Experiment Involves Search Results

How To: Reverse Check a Phone Number

Prank Calls, Masked NumbersWho is calling your phone or your child's? Pranksters use a lot of tricks to make sure they can get on your nerves. Being able to trace prank calls is important because you're not going to learn much from your Caller ID, since most prank callers use an unlisted number - such as, a cell phone number. Many also use special code *67 to mask the number so your Caller ID will show "Blocked Number" or "Private Number". There are a lot of mild cases of so-called phone bull...

How To: Enjoy New Year's Eve Fireworks Anywhere & Anyway Possible

For most people, New Year's Eve means watching the ball drop in Times Square. It means celebrating the New Year with friends and family. Countdown parties, clocks, confetti... passing out before the clock strikes midnight because you drank too much. But there's one more thing, and it's something we usually only see one other time each year— fireworks.

News: Comics, Why Aren't You Reading Them?

Well, why aren't you? They're all the rage in pop culture right now, what with The Avengers blowing away audiences and the finale to the Batman trilogy coming out soon. Not to mention that Marvel is remaking Spider-Man! The original is only like, what, less than ten years old? Jeez. Now, I know what you're saying, "But, Henry! Comics are for nerds! We're waaaay cooler than that!"

Community Contest: Code the Best Hacking Tool, Win Bragging Rights

Here's something fun for the Null Byte community to do—a coding competition! This week, I wanted to get everyone involved by offering you all a nice library of possible program types to choose from and try to code. At the end of this competition, all of the submitted programs will be reviewed by the community and myself. The coder that receives the most votes will be dubbed THE BEST.

News: Local Politicians in the Los Angeles area.

Representative Henry A. Waxman is in charge of California’s 30th Congressional district. He is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ever since he began his career in the government business, he has been involved with health and environmental issues. He represents cities such as Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu, Westlake Village and West Hollywood, as well as such areas of Los Angeles as Beverly-Fairfax, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Beverl...

News: Students Exploring the Branches of Government

Our class had been assigned interviews with political representatives from different branches. In these interviews we asked questions that we had generated about their career position, advice to young activists, our government system, getting involved, and their opinion on certain laws. Here are the results from the two interviews that were done.

How To: Access Wikipedia During Today's SOPA Blackout

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.

Community Byte: Hack Our IRC Bot to Issue Commands

Last week's Community Byte we got off to a great start! We had a few people build our IRC bot, and all went well. We had some great contributers, ideas, and people willing to learn. So, needless to say, we will be having another. Let's try to get a few more people involved this time!

How To: How Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks Sneak into Unprotected Websites (Plus: How to Block Them)

XSS stands for cross-site scripting, which is a form of web-based exploitation that uses client-side vulnerabilities in a web page to execute malicious JavaScript codes. JavaScript is referred to as "cross-site" because it usually involves an external website containing the malicious code. That code is most commonly used to steal cookies with a website that the attacker created and hosted on another server. The cookies can then be used to escalate privileges and gain root access to someone's ...

News: Iconic Indie Game Publisher Interplay Struggles to Make a Comeback

For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...

League of Legends: Dominion Coming Soon

If you’re unfamiliar with League of Legends, you’re either not into PC gaming or you haven’t spent much time on the internet. Riot Games officially released League almost two years ago, and since then it’s become a huge hit. In fact, the Santa Monica based company recently announced that the DOTA inspired game has 15 million registered users, 4 million unique logins each month, and 500,000 people playing the game at any given moment.

News: Free Protein Folding Game Cracks HIV Molecule Riddle

Foldit is definitely a niche game. The sole gameplay mechanic is attempting to fold complex proteins into smaller and more efficient shapes following the rules of molecular physics and biology. Points are awarded based on how small one can make the protein. Online leaderboards track players' relative progress and allows them to view and manipulate other players' completed designs. It's original, certainly, but no developer is going to ship a million units of a game about molecular-level prote...

