Risen Codes

[Heberto Calderon]

Thispage contains a list of cheats, codes, Easter eggs, tips, and other secrets for Risen for PC. If you've discovered a cheat you'd like to add to the page, or have a correction, please click EDIT and add it.

Here is another example of social engineering and the use of QR codes in a phishing email. The email lures its victim into accessing the attached HTML file and scanning the QR code within to update their email account.

Since the dawn of the computing revolution designers and engineers have aimed to reduce the gap between human and machine by evolving interaction methods to make it ever more intuitive.

Starting with text and simple mouse-based cursor movements, we now have almost ubiquitous touch screens on personal and public space devices. But under new scrutiny of the COVID-19 landscape we have seen a rapid rise of QR codes, which will have longer-term implications as we move into the new normal.

It is strange to think that it took a global pandemic to blow the dust off an old technology and give it a new lease on life, but it has been a long time coming. We have had many predictions in the 2000s of the year of the QR code that never truly came to fruition, which pushed the technology into the graveyard, often perceived by markets and consumers as gimmicky, clunky and overhyped.

Gone are the days when marketers of any and all types tried to shoehorn a QR code into an activation citing convergence as evidence that consumers want to use them and will scan them or even know what QR codes are. Beyond regulatory body recommendations, the recent proliferation of QR codes makes sense.

QR codes are all about the merging of the physical and digital life, are touch-free and convenient. Avoiding contamination has replaced food quality as the largest driver of deciding where to dine. According to a survey of 1,200 U.S. customers, 24% of respondents are most concerned with contamination, followed by safety and sanitation practices and restaurant cleanliness.

For people who are not first-adopters, technology needs to have a use for them to try it and change their patterns of behavior to integrate it into their lives. Not only is there a very clear need for it currently, the technology has evolved.

QR codes direct viewers straight from the camera, unlike the need for QR code reading apps. It has been suggested the sustained use of QR codes in Asia was due to the use of mega apps such as WeChat that bring together social and payment apps. With the ease of the technology and pre-existing knowledge of what and how to use them, we can expect retailers, public/event spaces (if they open), and brands to follow suit and implement QR codes everywhere for safety and convenience reasons.

Interestingly, this is likely to be most immediately noticeable Test and Trace techniques for the COVID-19 pandemic itself. As people scan QR codes at physical locations, they create a log of where they have been and when they were there, allowing efficient tracing to combat spikes in COVID-19 cases.

Consumers will be more competent QR code users, with increased positive sentiment about the experience it can offer them. However, when it comes to marketing, we need to tread cautiously. Let us not squander away an opportunity to make convenient and, more importantly, meaningful experiences for consumers.

QR codes offer an easy, convenient way to bring consumers directly onto owned platforms that will allow for first-party data. Should brands activate QR codes to create loyalty schemes or deliver digital experiences for the home? We should consider these as options when constructing media ecosystems that go beyond simple exposures.

Government restrictions have risen in several different ways. Laws and policies restricting religious freedom (such as requiring that religious groups register in order to operate) and government favoritism of religious groups (through funding for religious education, property and clergy, for example) have consistently been the most prevalent types of restrictions globally and in each of the five regions tracked in the study: Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East-North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Both types of restrictions have been rising; the global average score in each of these categories increased more than 20% between 2007 and 2017.

This big-picture view of restrictions on religion comes from a decadelong series of studies by Pew Research Center analyzing the extent to which governments and societies around the world impinge on religious beliefs and practices. Researchers annually comb through more than a dozen publicly available, widely cited sources of information, including annual reports on international religious freedom by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as publications by a variety of European and UN bodies and several independent, nongovernmental organizations. (See Methodology for more details on sources used in the study.) Due to the availability of the source material and the time it takes to code, each annual Pew Research Center report looks at events that took place about 18 months to two years before its publication. For example, this report covers events that occurred in 2017.

The studies are part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. The project is jointly funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.

The categories can help give readers a sense of what goes into the broader GRI and SHI scores, and they also are useful when comparing countries that have similar overall scores but very different situations within their borders.

The Government Restrictions Index measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs and practices. The GRI comprises 20 measures of restrictions, now grouped into the following categories:6

One of the consistent takeaways from a decade of tracking is the relatively high level of government restrictions on religion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which has ranked above all other regions each year from 2007 to 2017. The new study shows that the Middle East has high levels of restrictions across all four categories in 2017, but the gap in government favoritism is particularly large: The average country in the MENA region scores nearly twice as high on measures of government favoritism as the average country in any other region.

However, government favoritism has barely increased in the Middle East over the course of the study, partly because it started at such a high level that there was not much room for growth on the scale. In the other four major geographic regions, meanwhile, there have been notable increases in the levels of government favoritism of religious groups.

Most countries with the highest scores in government favoritism as of 2017 (including Afghanistan, Bahrain and Bangladesh) have Islam as their official state religion.14 This dovetails with an earlier finding that, as of 2015, Islam is the most common state religion around the world; in 27 of the 43 countries that enshrine an official religion (63%), that religion is Islam.

Rules on government registration of religious groups contributed heavily to the high scores in this category across all regions. Many countries require some form of registration for religious groups to operate, and at least four-in-ten countries in the Americas and more than half the countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and Europe had a registration process in 2017 that, at a minimum, adversely affected the ability of some groups to carry out their religious activities. In the Middle East and North Africa, this was the case in more than eight-in-ten countries.

Since 2007, Hungary has experienced a large increase in its score in this category. A new law in 2012 changed the registration process for religious groups and effectively deregistered more than 350 groups, adversely affecting their finances and ability to offer charitable social services.24

Government limits on religious activities also have increased markedly in the Americas, where the number of countries where governments interfered with worship rose from 16 in 2007 to 28 in 2017. In Canada, for example, the Supreme Court denied constitutional protection to a territory of spiritual significance to the indigenous Ktunaxa Nation in 2017. The Ktunaxa Nation had in 2012 sought a judicial review of a decision to approve the construction of a ski resort on land that was central to their faith, claiming it would impinge on their religious practices and violate their religious freedom.32

In other regions, too, government limits on religious activities have risen over the course of the study. This includes the Middle East-North Africa region. For instance, limits on public preaching have increased notably since 2007, when 13 countries were reported to have such restrictions. In 2017, 18 out of 20 countries in the region reportedly limited public preaching. These types of restrictions are not limited to minority faiths. In Jordan, for example, the government monitored sermons at mosques and required preachers to abstain from talking about politics to avoid social and political unrest and to counter extremist views. The Jordanian government began distributing themes and recommended texts for sermons to imams at mosques in 2017, and those who did not follow the recommendations were subject to fines and preaching bans.33

Among the countries with the highest levels of limits on religion, myriad policies restricting religious activities are enforced. In the Maldives, for example, it is a criminal offense to promote a religion other than Islam, punishable by up to five years in jail.35 And in Laos, religious groups must get permission from the government in order to gather, hold religious services, build houses of worship and establish new congregations.36

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