David Carr of the New York Times neatly explains how Wikipedia’s blackout today to protest poorly drafted anti-piracy bills under consideration in the U.S. Congress leaves a ragged hole in the Internet. He doesn’t see Wikipedia as authoritative, but as fundamental: it’s the way to start to understand and research millions of topics.

In the November issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows shares the story of how his wife’s Gmail account was hijacked and what they went through to recover years of stored messages. It’s a compelling tale that will hopefully bring home the need for secure passwords and offline backups of cloud-based data.

A new tool from domain name lookup service OpenDNS secures your Mac’s connection to the firm’s servers when translating a human-readable name into its IP address, as Glenn Fleishman explains at Macworld. This prevents a host of malicious activities that can occur when third parties tamper or poison the values returned for a DNS request. It’s free, and it works with OpenDNS’s free and paid offerings.