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"Samsung's new Galaxy S5 arrived with an unexpected and underhyped feature. Like the iPhone 5S, it came with a fingerprint reader, but this reader plugs directly into PayPal, which in turn connects you to dozens of different payment systems. It's a clever trick: instead of a password, all you need is a fingerprint, carrying you through the entire web. If it catches on, soon you won't need a password at all."

"In an interview about the satellite hack with French news program 13 Heures, TV5Monde reporter David Delos unwittingly revealed at least one password for the station's social media presence. That's because he was filmed in front of a staffer's desk-which was smothered in sticky notes and taped index cards that were covered in account usernames and passwords."

"Under current law there is no recognized right to privacy in a student's or applicant's social networking site passwords and account information. This Bill makes it unlawful for a public or nonpublic academic institution to mandate that a student or applicant disclose password or account information granting the academic institution access to the student's or applicant's social networking profile or account. This Bill also prohibits academic institutions from requesting that a student or applicant log onto their respective social networking site to provide the academic institution direct access to the student's or applicant's social networking site profile or account. It is acknowledged by the General Assembly that new technological advances in internet use and social networking require new approaches to protecting reasonable expectations of privacy in personal information."

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

"Horror stories have been published about employers asking for job applicants' Facebook passwords. Recently, psychologists discovered that employers frown upon applicants without a Facebook presence. The lack of a profile raises many red flags: is this person anti-social? Was once tagged in too many party photos? Is he or she just pretentious?"

"A wristband dubbed Nymi confirms a user's identity via electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors that monitor the heartbeat and can authenticate a range of devices, from iPads to cars. Developers at Bionym, the Toronto-based company that makes the device, say the peeks and valleys of an individual's heartbeat are harder to imitate than the external features of biometric systems, like fingerprints or facial recognition."

"Introducing TweetDeck Teams, a simple way to share access to your Twitter accounts without sharing passwords. The feature is starting to roll out today on TweetDeck for web, Chrome and Windows."

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"An adequate education in web literacy would provide a framework for understanding the internet. It's not just about learning to type or to use a computer or smartphone, nor is it about mastering a programming language like JavaScript. It's about the gulf in between. Web literacy requires understanding the difference between a web browser, a search engine, or an app, and being able to leverage each. It's about knowing how to evaluate online content, and knowing how to differentiate between the credible and the dishonest. It's about the ability to thwart phishing attempts, to craft strong passwords, and to control how personal data is collected and used."