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.

This research finding from Georgia Tech sounds like it comes from the plot of a high-tech thriller — a team has figured out how to listen in on what someone is typing on a nearby keyboard by using the accelerometer and gyroscope of an iPhone 4 to sense keyboard vibrations and decipher sentences with 80 percent accuracy. Although the actual risk of this happening is essentially non-existent, it’s yet another example of just how important it is that smartphone security be maintained by manufacturers and users alike.

A spate of problems has cropped up with rogue SSL/TLS certificates that have the potential to subvert the integrity of encrypted Internet communications. Over at Macworld, Glenn Fleishman explains the situation, and offers advice to Mac OS X users on how to put up their guard for the system and browsers.