It's a breeze to send videos and music from your phone straight to your TV with an Apple TV or Chromecast, but these devices don't support all file types. While MP4 videos and MP3 music files are the norm these days, I still have a ton of AVI and FLV files that I'd like to watch on a big screen.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! Recently, Microsoft released a new patch (September 8, 2015) to close another vulnerability in their Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 operating systems. The vulnerability in question (MS15-100) enabled an attacker to gain remote access to any of these systems using a well-crafted Media Center link (MCL) file.
Had so much fun filming underwater fish releases that I now enjoy filming them rather than fishing for them. You can view my latest (make believe) adventure on YouTube. I have to admit that adding the right music really makes a difference.
Eventually, your voicemail inbox on your iPhone will get full, and you'll have to delete some messages in order to make way for new ones. If all the voicemails you currently have are super important, you're not going to want to delete them before saving them first, of course. Luckily, this is a super simple task, and you can even forward them to someone else if needed.
Newer gaming systems like the PlayStation 4 have a nice, subtle feature that goes a long way towards helping create a more immersive experience. Any time you're on the main menu or home screen, an ambient background music track is playing, which adds an aural appeal to an experience that would otherwise be all about the visuals.
Google Now is great for looking up movie times or finding your parking spot, but if you need to track down a file you downloaded, you're relegated to using a file explorer and, depending on your organizational skills, this can either be extremely easy or a huge pain in the ass. Unfortunately I land in the latter category, which is why I started using Fast Search by developer Mohamad Amin.
Welcome back, my hacker novitiates! In an earlier Linux Basics tutorial, I had demonstrated the basics of the Apache web server. Since Apache is the world's most widely used web server on the Internet (as of July 2015, Apache was 38%, IIS was 26%, and Nginx is 15%), the more you know about it and understand it, the more success you are likely to have hacking it.
MagicTree is often the go-to tool for data collection and reporting for many pentesters. It organizes data in nodes in a tree-structure which is very efficient at managing host and network data. Reports can be completely customized to meet the user's needs. Also, MagicTree allows you to import XML data and has XSLT transforms for Nessus, Nmap, OpenVas, Burp, Nikto. MagicTree comes pre-installed in Kali.
For all of the flak that Windows 8 received from desktop users, it certainly had some interesting and unique features. For instance, the "Charms" bar allowed you to easily access several key menus by simply hovering your mouse pointer in the top- or bottom-right corner of the screen.
Malware often disguises itself inside of seemingly non-malicious files, such as installer packages, where it can then gain root access to your computer to track activity or steal your information.
Disclaimer: All information in this tutorial is for entertainment and educational purposes ONLY. You pesky teenagers.
Apple just showed off iOS 9 and its new features at WWDC 2015, including multitasking support for iPads (finally!), a new Low Power Mode to save battery, local area search and transit directions in Maps, a highly improved "Proactive" Siri, a better Spotlight search, new apps, and so much more.
Welcome back, my aspiring hackers! In many of my earlier tutorials, I mentioned the complementary nature of hacking and forensics. Both disciplines, hacking and forensics, benefit from a knowledge of the other. In many cases, both disciplines will use the same tool. In this tutorial, we will use another tool that can be used in either discipline—Sysinternals—a suite of tools developed by Mark Russinovich.
Performance boosters generally get a bad rap, but that doesn't mean they should all be dismissed—particularly when they're as well thought out as the latest work from developer Danijel Markov. After recognizing a few inefficiencies in the way Android handles memory management and other system-level functions, he created a flashable ZIP that will apply many fixes in one fell swoop.
Sideloading apps on Android is incredibly easy—you just have to enable "Unknown sources" in your device's Security settings, then you're free to run an APK installer file to get the app installed.
This requires a dry hen's egg at room temperature. Hold an egg near a candle flame to cover it with soot. It will need to be completely covered. This is tricky, because if the egg is a tiny bit damp the soot will easily flake off on to your fingers as you turn the egg. Once the egg has a nice black sooty coating, gently immerse it in a bowl of water.
When Google announced its new Android TV platform, one of the features they advertised was a home screen that automatically reorganized your apps based on how frequently you used them. Unfortunately, this feature either didn't make the cut, or is still under development, since the home screen on the Nexus Player always remains static.
Most custom ROMs are built from the freely-available source code of AOSP, so they share a lot of common ground with stock Android. The difference, though, is the fact that Google adds many minor tweaks and finishing touches to AOSP while creating the version of Android that ultimately comes pre-installed on Nexus devices.
The AMOLED display on the Nexus 6 wastes no power to show black pixels. This is because pixels on such a screen emit their own light, and black can be easily achieved by simply not lighting any given pixel.
