This week, learn from Trump’s Twitter mistake, Baldur’s Gate 3 may be worth getting early, and Watch Dog: Legion takes to the streets of London. But first, a new report finds that Canadians are worried about what businesses do with their private info.

Canadian consumers are concerned about their confidential info and this has implications for businesses

A new report, based on a survey conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Shred-It, found that 83 percent of Canadians are worried about companies they do business with having their personal information online.

And Canadian consumers are not very trusting, either, with more than half of those surveyed believing that not all data breaches are reported.

Companies need to have their physical and digital security in place or consumers are unlikely to deal with them.

The report differentiates between physical risk of print materials, laptops, and hard drives being lost or stolen, and digital risk, like malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks.

The Shred-It report also found that while businesses agree that data security is a priority, they are more vulnerable than ever, especially with the prevalence of work-from-home.

One of the key recommendations is that companies need to do better at creating information security policies and making sure that employees understand and adhere to them.

Especially since remote work is likely to be the norm for some time.

Trump’s Twitter account hacked; get a password manager

A Dutch digital security researcher claims that he hacked Donald Trump’s Twitter account last week after guessing the password: “maga2020!”

The claim was reported by the Guardian.

Twitter said in a statement that there was no evidence such a hack occurred, but it’s not difficult to imagine that the password on Trump’s Twitter would be so obvious.

So let this be a reminder to all of us that we should:

1. Have different passwords for all our accounts.
2. Change our passwords regularly.
3. Use a password manager to make all of this easy.

My favourite is 1Password.

Baldur’s Gate III is a great early access option

Baldur’s Gate III, the eagerly anticipated role-playing video game, has been released. Kind of. It’s in early release, which is to say that the software runs, and a lot of the pieces are in place, but it’s not exactly finished.

With early release, developers – most of them are smaller, independent studios – are hoping to get their game in the world to raise a bit of money and create a bit of buzz. The money helps keep development going as the game is polished, and the buzz helps to generate more sales when the game gets its final release.

So it is with Baldur’s Gate 3, developed by Larian Studios and very much in the world of Dungeons & Dragons (the Fifth Edition). While the game is available on MacOS and Windows, I’ve been playing the early release on Google’s Stadia streaming service.

Larian says that what’s available now is about a fifth of the final game. Given that this early access will give you between 20 and 30 hours of gameplay, you’ll get a sense of how massive this game is.

Despite that, this is a fully realized world with a compelling narrative that will appeal to old school D&D fans. The dialogue options are extensive and this is how much of the story is told. It’s also how you can recruit companions to be part of your adventure.

While you choose your actions, sometimes the game will literally give you a rolling D20, which is a nice nod to the tabletop origin of the game.

You can play as one of six classes: cleric, fighter, ranger, rogue, warlock, or wizard. Multi-classes will be part of the game later, but are not available yet.

Because this is an early access, there are some bugs and glitches, but fixes for these things will be rolling out regularly.

Whether you want to dive into Baldur’s Gate III early will depend on a couple of things.

If you don’t want to wait for the full game – it could be a year away – you might want to give yourself a chance to enjoy this rich world.

But note that your saves will not carry over, so any characters you create and advance now will not come with you when you start playing the final release. So if you become attached to your creations, or you don’t want to spoil any of the early story, maybe you should be patient.

The streets of London are a great setting for Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Legion starts, like all good stories, with a conspiracy. And a catastrophe. In this world, London will never be the same again.

The third game in the franchise from Ubisoft, with development led by the studio in Toronto, is, like its predecessors, a game that centers concerns about the surveillance state.

The first game, set in Chicago, was released in 2014. The second game, 2016’s Watch Dogs 2, moved to San Francisco. Those games were set two years later than the release dates, and that near-future context is true of Legion, too, even if the year isn’t specified.

There’s a straight line between Brexit and Black Lives Matter and the climate crisis and the London created for Legion, which is victimized with a terrorist attack which leads to the militarization of law and order and creeping fascism.

Connected cameras and drones are persistent in this world, and the private corporation of Albion has been handed control of it all.

Resisting are the people who come together in DedSec, the hacker group which has been part of the Watch Dog games since the beginning.

And it’s the people where Legion becomes an entirely different game than the previous Watch Dog titles and distinct among standard open-world role-playing games. Because any character that you see on the street can become a playable character in your game.

Much of the delight here is in finding new characters to recruit, as each person has skills that they bring to help the collective effort, and some of those unique characteristics could be essential to completing missions. There’s enough flexibility in this sandbox to use a variety of methods to accomplish the same task.

You won’t always be successful in recruiting people, and not everyone is open to recruitment. You’ll figure all that out as you go.

Along the way you’ll confront Albion, increasing in power, as well as other factions – the criminal underground, for example – that are trying to control what happens in the city.

Combat is passable, but Watch Dogs is less about beating someone down and more about sneaking around and using your tech tools to complete objectives. And as you build out your own DedSec, you’ll be able to combine your operatives and their skills in completely unique ways.

The London created for Legion is essential to the game. It’s a huge city, and each of the eight districts built out for the game has its own personality. There are, as with all open world games these days, plenty of tasks to take on and items to collect. I didn’t get the same sense of boredom from this as I have from other open worlds that were overwhelming with the number of things to do and mind-numbingly the same.

In part that’s because this city is as maze-like as the real London, too, with everything somehow flowing with the Thames. It’s a treat to simply be in the world, with its bright neon tint and cacophony.

One mechanic I didn’t have a chance to explore is the permanent death option, which removes characters you’ve recruited from your roster if they are killed in the game. It’s the kind of creative fluidity that means that no two games are ever alike, and I believe would make me very cautious about how I play the game and the decisions I make about the characters I play.

Another way that Legion differs from the earlier two Watch Dogs games is in its tone of irreverence. While the game’s themes are serious, the game itself doesn’t take itself too seriously. This “taking the piss” attitude comes through in the dialogue, in the top-notch voice acting that is at times incomprehensible, and in the bizarre and hilarious masks that the characters wear when on missions to circumvent facial recognition. This is the country of Guy Fawkes, after all.

When the world we’re living in seems more like a video game each day, what else can we expect from the video games we play?

Watch Dogs: Legion is now available for PS4, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One, on November 10 for Xbox Series S/X, and on November 12 for PS5. Rated mature.