passwords

Sooner than you think, the Holy Grail of mobile password security could land on your phone thanks to new tech from Nuance called Dragon ID.

Dragon ID is a voice biometrics system from the same company behind the voice-recognition tech in Dragon Dictate for PCs and Dragon Go for iOS and Android. It promises a hands-free login system, but Nuance isn't putting it out in an app.

Instead, it's licensing the technology to manufacturers so they can build it into their phones.

"We're going to be pretty aggressive with our longstanding OEM partners, so we certainly … Read more

This might make those of advanced years feel a little smug.

Which, those in their 20s who are desperate to find a job and pay off student loans might say, the over-55s have been for at least 20 years.

This new source of smugness, however, comes from research at the University of Cambridge. For it showed that the password strength of Yahoo accounts belonging to the over-55s was twice that of, say, teens.

The New Scientist passes this information along and offers that the researchers concluded that most people have weak passwords.

The computer scientist who led the research, Joseph Bonneau, … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with concerns about password and data security when sending computers in for repair, Boot Camp installations not loading after running disk verification and repair routines, and the feasibility of putting third-party utilities on the OS X Lion recovery HD partition. We welcome alternative approaches and views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, post them in the comments!

Question: Password and data security during computer repairs MacFixIt reader Jerry asks:

One of the great intellectual new talents of this century has been training one's mind to remember all one's passwords.

Because writing them down always seems so very dangerous.

However, it seems that Best Buy's Geek Squad is rather keen for you to write down your password and, um, pass it to them.

Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin says he experienced this revealing phenomenon when he shopping with his brother for a new computer at Best Buy in Scottsdale, Ariz.

As his brother completed his purchase of a fine HP Windows 7 machine, Brodkin says his brother … Read more

In a better world, vulnerable accounts like banks, medical records, e-mail, and cloud drives would be protected with biometric systems. A swipe of a finger or a retina scan would allow access to your most important data.

Alas, eight-or-more-character passwords still dominate Web service log-ins. Anything from your investment portfolio to your Facebook account is simply accessed with an e-mail address (or username) and a few characters.

Yet, many Internet users continue to use easy-to-guess passwords like "123456," "qwerty," or their first names. Even worse, users repeat the same password (or a variation of one) across … Read more

Democrats in Washington are aiming to protect employees being asked to hand over the keys to their Facebook accounts.

A new bill introduced yesterday in the U.S. Senate would seek to stop employers from requesting passwords or access to an employee's account on Facebook and other social networks.

Known as the Password Protection Act Of 2012 (PDF), the bill is the latest response from politicians over the growing trend of employers eager to snoop around their workers' online accounts.

In some cases, current employees are being pressured to allow access to their Facebook accounts. A teacher's aide … Read more

Last week a security hole in OS X 10.7.3 was uncovered where the account passwords for Lion users who had upgraded from Snow Leopard and who were still using the legacy FileVault encryption scheme were being stored in plain text in system log files. This issue happened apparently because a debugging flag for the OS software had been left enabled in the public release. Following this finding, Apple today issued the next version of OS X Lion, which along with other fixes and tweaks, closes this security hole for these users.

The security hole was found to be … Read more

Twitter is investigating the release of what appear to be thousands of user account passwords and e-mail addresses.

"We are currently looking into the situation. In the meantime, we have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected," Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks told CNET in an e-mail. "For those who are concerned that their account may have been compromised, we suggest resetting your passwords and more in our Help Center."

The user data, so vast that it took five Pastebin pages to post, was released yesterday and blogged about on Airdemon.net, putting … Read more

A security hole has recently been found in the latest version of OS X 10.7.3, through which a user's password may be written to a log file in plain text if that person is using the older legacy FileVault data encryption technology from past versions of OS X.

While the hole may be a problem for a certain group of people who still use the legacy encryption scheme, there are several things that can be done about it.

The hole happened when an Apple software engineer apparently left a debugging flag enabled in the production release of … Read more