As smartphones become more accessible, billions of people have come to depend on their features for daily life. One of the most important aspects these days is the camera. OEMs have been working for years to improve camera quality, and they seem to have finally figured it out — the best way to achieve DSLR-quality photos wasn't just with better sensors, but with better intelligence.
Thanks to ever more powerful smartphones — the iPhone X with its advanced A11 processor and the Galaxy Note 8 powered by Snapdragon's 835 come to mind — the mobile industry is fast closing in on consoles and PCs with regards to gaming. Game developers have been aware of this fact, and have ported many games once dedicated to computers onto our handheld devices.
Nvidia's decades-long development of graphics processor units (GPU) for PCs has given it a major leg up in the driverless space.
While the world is only recently becoming aware of its existence, augmented reality has been around in some form or another since the '90s. In the last decade, with the advancement and miniaturization of computer technology — specifically smartphones and tablets — AR has become far more viable as a usable tool and even more so as a form of entertainment. And these are the people behind mobile AR to keep an eye on.
One major component of Level 4 and Level 5 driverless cars is in very short supply. Venture capitalists and engineers from around the world are racing to fill the LiDAR production, price, and performance void.
Now that Google has announced its new Pixel smartphones, folks who rushed to buy an iPhone 7 might be experiencing a bit of buyer's remorse. The new Pixel and Pixel XL are packed to the brim with cutting-edge features and top-notch hardware, and Google seems to be taking direct aim at the iPhone 7 with its Pixel marketing (and their groan-worthy jokes during the keynote).
I'm an Android user. Over the course of the past seven years, I've owned ten different smartphones—all of them powered by Android. This isn't due to some blind trust in Google or some unfounded hate for Apple, either, because I've always made sure to get my hands on each iPhone iteration along the way to see what it had to offer.
Many of our members here at Null Byte are aspiring hackers looking to gain skills and credentials to enter the most-valued profession of the 21st century. Hackers are being hired by IT security firms, antivirus developers, national military and espionage organizations, private detectives, and many other organizations.
While the Apple Watch does have up to 18 hours of battery life each day on a full charge, your results will vary depending on how often you use it and what you're actually doing with it.
You can find chili peppers in practically every cuisine. From the sweet Italian variety to the spicy Thai bird's chili and the smoky Mexican chipotle, peppers are ubiquitous and universally loved. But if you find the range and scope of these little fireballs overwhelming, you're not alone.
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! I have already done a few tutorials on password cracking, including ones for Linux and Windows, WEP and WPA2, and even online passwords using THC Hydra. Now, I thought it might be worthwhile to begin a series on password cracking in general. Password cracking is both an art and a science, and I hope to show you the many ways and subtleties involved.
The microwave oven is a monumental technological achievement that's saved college students and single people from starvation for decades. Almost 97% of all American households have one, which makes it the most-owned kitchen appliance in US homes right after the refrigerator.
Hard-boiled (also known as hard-cooked) eggs are notoriously easy to mess up. We've all ended up with tough, rubbery egg whites and overcooked yolks that have that unappetizing gray-green ring around the edge. An ideal hard-cooked egg has a firm yet tender white, while the yolk is creamy and well-done without being mealy.
A typical resistance spot welder can range in price from about $200-$800, but with a little resourcefulness and a bit of free time, you can make one like this for about $10 or less.
I don't know how many of you had this experience in your youth, but when I was a kid, I used to actively think about what would happen if I suddenly woke up in a fantasy land, or were to pass through a portal into another space and time. I knew it wouldn't really happen, but when you're a kid, these can be important issues to you. So I slept with my glasses on every night, just in case. Photo from George Pal's The Time Machine.
Will the predicted apocalyptic date—December 21st, 2012—really be the end of the world? In this ongoing five-part series, we examine what would happen if zombies, nuclear weapons, cyber wars, earthquakes, or aliens actually destroyed our planet—and how you might survive.
Using only a circle and straight lines, it's possible to create various aesthetic curves that combine both art and mathematics. The geometry behind the concentric circle, ellipse, and cardioid dates back centuries and is easily found in the world around us. From an archery target to an apple, can you name these geometric shapes?
The Calculator app is probably one of Apple's most-used iPhone apps, yet I always meet people who don't know all the little tricks there are to using it more efficiently. You may know most of them, but there's a chance you don't or at least forget about some of them.
Google and Snap held their annual conferences this week, and both companies managed to upstage their new AR software features with fantastic new AR hardware.
For most mainstream users, LiDAR sensors for precision depth sensing remain the exclusive domain of Apple iPhones and iPads, but Google is helping Android device makers close the depth gap on the software side via its ARCore toolkit.
The mission to rise above the fray to become a leading player in the augmented reality business is a moving target that depends on innovation, resources, and timing.
