passwords

There are several excellent bookmark-syncing extensions for Firefox, but Weave is the first major effort designed by Mozilla. The newest version of Weave is out of beta and supports more than just bookmark sync. It also supports syncing open tabs, history, passwords, preferences, and Firefox 3's advanced Location Bar data.

The add-on lives in your tools menu, in your Options menu, and in a Status Bar icon. From clicking on any of them, you can check your syncing log, create a user account and password, and toggle sync settings. The default is to sync all, but choosing the customization … Read more

Anyone who's ever tried to open or edit an important Microsoft Word or Excel document, only to find it's protected by a long-lost or never-known password, will appreciate PasswordUnlocker's Office Password Unlocker. It's a handy tool that unlocks password-protected Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access documents so they can be opened and edited by anyone. You can also use it to recover forgotten Office passwords. It's compatible with all versions of Microsoft Office from 97 to 2007.

Office Password Unlocker opens with a basic gray dialog box typical of the Office family, which means functional but … Read more

In a world where almost everything is online, from e-mail to credit cards, social networking to car insurance, keeping passwords both secure and manageable is no easy task. Security experts recommend that you not use the same password for everything, and that you incorporate a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Who can remember so many different nonsensical passwords? Fortunately, there's Efficient Password Manager, a simple and effective way to keep track of passwords for just about everything.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, reminding us a bit of Microsoft Outlook. There are separate sections in which … Read more

KeePass Password Safe Professional provides a helpful directory for remembering passwords and keeping them secure. While its layout was slightly confusing, its excellent results made us very happy, and to top it off, it's free.

The program's interface has a stark, directionless layout that initially turned us off. However, a visit to the Help file's instructions and some experimenting quickly opened this program up, and it actually proved to be easy to use. The program's functionality is quite simple: Follow an onscreen menu to enter a Web site's information and its corresponding user name and … Read more

Since Apple introduced iTunes 9 several months ago, we've received a fair number of complaints about two particular bugs. So far no one, not even the first and second levels of Applecare support, has been able to resolve them.

iTunes password-saving problem

Previous versions of iTunes allowed you to save your iTunes Store password on your desktop by checking the box as shown in the adjacent picture. Now, iTunes 9 teases us with a dialog box offering this option, but when you attempt to save the password by checking the box, iTunes fails to remember the password. Although there … Read more

For about the 4,000th time in the last five years, I tried to sign up for a new Web service, but it wouldn't accept my proposed password. Apparently, the site operators decided that passwords should contain only letters and numbers. Aarrrrgh! This isn't the first time I've seen this idiocy, and it won't be the last. But it should be.

Guidelines on how to construct a strong password almost uniformly recommend using a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Tools for generating passwords (for example, strongpasswordgenerator.com) encourage the use of … Read more

This robust password manager is a must-use freeware tool that supports multiple operating systems and browsers. With LastPass, you create a master password, and then it uses automatic form filling and one-click log-in to simplify password entry.

LastPass will create secure passwords for you, as well as allow for secure password sharing, password import and export, secure note-taking, and password backup and restore. Because the data is stored on its encrypted servers, you can access your passwords remotely. If you're worried about key logging, LastPass can make a single-serving-use password for you. You can manually add sites, like financial … Read more

Sticky Password creates a password storehouse for passwords throughout your system, although the program is somewhat more limited than that sounds. In addition to the generally strong password management feature, the keystone of the program, it offers a good selection of useful secondary features to bolster its value.

Sticky Password will import passwords from your browser, and ask you to create a master password for accessing them. That same master password can be used to restrict access to your computer, requiring the master pass before resuming from sleep or hibernation. It supports multiple accounts, fast access via the system tray … Read more

Password managers on the iPhone don't work as seamlessly as they do on the desktop, but 1Password Pro gets close. The all-in-one data store contains two security levels and an option to keep passwords hidden from sight even when you're viewing the record on the iPhone. We like that option a whole heck of a lot more than we do opening the record and seeing our passwords staring back. Call us paranoid.

The app stores both log-ins and individual passwords, which you can use to surf to a site from within the application's built-in browser. Browsing this … Read more