An undisclosed number of Kickstarter users have been emailed with advice to reset their passwords after the company was made aware of a data breach that may have led to the disclosure of personal information.

Some time in the last 24 hours, Kickstarter updated their website to display a banner on the top of its site for logged-in users, advising them to change their password and providing a link to do so. The advice comes following a statement by Kickstarter – which was emailed to an undisclosed number of users – stating the company was made aware “by law enforcement officials” of hackers breaching their servers to steal account-related information. The advice also recommended users consider using tools such as 1Password or LastPass, which as well as offering storage to let you remember all your passwords, also include password generators to come up with randomised, highly-secure passwords (might I also recommend KeyPass, which does the same but also contains a meter telling you how “secure” any password you type in is likely to be?)

The following is the full text of the email as sent out by Kickstarter – I’ll leave the explaining to them as it puts it better than I could myself:

“On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers’ data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.

 

No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers. There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on your account.

 

While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.

 

As a precaution, we strongly recommend that you change the password of your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password.

 

To change your password, log in to your account at Kickstarter.com and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password. We recommend you do the same on other sites where you use this password. For additional help with password security, we recommend tools like 1Password and LastPass.

 

We’re incredibly sorry that this happened. We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting. We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again.

 

Kickstarter is a vibrant community like no other, and we can’t thank you enough for being a part of it. Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. You can reach us at accountsecurity@kickstarter.com.

While it’s disappointing to hear of any type of hack where data is stolen – and a sad reflection of the state of the world today that not even a website that exists to give those with ideas but no money to make them real, the chance to connect with their potential market and get the funding they need, is safe from being hacked – it’s reassuring to see a company own up to the breach so quickly and waste no time in attempting to secure their service better and protect their users. I hope more companies learn from this example.

Smashdate! #3 a little guy with a powerful punch is warming up in the Blue corner, the next contender is sporting some interesting new mechanics as well as snazzy green shorts. We’ll also be looking into a few of the other stages that we can piece together.

[*ALARM*]

A Challenger Approaches

Little Mac

It’s time to touch gloves and come out fighting! Little mac has been upgraded from a mere assist trophy and is ready to go toe to toe with all the other superstars. His short stature and incredible speed will make mac a hard target to hit, although from the release trailer his jump/recovery height seems to be very unimpressive but what else can we expect from a professional boxer. Mac seems to be geared towards keeping his feet on the ground and dishing out the smash attacks. An interesting feature of Mac’s fighting style is the addition of his KO meter. This meter act’s in a similar way to DK’s star punch allowing Mac to charge his haymaker and deal an instant smash, unlike DK, Mac can’t store his charge so will deal his damage as soon as you release the button. This means allot less freedom and a more strategic attack, but one that deals all manner of damage and insta-kills.

One quick bit to mention about Macs announcement video is that he transforms into Mega Mac he has a rainbow aura similar to the Smash Moves of brawl. So it seems very likely that the special Smash Moves will be making a comeback.

The Stage is Set:

Wii Sports Studio

Everybody’s favourite characters home turf looks just as interesting as she does. With little to no features bar a couple of floating platforms this glorified yoga studio looks to be a good stage for a balanced fight. although the lack of a drop off may frustrate more seasoned players.

Green Hill Zone

The Blue Blur’s opening stage is back for another battle, not a lot of info can be obtained from these screen shots other than the stage being set in Sonic Lost Worlds. But if the brawl stage is anything to go by a dynamic shifting stage may be what we get.

Spirit Train

Our first 3DS stage here on Smashdate! Straight out of Toon Link’s series this mystical rail way spans the length and breadth of Hyrule. With bright popping colours and a cute little conductor this stage definitely has the Toon Link charm. As for the stage mechanics it looks like a scrolling base that’ll give players a chance to recover if they’re fast enough. Will we see varying speeds like ice mountain in brawl we will have to wait and see.

Round 3 of Smashdate! Had a couple of TKO’s with some interesting additions to mechanics, stages and characters. And I don’t know about you guys but I’m super excited to see these new mechanics come into play.

After the final bell has rung and the bout is over for now I’m still sat here clutching my moustache wax, hoping, praying that my trusty main will be reviled ready for the championship bout.

Another detail revealed during last night’s Nintendo Direct is the upcoming launch of another spin-off Pokémon game for the 3DS.

Pokémon Link: Battle!, known in America as Pokémon Battle Trozei, is the 3DS sequel to the DS game Pokémon Link/Trozei, which featured match-three style puzzles using Pokémon faces. Battle! sees you doing the same, playing out match-3 style puzzles with Pokémon – but this time, the puzzles take the form of Pokémon battles that progress based on your performance in the game. Burst the right number and type of tiny Pokémon heads and you deal damage to your opponent.

Pokémon Link: Battle! will feature all known Pokémon from Generations 1 through to the present day Gen 6; and all of them will be “befriendable”. The game will launch on the 3DS eShop in the UK on 13 March.

Now Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Punch-Out!! among new titles to get the Remix treatment.

Remember NES Remix – the Wii U eShop Download that, as I put it at the time, “first remembers classic NES Titles… then screws with them”? After the surprise announcement and rapid release of the original game in December, perhaps it should come as no surprise that in a Nintendo Direct last night, Satoru Iwata once again surprised us by announcing its successor.

Like the previous title, NES Remix 2 takes another selection of classic NES games; and sets you specific challenges to complete in each, both using the original title’s gameplay and then in “altered” versions, where whole new twists are added to radically change the game you once knew. This time around, the titles focus on the later era of the NES, such as Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, Punch-Out!!, Kirby Adventure, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Metroid, among others. The game will also feature a new “Championship Mode”, which was left unexplained.

As well as being a game made up of mini-games from other games, NES Remix 2 is also going to include a full-length game in its own right, in the form of “Super Luigi Bros.” Super Luigi Bros. is a fully playable, reversed version of Super Mario Bros, where you now play as Luigi throughout and can take advantage of his higher jumping ability; and in a new right-to-left viewpoint instead of the classic left-to-right.

NES Remix 2 will hit the Wii U eShop on 25 April, price TBC.

Those of us paying attention to the snapshots Mojang have been releasing in the run up to the release of Minecraft 1.8 might have long since noticed a pattern to the additions to the game, an awful lot of it is centring around making building maps of different types easier to automate. Most of this seems to be because the way blocks are rendered among other things are being subtly fiddled with ‘behind-the-scenes’ in the run up to the implementation of the plugin API that Dinnerbone has been promising for a while, meaning a lack of ‘survival’ changes to the game.

Snapshot 14w07a is no different, although it does bring new iron trapdoors to the survival aspect of the game. Otherwise the majority of changes in this ‘smaller snapshot’ (Mojang’s words) centre once again around adding new ways to customise and set-up maps and mini-games for map-makers to use.

The two major map-making additions in my opinion are the ability to now display team objectives that can only be seen by the team it is for (filtered out by ‘team colour’) and the ability to at last switch off nameplates above a player’s head, using the teams function. That last one especially will have a major effect on Survival Game type maps equal almost to how Spectator Mode did back in snapshot 14w05a.

Other notable command additions have to do with the /scoreboard command added in the last patch, with some new subcommands /scoreboard operation and /scoreboard test, operation used for math-based functions such as totalling up all the kills from one team into one single score and test used to make sure that scores are falling between set parameters (e.g. not under 0 and not over 100).

Needless to say, 1.8 looks like it’s going to be a very good update for all map-makers in the Minecraft community.

Snapshot notes are here.