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Mozilla's Web site log-in alternative known as Persona unveiled a Beta 2 version today. Now you can sign in to any Web site supporting Persona using a Yahoo Mail account.

Persona, which is still in development, is an open authentication system that works on desktops and mobile devices. In addition to being able to log in using either your Persona ID or your Yahoo credentials, today's release introduces support for Firefox OS, which means you can expect to use Persona to log in to any Firefox OS devices that launch later this year. It also includes back-end changes … Read more

A new exploit lets anyone who knows your birthday and e-mail address reset your Apple ID password, according to a new report.

The exploit, described by The Verge though not posted publicly, makes use of a special URL that gets around the need for a security question, a security measure Apple put in place on all Apple ID accounts last April.

The reported exploit does not work on accounts with two-step verification enabled, which Apple introduced yesterday, and does away with the security question in favor of sending a four-digit PIN code to a cell phone that needs to be … Read more

OS X is a multiuser operating system so each user can tailor the system for his or her own needs without interfering with another user's workflow. With this setup, not only can multiple people use a system, but an individual can also configure it to have multiple work environments.

For example, if you use your computer for two jobs and would like to keep all work for one completely separate from another, then one option is to use multiple user accounts for this. Alternatively you might like to have a separate user account for testing purposes if you've … Read more

To help identify your user account from others who use your system, OS X assigns your account a small picture that appears in various places in the system, including the log-in window as well as in applications like Mail.

When you initially set up your account in OS X, the system will have you set up your account picture, but often people skip by this step and continue with the setup process to start using their computers quicker, leaving their accounts with the image that OS X randomly chooses for it. However, if you would like to change your account … Read more

If you've ever struggled with remembering your Facebook password, or felt uncomfortable using your Google ID to log in to a non-Google Web site, Mozilla has a solution for you -- one it calls Persona.

This first beta of Persona, which used to be called Mozilla's BrowserID project, is designed to compete with Web site login systems like the ones offered by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Whether this open source alternative can hold its own against those other login heavy-hitters, though, is another story.

Persona essentially aims to give you a cross-platform, cross-browser way to log into a … Read more

If you regularly access remote servers using the secure shell (SSH) command in your Mac's Terminal, often you will do so to simply edit a configuration file or two. This is normally done using a Terminal-based text editor such as vi, nano, or emacs; however, even though these programs can be fairly powerful options, often they simply lack in both ease and capability when compared to GUI-based editors like the TextWrangler, a popular and free editor from BareBones software.

Unfortunately being a full GUI application, TextWrangler will not run in the Terminal so you cannot use a remote copy … Read more

If you are familiar with the Unix command line, then the OS X Terminal is a great resource for accessing systems remotely. This can be done with several different protocols, including SSH and Telnet, FTP, and SFTP, as well as several others. Often people who use the Terminal for remote access will have several servers they regularly access, which makes typing the commands and URLs to establish the connection rather redundant.

To make this easier, you have several approaches you can take. The first is to set up a script or shell function that will store the connection information for … Read more

A small number of Mac Pro owners who have upgraded to Mountain Lion are reporting an issue where the system seems to randomly log out, quitting all applications without any warnings and returning to the log-in screen.

While this may appear as if the system has restarted or even performed a standard log-out, the system is in fact experiencing a crash in a critical process called the Window Server that supports the current log-in session by managing the drawing and representation of windows on the screen. Crash logs that affected users have revealed show that the problem is rooted in … Read more

Yahoo has been the victim of a security breach that yielded hundreds of thousands of login credentials stored in plain text.

The hacked data, posted to the hacker site D33D Company, contained more than 453,000 login credentials and appears to have originated from the Web pioneer's network. The hackers, who said they used a union-based SQL injection technique to penetrate the Yahoo subdomain, intended the data dump to be a "wake-up call."

"We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as … Read more