The majority of Android web browsers carry a "desktop mode" feature that makes mobile websites look like normal computer versions. Mobile versions are designed to work faster and more efficiently on smartphones, but sometimes the desktop version looks better on large displays or has additional features not included in the mobile one.
Battery life is extremely unpredictable on an Android. Finding the right ROM and kernel combo can make or break having the kind of battery that will last you all day long. Even if you do find the perfect pair, you then have to worry about apps, widgets, and other processes constantly waking your phone and draining your juice. While your media scanner isn't the biggest battery hog out there, it can definitely take a chunk out of it.
While Android devices made by HTC, Samsung, and others have long utilized IR (infrared) blasters to offer remote control functionality, Apple has still yet to embrace it on iPhones.
Welcome back, my fledgling hackers! Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, we can only get a command shell on our target system. For instance, with Metasploit, it's not always possible to get the all powerful Meterpreter on our target system. In other cases, we may be able to connect to a command shell via Netcat or Cryptcat.
Back in March, Samsung partnered with Slacker Radio to create a streaming service called Milk Music. For those of us who don't own a Galaxy device, this news was a non-starter, as it was exclusive to Samsung's flagship line of phones and tablets.
Apple prides itself on simplicity, but the company makes downloading video and music files onto your iPad or iPhone an overly complicated process, requiring iTunes and/or iCloud.
It wasn't too long ago that I showed you how to unlock the LG G3 bootloader and install TWRP, and while the process was extremely easy, the custom recovery can look a little intimidating to new users. Even long-time users who know how to navigate it find it boring to look at, as TWRP has had the same basic aesthetics since its creation.
While LG G3 users have been patiently waiting, developer the cubed and his Codefire team have been diligently working on a successful unlock method for the heavily locked-down bootloader. Now it's finally here, and the unlocking method is extremely easy to do—and it works for all G3 variants.
If you've ever noticed that the stock launcher on an Android device seems to just feel faster than any third-party home screen replacement app, this is not a placebo effect. Most manufacturers, Samsung included, force their stock launchers to reside permanently in your phone's memory, thus reducing the risk of redraws.
Welcome back, my novice hackers! Before we try to attack a website, it's worthwhile understanding the structure, directories, and files that the website uses. In this way, we can begin to map an attack strategy that will be most effective.
With the release of the ARChon Runtime, many Android apps can now be run within the Chrome web browser. Minor changes must be made to existing Android APK files before they can be installed on Chrome, so the process isn't exactly as easy as pasting an Android app into a folder on your computer.
With recent security breaches in the news, there is no better time than the present to make sure you know exactly what's happening on your device.
If you've been testing out the Mac OS X Yosemite preview, you already know that Mac OS X 10.10 has a ton of cool under-the-hood tweaks and optimizations. One of the most noticeable changes for me has to be the new flatter look and "Dark Mode," which changes most UI elements from silver to black, making it easier to use your Mac in low-light conditions.
Apple released the iOS 8 Gold Master build to developers shortly after their WWDC event ended on Sept. 9th, which is jam-packed with tons of new features for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. The public version comes out on Sept. 17th, but if you can't wait to test out iOS 8, you can get it right now.
What if the code you are trying to reverse engineer is obfuscated or somehow corrupted? What if no way is left? Here comes what I like to call (wrongly and ironically) the "brute force of reverse engineering".
As a regular Mac OS X user, I have a love/hate relationship with the "Open With" contextual menu. Sometimes, it has just what I need. Other times, it's often packed with unnecessary or duplicate items, or missing the app I want to open the file up with the most.
Though they share the same name, the HTC One and OnePlus One have completely different sound quality. HTC had put a lot of time and effort into fine-tuning their BoomSound technology, while OnePlus is still fairly new to the game, with brand recognition being a much greater objective than awesome speakers.
Android's permissions system is simple, transparent, and straightforward. When installing an app, you get a chance to review all of the permissions that the app has requested. These can range from accessing your location data to holding a "wakelock" in order to prevent your phone from entering sleep mode. But your only choice in this matter is to accept all requested permissions, or not install the app.
The Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 (2013 edition) boast beautiful 1080p screens that are capable of displaying images and videos in ultra-sharp high definition. But for some strange reason, the YouTube app only allows for streaming of 720p content on these devices. It's not a limitation of YouTube for Android, since other devices support 1080p playback out of the box, and some, like the LG G3, even support higher resolutions.
This is a video that I created for teaching you(the viewer) how to batch unrar, unzip, or extract a lot of files at a time but I do it in rap form. I know it sounds weird but I still hope you like it.
The build.prop file in an Android device is home to many system-level values and settings. Everything from screen density to video recording quality is covered in this file, and people have been editing these entries to get new functionality and better performance since Android has existed.