If you want to get started sniffing Wi-Fi networks, you usually need to start with a wireless network adapter. But thanks to a Wi-Fi sniffing library written in Arduino and the ultra-cheap ESP8266 chip, you might not need one. For less than $10 in electronics, you can build a tiny Arduino Wi-Fi sniffer that saves Wireshark-compatible PCAP files and fits anywhere.
As I've mentioned in recent days, it was refreshing to discover that Microsoft's HoloLens 2 stage production was every bit as accurate as presented (check out my hands-on test of the device for more on that).
Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that augmented reality (or, AR for short) will "change everything." But what, exactly, is augmented reality?
A relay is an electrical component that works like a light switch, where it's turned on or off with an electrical signal. By connecting a relay to a Wi-Fi connected microcontroller like an ESP8266, you can build a connected switch that can be controlled from the web browser of any device connected to the same Wi-Fi network — all for just a couple of dollars.
The most common Wi-Fi jamming attacks leverage deauthentication and disassociation packets to attack networks. This allows a low-cost ESP8266-based device programmed in Arduino to detect and classify Wi-Fi denial-of-service attacks by lighting a different color LED for each type of packet. The pattern of these colors can also allow us to fingerprint the tool being used to attack the network.
With all the controversy around the Pixel 3 XL, the regular-sized Pixel 3 might be the phone of choice for most users. Thanks to the huge boost in screen size, the little brother is now an easier pickup for those who like a bigger screen. And once more, the internals are the same, giving you the same experience as the 3 XL without the display notch.
This time last year, we got our first taste of what mobile app developers could do in augmented reality with Apple's ARKit. Most people had never heard of Animojis. Google's AR platform was still Tango. Snapchat introduced its World Lens AR experiences. Most mobile AR experiences existing in the wild were marker-based offerings from the likes of Blippar and Zappar or generic Pokémon GO knock-offs.
Update: Google's new Pixel models have been released! Check out our full guides on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL to see all the details, but we'll leave the rumor roundup intact below for posterity.
The mysterious technology product teased via an eccentric TED Talk nearly five years ago has finally been revealed, and it's called the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition. After all of the non-disclosure agreements, furtive comments from CEOs and insiders given early access to the device, and a seemingly never-ending string of hints dropped by the company's CEO, Rony Abovitz, on Twitter, we finally have a real look at the product.
Shodan calls itself "the search engine for internet-connected devices." With so many devices connected to the internet featuring varying levels of security, the special capabilities of this search engine mean it can provide a list of devices to test and attack. In this tutorial, we'll use Python to target specific software vulnerabilities and extract vulnerable target IP addresses from Shodan.
As unappealing as it sounds, transplants with fecal material from healthy donors help treat tough Clostridium difficile gastrointestinal infections. Researchers credit the treatment's success to its ability to restore a healthy bacterial balance to the bowels, and new research has shown that the transplanted bacteria doesn't just do its job and leave. The good fecal bacteria and its benefits can persist for years.
On April 7, 2017, residents in Dallas, Texas, woke to the sound of emergency sirens blaring all over the city. No one could shut them off, and after repeated efforts to contain the situation, the city had to shut down the entire system. While the media reported a sophisticated computer hack was responsible, the truth was much less high-tech.
A new technological movement without the technology itself is just an idea sitting and waiting. Once the technology is present in the equation, movement forward can begin. This is how many of us see the head-mounted displays (HMDs) and smartglasses that have recently entered the augmented and mixed reality market — or are coming out in the next few months. This is a movement that will sweep over the world, changing everything in its path, and these are some of the people behind it.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer that can crack Wi-Fi, clone key cards, break into laptops, and even clone an existing Wi-Fi network to trick users into connecting to the Pi instead. It can jam Wi-Fi for blocks, track cell phones, listen in on police scanners, broadcast an FM radio signal, and apparently even fly a goddamn missile into a helicopter.
All fields of study have their own language. For people interested in learning about microbes, the language can sometimes be downright difficult — but it doesn't need to be. From antibiotics to xerophiles, we have you covered in an easy-to-understand glossary.
Video chatting has become an important factor in the overall smartphone experience. Even just a few years ago, 37% of teens were making video calls on a regular basis, and that number has surely grown. 85% of households with infants have used video chat apps to call relatives in other cities, and it's been shown that toddlers can create bonds and learn from visual cues in video calls.
When shopping for a new smartphone, you'll encounter comparisons and spec sheets that are filled to the brim with values like mAh, GB, and GHz. To the average consumer, however, these values are meaningless, so we end up looking at which device has the specs with the highest actual numbers.
Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 9, may not be the huge overhaul that iOS 8 was, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of new features. In fact, there are a ton of subtle changes that you may not notice right away. Here's a rundown of all the coolest new features you need to know about on the new iOS 9 for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
The older I get, the more my Friday nights involve watching Netflix at home with a bottle of Maker's Mark and a box of Oreos. Netflix is a big part of my life, and I'm not alone. YouTube and Netflix make up over 50% of all activity on the Internet, so it might be worth your time to understand why Netflix seems to cause so many headaches and what can be done about it.
