in a way that’s affordable, easy to use and secure. Microsoft 365 for Campaigns provides the features of Microsoft 365 Business to these customers at a low price and with setup tools that help enable any campaign staffer to configure it securely for a campaign environment in about five minutes.

Policy recommendations

Today, we also published a set of policy recommendations and suggested actions government can take to secure the election system, including recommendations for conducting secure elections while addressing the need for social distancing to fight COVID-19.

To accommodate the possible need for social distancing leading into the November 2020 U.S. elections, Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program is urging governments to

• Look at options like increasing access to absentee voting
• Enable curbside or portable voting solutions.

To enable absentee voting, states can, for example, waive the requirement that voters submit a reason for requesting an absentee ballot and allow people to request an absentee ballot online. Portable or curbside voting solutions, which exist today mainly to accommodate people with disabilities, should be expanded, which will require new tools like e-pollbooks that can ensure voters are eligible without being tied to a single polling place.

While COVID-19 is a new and unexpected threat to U.S. elections, it is certainly not the only one. Challenges of nation-state interference and concerns about the security of election systems were already at the forefront of many officials’ minds going into this year. To address this, the policy recommendations also lay out five specific suggestions for securing the elections in general:

• A paper trail should be required for all elections
• Election results should be confirmed through post-election audits
• Elections should be end-to-end verifiable, meaning voters and members of the public should be able to confirm the accuracy of results
• Consistent funding needs to be provided by the federal government, so that state and local officials know when they purchase new technology that they’ll have funds to keep it secure through updates and improvements
• Everyone impacted by cyber threats, including the election community needs to be part of the discussion about changing what’s considered acceptable behavior in cyberspace by joining multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Paris Peace Call for Trust & Security in Cyberspace

Of course, we don’t have all the answers, but we’re sharing these recommendations based on what we’ve seen as we’ve tried to offer new technologies to the community and based on discussions with other technology providers, election officials and the academic community. We hope others offer their suggestions and contribute to the conversation.

In closing, there’s one important note about today’s AccountGuard and Microsoft 365 for Campaigns news. Due to local regulations, we are currently unable to offer AccountGuard to state election departments or M365 for Campaigns in the following states at this time: Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming. We encourage customers in those states to explore additional offerings here. In many cases, it’s law or regulation – not technical capability – that is preventing us from helping to secure democratic institutions as much as possible. We’ve been pleased that so many government officials around the world have worked collaboratively with us to break down existing barriers, and we’ll continue to work with government officials to find solutions.

Tags: COVID-19, Election Security Advisors, ElectionGuard, elections, Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, Microsoft AccountGuard

Over the last few weeks, the world at large has taken on many new challenges in daily life. Adopting new ways to work from home, often while parenting and balancing other priorities. It takes time, patience and problem solving. It’s like learning a new language.

We have received questions from across the disability community looking for tools, resources and best practices. Below you’ll see some of our key learnings since transitioning to working from home in early March. We have identified ways to accelerate the learning curve by leaning into our employees expertise and by continuing to prioritize accessibility to ensure that what we deliver is accessible to all our colleagues in these new and shifting circumstances.

Consider this the start of a series with more chapters ahead. Our hope is that by sharing these learnings we can accelerate your new your journey of being accessible, inclusive and productive – no matter where you’re working.

Learn from others with disabilities

The biggest source of knowledge right now are your employees, especially those in your disability employee communities. The insight and learning here will accelerate the learning curve. Three of our employees have already posted articles with details of how they are working day to day pragmatics:

• Leah Katz-Hernandez, a member of our CEO communications team, shares her experience as a profoundly deaf, visual-only American Sign Language (ASL) user – with tips on how to conduct great productive meetings in the virtual meeting space.
• Alyson Boote, a staff ASL interpreter, lists her recommendations for at-home remote ASL interpretation including downloadable reference guides.
• Megan Lawrence, member of our mental health employee resource group, details key tools and imperatives for maintaining emotional wellbeing including use of the toolset, MyAnalytics.

Leverage assistive technology

Now more than ever, accessibility isn’t option – it’s imperative. Online content, conference calls and virtual forums have replaced in person meetings and events for immediate future, and ‘in person’ accommodations that empower people with disabilities to consume that content have understandably reduced or stopped. However, if you embed accessibility into design of virtual or online content, you remove or reduce the potential of exclusion. You have the power to include and accessibility is the key. Here are a few tools at your disposal to assist you:

• Use Accessibility Insights to check your website, Windows or Android app for accessibility with quick easy guides on how to make them more accessible. Do this before you post content.
• Caption your videos. There are lots of ways to do this, I upload videos into Microsoft Stream (available as part of Microsoft 365) and auto captioning/editing feature prior to sharing within my organization.
• Use Accessibility Checker on any Microsoft 365 document to catch simple gotchas. Add alt-text to all images and ensure the format is screen reader friendly.
• Microsoft Teams is a one stop shop for conference calls, meetings, collaboration. If you’re looking for the simple answer to ‘is it accessible’ – yes – we’ve worked hard to making this an accessible platform for online meetings. Turn on live captions in any call or webinar, use ‘pin’ feature to keep one speaker (or in my case, my ASL interpreter) on the screen to avoid distractions, use Immersive Reader in the chat window or my favorite feature ‘background blur’ which was specifically designed by one of our deaf engineers to power up lipreading, great example of how an accessibility feature has powered up millions.

