| Cult of Mac

YubiKey wants to be like Touch ID for your Internet life

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YubiKey opens the way to online security. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
YubiKey can make online security easy -- if it gains widespread adoption. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

LAS VEGAS — Nobody wants to get hacked like Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account. Everyone, including Apple, is pushing two-factor authentication in the wake of the high-profile hack that exposed dozens of celebrities nude selfies, but verifying an account login with a code sent to your phone is a total pain.

Cult_of_Mac_CES_2015 In the not-so-distant future, we might all be storing two-factor authentication on our keychains.

Yubico is already providing eight out of 10 Silicon Valley companies with a tiny USB dongle called YubiKey that securely verifies an employee’s online identity. You just plug it into a computer and tap it when it’s time to log in. Now that Gmail has started supporting YubiKey on the front end, anyone can use it as the second verification step for getting into their inbox.

Will Biometrics Replace Passwords As Keys To Our Digital Lives?

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The fingerprint: A brilliant convenience or key to a dystopian future?
The fingerprint: A brilliant convenience or key to a dystopian future?

With the touch of a button, Apple’s iPhone 5s will change the mobile industry. And Touch ID, the fingerprint reader built into the latest iPhone, just may simplify your life.

Thanks to its insanely simple implementation in the phone’s Home button, Apple has taken the first big step toward making its mobile devices even more central to the daily process of more efficiently managing the security-dependent details of our daily lives.

Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile: It’s a Scale — But For Sleep, Not Weight [Review, Fitness Special]

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The idea behind the Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile ($99) is that the quality of your sleep affects your health in a bigger way than we generally recognize, and that measuring the amount of time we sleep and its quality — then quantifying that sleep with a number on a 100-point scale — will give us the information we need to improve our sleep, and ultimately our health.