Online Password | featured news

To minimize identity theft, the Obama administration is urging Internet companies to agree upon and adopt a standard, reliable identity-verification system that people can use for any website. Each person would choose one company, perhaps their e-mail service provider, to handle credentials for sensitive personal or financial information on other sites.

Does this person sound familiar? He can’t be bothered to type a password into his phone every time he wants to play a game of Angry Birds. When he does need a password, maybe for his email or bank website, he chooses one that’s easy to remember like his sister’s name—and he uses the same one for each website he visits. For him, cookies come from the bakery, IP addresses are the locations of Intellectual Property and a correct Google search result is basically magic. Most of us know someone like this.

Oracle Corp.'s courtroom clash with archenemy SAP AG has paid off handsomely. A jury on Tuesday ordered SAP to pay $1.3 billion - more than half of its total profit last year - for a subsidiary's skullduggery in stealing a stockpile of software and customer-support documents from password-protected Oracle websites.

Younger Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 are more reckless with giving out their online passwords compared to older Web surfers, a new study suggests.