In this article, I'll show you how to make a high-powered, long-range, air-powered rocket gun. This launcher is based on a sprinkler valve, a modified propane tank, and a few other components. Though not hard to make, this device is VERY dangerous! The rocket can seriously harm, if not kill any living thing it's shot at. Here's a video of it in action, quite an accurate shot by my friend Chris... Parts
Hobby rockets are tons of fun. Vicarious astronaut adventures abound with every launch. What if you want to be closer to the action though? What if you want to feel what it's like to be in a rocket at takeoff? With the discovery of tiny keychain cameras, we have technology small and cheap enough to fit inside a model rocket!
Another week has passed on the online battlefield as the CISPA legislation continues to grind away at our freedom. Here at Null Byte, we try to keep our community informed and knowledgeable at the same time—and that means creating content for them to learn from.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our tutorials, post to the community corkboard, and come play on our free server!
Bikes are a great form of transportation. They use human energy more efficiently than any other machine. You can keep it in your closet or hallway. You can even take it on the train in a pinch. However, this portability is also the bike's biggest draw back. If you own a bike in the city, chances are it will be stolen. Locks barely deter thieves armed with bolt cutters and crowbars. Throw the bike thieves for a loop and make a tilt-sensitive alarm. It will hopefully startle your bike's assaila...
House plants are a refreshing reminder of the rich biosphere teaming with life just outside of our hermetically sealed human dens. They calm us and clean our air. But what would you do if you came across a glowing green flower on your dinner table? I would be startled, but not shaken.
There isn't much going on this week, but be sure to try viewing the Spica-moon conjunction. It will be hard to view with the full moon, but it will be spectacular if you can snag a peak.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our tutorials, post to the community corkboard, and come play on our free server!
Rockets are lots of fun when you are launching them. However, finding them can be an arduous if not maddening task. Fancy space rockets have lots of tracking equipment to make touchdowns as simple as pie. Today, we look at embedding LEDs into your hobby rocket for easy night flight fun!
The only thing better than successfully pulling off a new experiment is doing it with household materials. You get to laugh in conceit as professional scientists everywhere spend all their grant money on the same project you just accomplished with some under-the-sink chemicals! However, there are times when DIY gets dangerous. Some household chemicals are not pure enough to use and some are just pure dangerous. Let's take a look at two problems I have encountered in the course of mad sciencing.
Glass is one of the least reactive substances known to chemistry. It is the standard container material for almost all lab chemicals because it's so inert. But there are a couple of substances that have strong reactions with glass. Sodium hydroxide, aka solid drain cleaner or lye, can easily be stored in glass as a solid, but when molten, it reacts violently with glass and can actually dissolve it away! So, the next time you clog up your drains with broken glass beakers and flasks, rest assur...
You're never too young to start building your vast swarm of robotic minions. Taking over the world requires a whole lot of robots. The sheer volume of robots needed means your first wave will have to be made of cheap materials. After they take over key resources, you can upgrade to Kevlar and titanium. But to start, let's make popsicle stick insect robots!
Science-fiction writer Jules Verne predicted many scientific breakthroughs, including the moon landing, tasers, and nuclear submarines. In his 1874 book The Mysterious Island, Verne writes:
There's a time in everyone's life when they need to become immortalized and reprographed in a full-blown comic spread, complete with halftone dots and speech bubbles—or squares, if you're a square. With our favorite program Photoshop, you can quickly turn any hyperbolic celebrity into a comical farce. Even normal people can become vintage villains with a little pixelation.
If Null Byte had a large Batman-like spotlight calling for help, we would definitely be using it right now. However, we don't, so this is my digital equivalent. Information security is a huge field, far too much for one man to cover adequately, so I need your help!
The very people this humanitarian mission seeks to help are outraged at the portrayal of their problems and lands. In my previous post, I talked about how this new internet sensation is most probably a hoax designed to force us into a new war. Guess what? It was.
Need help getting started on this week's WTFoto Challenge? Look no further! In this tutorial, I will teach you how to create simple chalk symbols and writing in Photoshop. So read through this post and try it out yourself—or I'll tell your cousin what you said when you were drunk that one time. Keep in mind that the steps are similar for other programs, such as GIMP.
Around the world, X-People (yes... there are X-Women, too) are under attack from an intolerant sapiencentric ruling class. Integration without equality is a farce. Autonomy is denied outright. Human prejudice cannot abide a mutant state. Human fear, born to hate, imposes itself on the life of every mutant.
Here at Null Byte, we try to inform and teach the community on ways to navigate the Internet in that special way, as well as staying safe along the trip. That being said, I need some help from all of you! There is a lot of information to cover and I know we have some smart users lurking around. We would love to hear from you.
The agents of empire do not always arrive with warning. When you are besieged, surrounded, and infiltrated, imagination is often your best weapon against the oppressors. If all you have at hand is some duct tape and a disposable camera, fear not, you have the makings of a powerful taser!
Writing secret notes with lemon juice was one of my favorite pastimes as a child. All it took was a small flame to lightly scorch the paper and reveal the hidden message. Now that I'm tall and pay bills, lemon ink just isn't exciting enough anymore. Luckily, we can use another kind of invisible ink to write in fire! By using the saltpeter, we can whip up invisible fire ink in no time.