Contact us any time

The Microsoft Disability Answer Desk is available 24/7 by phone, chat or ASL Video. Please reach out if you need any advice or assistance as you learn your ‘new language.’

More to come. If you have any feedback or topics you want me to cover in next blog, pop ideas into the comments field below. Stay safe and wash your hands.

Yesterday, PlatinumGames revealed the fourth and final part of its much-hyped ‘Platinum4’ series of announcements, and the whole thing turned out to be an April Fools’ joke. It didn’t seem to sit particularly well with fans who were hoping for something more, but Hideki Kamiya has taken to social media to explain the thought process behind the whole thing.

In case you missed it, the prank teased an arcade machine for a new game called ‘Sol Cresta’, a made-up sequel to ’80s side-scrolling shoot em ups Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta. On Twitter, Kamiya says that he hopes fans “were able to get a good laugh”. His full statement can be found below (translation via Siliconera):

“We, PlatinumGames, went all-out for this year’s April Fools’ again. While I’m aware that we’re living in troubled times, as an entertainer there’s a part of me that just wants to cheer you all up, even if it’s just a little.

And a big thank you goes out to the folks at Hamster for their cooperation.

I’ve always had my own rules about April Fools’ jokes such as ‘make it obvious that it’s a lie’ and ‘make sure it doesn’t disappoint even if they know it’s a lie’ and so on. However, this time it was ‘make something that will get us (me?) excited’ and we went full stupid with it. I hope that you were able to get a good laugh and remind yourself that this is PlatinumGames.”

Judging by the reactions of fans in the prank’s YouTube comments, and indeed in our very own comment section yesterday, it sadly didn’t seem to get viewers very excited at all. Instead, people were simply left wondering whether we’ll still be getting a ‘proper’ fourth announcement in the future.

That still remains to be seen, but we sure hope there’s something else up PlatinumGames’ sleeve – for many, hyping up a joke won’t quite cut it.

メモリーズオフ-Innocent Fille- is Now Available on Steam!

「メモリーズオフ」シリーズ史上最もライトで最もシリアスな二面性のあるシナリオが、切なくて儚い、ただ一つの想いを選ぶ“二者択一の恋物語”(オルタナティブ・ラヴストーリー)へとプレイヤーを誘います。

Bethesda Softworks and id Software have canceled their annual QuakeCon fan event, announcing over Twitter that uncertainties involving the ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic make planning this year’s event too difficult to proceed with the show.

While QuakeCon is far from the first event to be called off due to the spread of COVID-19, the event makes for one of the earlier cancellations so far as QuakeCon 25 was originally scheduled for this August.

“In recent weeks we have spent a lot of time discussing how we might still move forward with QuakeCon this year, particularly given that it’s the 25th year of the event. However, with all the logistical challenges and uncertainties we currently face due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to cancel this year’s QuakeCon,” reads a portion of the statement shared to Twitter.

“While we don’t know what the state of the pandemic will be this August, we do know it will not be possible to complete the work and planning with partners, vendors, volunteers, and others that is required to make QuakeCon a success.”

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts​

Fire Hose Games is growing! The studio behind Go Home Dinosaurs, Catlateral Damage, and 20XX is now working on 2 new unannounced games for PC/console that are ambitious departures from our previous titles. We’re looking for talented, passionate developers to expand our team.

Job Description

• Develop sustainable monetization strategies and engaging progression systems for a live game
• Work with design and production to align monetization with the game’s vision and milestones
• Design economic systems within and outside the game
• Balance the game economy and progression systems
• Identify and analyze metrics for adjusting progression and economy systems
• Collaborate with engineering, art, and production

Qualifications

• 2+ years industry experience
• At least 1 shipped title
• Experience developing monetization strategies for free to play games
• Experience designing economic, metagame, and other progression systems
• Understanding of player psychology and motivation for different player segments
• Experience with visualizing and processing user data
• Knowledge of and experience with online games as a service and free to play games

Preferences

• General game design experience
• Basic programming skills
• Experience with agile/Scrum practices
• Experience with rapid prototyping
• Experience with A/B testing during live development
• Proximity to the Greater Boston area is strongly preferred, but not required

Additional Information

Fire Hose Games is located in Cambridge MA, next door to Boston. We pay good salaries and our generous benefits package includes health care, dental, unlimited vacation/sick time, 401(k) with matching, excellent maternity/paternity leave, flexible work hours, relocation costs, and free snacks at the office. Fire Hose hasn’t crunched in years and we don’t intend to start. Our company culture is inclusive, supportive, and fun. We care about diversity and strongly encourage applicants with diverse backgrounds and voices to apply. We hope to hear from you!

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.