News: Dota 2 Gamers Compete in Unprecedented $1,000,000 Tournament

Most indie game developers will never see a million dollars in their bank accounts, and I certainly doubt that Eul, the anonymous developer responsible for the original version of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), expected to. But now even the fans can earn a little green. Some lucky and talented DotA players are about to win $1,000,000 for playing the unreleased sequel to the free unsupported Warcraft III mod from 2003.

News: Will Games Ruin Google+ Like They Ruined Facebook?

Last week, Google+ took a crucial step towards becoming exactly like Facebook. As of now, there are games available for download within the service, most notably Angry Birds, which is already available on at least one of the devices owned by everyone in America today. Some of the other popular games include Bejeweled Blitz and Zynga Poker, and out of all of the available titles, all come from four companies that have come to form the four-headed dragon of U.S. casual gaming: EA, Zynga, PopCap...

TVs Are for Old People: A Guide to Handheld Consoles

Advancements in technology usually lead to the miniaturization of old technologies, and video games are no exception. Since at least 1990, game hardware manufacturers and enterprising DIY electronics enthusiasts have poured their efforts into making full-size video game consoles smaller, even handheld. And for good reason—who would have ever played a black and white Game Boy if they could have had an actual NES in their pocket?

News: Man Immortalizes Dead Fiancée in Virtual World

Death is tough for the living, and those who mourn do all sorts of odd things to cope with it. Some keep mementos, some build towering statues, others create memorial paintings or write sad songs, all of which are healthy in moderation. Honoring the dead has been around for so long, it's part of what makes us human. Recently, the practice of memorializing the dead has spread from the arts, religion, and ceremonial burial to video games.

News: Has SimCity Been Destroyed for Good?

Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...

News: Truck Driver Reverse Engineers Atom Bomb, Rebuilds Little Boy

You're walking down the street, minding your own business. Then you see it—a large, bright fireball in the near distance. A tremendous heat wave speeds towards you at one thousand miles an hour, and before you can think, before you can even blink, the extremely heated wind pushes right through you. Your skin melts, your eyes liquefy—your face disappears into the wind. Before you know it, your pancreas collide with what’s left of the person next to you, your duodenum is dissolving faster than ...

News: COLLISION BLAST – MOTOR GUARD MAGNA-SPOT CONTEST

ATTENTION COLLISION REPAIR INDUSTRYHave you ever put your stud in your stud gun to repair a dent and the stud falls out before it reaches the panel? Sure it has, it has happened to all of us. However, the new Magna-Spot eliminates this problem with their exclusive (MPS), which secures the pins in the electrode. You can read the press release below to learn more of the benefits.ENTER AND WIN THE NEW MAGNA-SPOT STUD GUNDetails to this contest are going to be revealed in layers as follows:

Surviving the Stress: 5 Tips for Avoiding the Morgue

So, at this time of the year, everyone seems to be going through a lot of stress - and by “everyone,” I mean, “anyone who has any contact with people who are in schools of any kind.” Still, stress can hit you at any time of the year, whether it’s right before Christmas, or when you’ve let all those little chores pile up, or when omigod all those bills are due tomorrow. When you feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions, it’s easy to want to murder everyone or plan an elaborate esc...

How To: Read Guitar Tab

Guitar Essentials My friends and I would secretly scribble tab in the darkly lit practice rooms in our university even though we were educated musicians. So, being able to read tablature, or tab, is essential for beginning guitarists.

How To: Make a Helmet Cam (DSLR)

I'm in the middle of a project right now that uses POV for every shot. One of these shots involves a person swinging a golf club. A normal steadi-cam doesn't work very well for this, so I thought it might be easier to just build a helmet cam. Here's how I did it:

News: A Way Out of the Overload

A Way Out of the Overload How do we simplify? There's a welter of information, advice, techniques, schools and every imaginable video tape available on the market to answer that question for you. In making a selection from this movable feast you'd want to take into account the background and credentials of the person offering you a way out of the overload. That's assuming you didn't just throw up your hands in exasperation and walk away from the task entirely.