Last week, we had a great contribution from Christopher Voute, who introduced us all on some of the basic moves in Python. Now, who else will share their knowledge and tackle some of the topics below?
Since the internet is becoming more and more important all the time in regards to overall marketing plans for many companies, it’s imperative that the company website be up to the task of attracting visitors and converting them into customers. There are many methods and techniques to do this and for that reason it’s usually preferable to hire a company that focuses on online marketing or search engine optimization (SEO) to do this work.
This article is all about creating content. This is a very important concept to grasp because the content that you will learn how to create is going to be the basis for how you will advertise and promote your website. Content, meaning articles, videos, and even podcasts. Content is now really the new advertising. Instead of traditional types of advertising and instead of the traditional separation between editorial content and advertising, that has gone the way of the dinosaur.
I recently posted a link to what seemed to be a very useful guide on Lifehacker for creating a TOR button in Chrome. However, when I tried it myself, it did not work. Also, it lacked a warning on the limits of Tor, which I think are important. Therefore, I decided to create an updated and more comprehensive tutorial.
Are you the expert hacker we're looking for? Do you have a great idea for an article on Null Byte? Do you have a passion to write, and more importantly... teach?
If you're hungry, eat now, because this list is probably going to put you off consuming vittles for so long that you'll end up looking like the love child of Nicole Richie and Skeletor. Now that you've been officially warned, help me count down the ten most WTF food items on this beautiful blue marble we call Earth.
Author's Note: Hi there, some of you may know but most of you probably won't. My name is Semeria and I am an author on the rising. I plan to be posting one of my novels on this website for people to read. Comment and let me know what you think and I hope you enjoy the story.
Law enforcement can make a lot of folks cringe. Too often do we hear on the news, and even experience in our own lives, the unjust way that an unacceptable portion of law enforcement treat the very citizens they are supposed to protect. People's rights are violate each and every day by law enforcement, simply because they are timid and uneducated with the laws of society. This dirty trickery shouldn't be played on harmless citizens under any circumstances.
Eventually, we plan on doing some root the box competitions here at Null Byte, but we're still looking for a server to play on. Anyone want to donate one? You won't regret it. Root the box is like 'king of the hill', except you have to hack a server and maintain access. Each server will have numerous known security holes, but until then, let's get back to the regular weekly coding sessions and realistic hacking missions on HackThisSite.
When it comes to webcams these days, most people are using their laptops over desktops. The cameras are centered, integrated, and require no configuring. They're a cinch and usually have great resolution. So, then what do we do with all of those old wired desktop webcams that we've accrued over the years? Even if you still use an external USB one, chances are you're not using it daily, so why not come up with a better use for it?
Lost the product key for your game? If you have to reinstall the game and don't have that key anymore, you're out of luck, especially if you didn't "buy" the game. But never be in fear of losing product keys again with today's Null Byte, where we'll be practicing a little bit of mind-kung fu.
We'd like this to be one of the last HTS mission announcements, at least for now. As soon as Null Byte finds a server to play with (anyone want to donate one?), we are going to start doing root the box competitions, which is like king of the hill, except you have to hack a server and maintain access. Each server will have numerous known security holes. But for now, back to the normal flow of things...
Lock picking is defined by locksmiths as "the art of opening a lock without the key". There's many ways to accomplish this, but I'm specifically interested in using a lock pick set. Since locks vary in shapes and size, it's better to stick with just one kind of lock at first. Most locks are based on fairly similar concepts, so sharing methods across locks is possible.
Technology in computers these days are very favorable to the semi-knowledgeable hacker. We have TOR for anonymity online, we have SSDs to protect and securely delete our data—we can even boot an OS from a thumb drive or SD card. With a little tunneling and MAC spoofing, a decent hacker can easily go undetected and even make it look like someone else did the hack job.
We're aiming for this to be one of the last HTS mission announcements, at least for now. As soon as Null Byte finds a server to play with, we are going to start doing root the box competitions, which is like king of the hill, except you have to hack a server and maintain access. Each server will have numerous known security holes. But, for now, back to the normal flow of things...
The community tore up the first realistic mission last week. You've applied the techniques learned in the basic missions to a real scenario, so I'm pretty content. The realistic missions are where the learning gets intense and where we can apply real knowledge to extremely realistic situations. We will also be continuing the normal Python coding and hacking sessions. These sessions are created to bring our community together, to learn from each other, and grow together. Everyone is welcome, f...
Following the first part in this series on advanced cracking techniques, we are going to go over how we can intelligently crack passwords using the old-fashioned bruteforce method. These unique cracking techniques aren't widely used, because most crackers are Script Kiddies who have no idea what the concepts are behind cracking passwords, thus, word won't get around too quickly.
How did it happen? How did your ultra-secure WPA password on your wireless network get broken into? Well, you might have just found yourself at the mercy of a cracker.
It has been suggested that about 150 million internet users will be affected by today's blackout of Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know what those are, go here and read up on it, and then take action yourself! After you've contacted your Representatives about these bills, you'll probably still need to get some work done today using Wikipedia's English-language site.
