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Apple responds to journalist's iCloud hack

After former Gizmodo reporter Mat Honan's entire digital presence was hacked via a loophole in AppleCare, Apple now says it is looking into how users can reset their account passwords to ensure that their data is protected.

It all began when Honan took to his Tumblr blog on Friday, detailing the events that led to his online life being sabotaged -- with his Google and Twitter accounts being deleted and his MacBook, iPad, and iPhone being wiped clean. He blamed an AppleCare technician for allowing his accounts to be hacked, as well as the tech blog's official feed.… Read more

Move your mail to Outlook.com

Multiple e-mail inboxes are a fact of life for most of us. At last count I had six mail accounts I access regularly and another six addresses I use occasionally.

That didn't prevent me from signing up for a new Outlook.com address when Microsoft announced the service last week.

At first I was disappointed that I wasn't able to transfer my existing Hotmail account to Outlook.com. Instead, I was prompted to link the new Outlook.com account with the existing Hotmail account.

However, once I had imported my Gmail to Microsoft's new service I was … Read more

Syncing Notes from Mountain Lion Macs to iOS and Android

One of the nice things about the new Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion release is that the Notes application makes it easy to have notes sync from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad. But what if you're an Android user or want your notes to flow outside the Apple ecosystem for some reason? Yes, it can be done.

I don't take a lot of notes, but I've found it handy to have some things like frequent flyer numbers jotted down digitally in an easy-to-locate format. As a longtime Outlook user, I've used Outlook'… Read more

Gmail gets video Hangout

Gmail users will soon be able to use the same video chat technology that Google uses for its Google+ social network. Earlier today the company began rolling out the newer Google+ Hangouts functionality to Gmail, which has had video chat for the last three years.

This is mostly an under-the-hood announcement of an effort that's slated for completion within the next few weeks. The biggest difference is that unlike the service's previous video chat, which was based on peer-to-peer technology, the upgraded service will offer improved reliability and also let users connect with people using Google+, according to … Read more

Tips for deduping Android contacts

The contacts app on your phone is the most boring, neglected app ever created. I don't care how much you love your phone -- the only reason you're reading a blog post about contacts right now is because things have gotten out of hand.

Are there people listed in your phone three or four times? Do you have 500 contacts, but only 10 of them have phone numbers? Well, then, it's time to take out the garbage.

The video above has all of my best advice, but I'm going to use this blog post to distill … Read more

First Thunderbird, now Sparrow? We need e-mail clients, please

Today the small e-mail app company Sparrow announced it's getting acquired by Google. I hope this will be good news, but I am not convinced. With Mozilla ceasing development of Thunderbird features, things look bad for users of desktop e-mail software.

I'm a paying user of the Sparrow OS X application. I love it. I find it provides both a simple view to my GMail accounts, and a very fast interface to blast though messages. Google's GMail Web app gives me more features and better searching, and Thunderbird and Postbox are better for bulk operations, but for … Read more

Google snatches up Sparrow team to work on Gmail

Google has acquired e-mail software startup Sparrow in a move that brings its team to work on Google's Gmail product.

Sparrow's chief executive Dom Leca announced the news on the company's site and Twitter account this morning, as well as in an e-mail to existing Sparrow users.

Leca says that the company will continue to make Sparrow available, and keep it up and running with support, however the two versions of the product will not gain any new features.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Citing sources, The Verge suggests the deal came in at &… Read more

Password-protect e-mail on your iPhone and iPad

After last week's post describing two apps that keep your iPhone and iPad data private, a reader posed this question:

Is there any app that allows you to use it like the 'mail' app on an iPhone etc., but has a password lock facility? Else children will be reading all my mail.

I'm sure Apple had a reason for not allowing iPhone and iPad users to require a passcode to access the device's mail app, but I don't know what that reason was.

I came up with a free workaround that requires creation of a send-only … Read more

How Google products go from creepy to cool

On April 1, 2004, Google announced its new and capacious Gmail service and said it would serve up contextual ads, a move so radical that people initially thought it was an April Fool's joke. It wasn't.

At the time, more than 30 civil liberties groups urged Google to suspend Gmail, arguing that targeting people with ads in their e-mail was setting a dangerous precedent and letting the "proverbial genie out of the bottle" for privacy abuse. California Sen. Liz Figueroa drafted a bill aimed at restricting this use of Gmail (later dropped), privacy groups asked the California Attorney General to investigate … Read more