With the plethora of programming that we promote at Null Byte, I figured a lot of you newbies that stop by IRC will need a big boost in the right direction to make your dive into programming a lot easier. A hot question that has been thrown around in IRC a lot when making the initial dive is, "How do I write code?". People who do not know much about computers can't understand how code is written. Code that we write here is usually scripted and written in Python, so we will use it as our examp...
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play with us on our free server.
This is Null Byte's fourth part in a series about fully securing our computers (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). In our last Null Byte, we went over how to encrypt an entire operating system to protect our data, however, this doesn't fully protect us. In the case of legal extortion, the government can actually make you give up your cryptographic key to your computer so that they can look through it.
There is a near-infinite amount of ways a computer can be broken into. But that does not mean that there isn't a reason to secure our computers as best as we possibly can. It's like the principles of a secure house. Which are the most secure houses? The ones with locks and advanced alarms, obviously, but not for the reasons people normally think.
"How do I install Arch Linux?" That question was bound to come up eventually. And with me using Arch, it's no coincidence that all of you want to use it as well. Arch is arguably the best Linux distro available. Distros that come close are Gentoo and some aspects of Ubuntu, but Arch is meant for building your OS from the inside out. Arch is built around minimalism, so you won't get anything by default. It doesn't even come with sound!
One of the main reasons I was held back from fully switching over to Linux was the fact that media streaming is nearly impossible. You have two choices in Windows: either you use file sharing with Windows Media Player, or you can just use the Windows Media Center. But both of these softwares are not for Linux or Mac. Microsoft doesn't like to make open source software because they believe in making a profit, instead of allowing others to innovate it.
The UK seems to have become an international hotbed of gamers going wild on society. Last week a British Navy sailor killed his superior officer, which parts of the tabloid media blamed on Grand Theft Auto. Today, a more concretely video game related tale of real life violence comes to us from The Daily Mail.
This Week's Workshop: Music To My Ears The heart of WonderHowTo's Minecraft World is, naturally, “How-To” and so in the spirit of all things tutorial and DIY we will be hosting a weekly workshop showcasing the best and newest tutorials, builds, and inspiring ideas. We hope to inspire creativity and create a place where the community can share ideas and practice skills, right here on our server.
After the launch of Google+ and its ensuing attendant fanfare and rave reviews, Facebook seemed to undergo an identity crisis. On July 6th, Facebook failed to make waves with its "awesome" announcement - the new group chat and video chat features felt lame in comparison to the Google+ hangout and huddle features. Facebook also faced ongoing criticism for its perceived lack of privacy controls. Over on Quora, workers confirmed a lockdown of sorts at Facebook, for employees to work harder on fe...
These days, I keep multiple browsers open so I can keep track of all my work and personal items. As a staff member of WonderHowTo, a lot of my work is done through our Google Account, which is separate from my personal Google Account.
Facebook games are ostensibly all about connecting their players. Yet, in many ways they exist on an isolated island. That's one of the reasons traditional gamers and game franchises have avoided Facebook in the past. And all of the breakout hits so far on Facebook have been cheap PC game ripoffs from the 90s, like FarmVille and ports of other popular casual games.
Outside the realm of politics, where opposing sides are quite passionate and quite disagreeable, there are few areas in our society quite as divisive as Twitter. People who like Twitter love Twitter and are relentless in trying to co-opt the people they know into joining (this is both altruistic and an unsubtle attempt to boost followers).
So you've added Google insiders, celebrities, and authors to your circles, but you want to know who you can reach out to for help when it comes to Google overall. Luckily for you, there seems to be a Community Manager for almost every Google product. If you've got an issue with your Google Account, just contact them via their Google+ profile!
Much of the press around the launch of Google+ has pitted it squarely against Facebook. This was highlighted painfully for Facebook with their (misguidedly dubbed) "awesome" announcements yesterday. Their launch of a new design, video calling, and group chat might have been exciting, had not Google announced its Hangout feature for Google+ a week earlier (and by the way, introduced their own 1-on-1 video calling inside of Gmail way back in 2008). Hangouts took video calling a step further and...
Google recently unveiled the start of their new social network Google+, which is set to compete with Facebook and fix the awkward, broken aspects on online sharing they claim exist. It's currently only open to a limited number of Googlers during its "field trial," and if you weren't one of the lucky ones given an invitation, you can still sign up to be notified when Google+ is available in your area. You can also stay up to date on its Twitter page, GooglePlus.
When the iPad 2 was released earlier this month, as to be expected there was a whole lotta buzz. And for good reason—while the the newest version shares the same price tag as the old, it boasts some significant new features. In case you missed it, here's a quick overview:
Hello wizards! Welcome to The Wizard's Spiral! This new blog is about Wizard101. Feel free to post about anything in the Forums, ranging from equipment to Helephants, from castles to Mooshu. If you have any questions or technical problems, go to the forums and open a new thread. Me or any other wizard will be there right away to help you. For those of you who are wondering what Wizard101 is, you have come to the right place. Wizard101 is an MMORPG game that is all about wizards and magic. Whe...
Today I was the only admin online at like 2:30 to 3:45. I had to deal with 27 people....asking me to World Edit all of their builds, and I explained how to apply online 3 different ways to 1 person...it was horrible. The other people who were online with me were getting super upset at this Guests. They were rude, and not able to understand super simple things.
In the last article, we left off with the Tor network and its hidden services. As I mentioned, Tor is not the only option in the game, and I want to offer a general introduction to I2P.
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.
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?
WonderHowTo is made up of niche communities called Worlds. If you've yet to join one (or create your own), get a taste below of what's going on in the community. Check in every Wednesday for a roundup of new activities and projects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a nasty little Null Byte. An open redirect vulnerability was found in both Facebook and Google that could allow hackers to steal user credentials via phishing. This also potentially allows redirects to malicious sites that exploit other vulnerabilities in your OS or browser. This could even get your computer flooded with spam, and these holes have been known about for over a month.
I'm pretty sure that it's a universal dream for everyone in the world to retire early. Who wants to to be stuck with the rest of the country and retire when you're almost 70 years old? You heard me right, 70! Most people can't go out and do the things they love to do by the time they're 70, unless they've been practicing good health and exercise their entire life.
VNC is a great protocol that you can use on Windows and Linux machines to remotely control computers. This is useful if you need to control your computer when away from home, help your grandma check her email, or help a client with a disk cleanup. VNC is secure in the sense that it requires authentication in order to make the connection, but after that, the data is sent over the internet unencrypted. This means that an attacker could sniff your traffic and snoop everything that's going on. Th...
Only so much data can be passed through the network and to your computer's networking interfaces. This is limited by the amount of bandwidth you have. The more bandwidth you have, the faster your network connections will be. Not only this, but your transfers will be more parallel and distributed so that all of your speed isn't taken up by one transfer. When all of your bandwidth is sapped and unable to be used, this is called a denial of service, or a DOS.
If you've ever heard software piracy terminology being discussed, I'm sure the term KeyGens came up. KeyGens is short for key generator, which is a program that exploits algorithmic faults in software by generating software license keys that appear to be genuine. Normally used as a technique to protect the source code software and prevent piracy, a key generator exploits the key algorithm to effectively nullify the need for any software licenses. For example, we must try to find patterns in t...
If you've ever wondered how software pirates can take software and crack it time and time again, even with security in place, this small series is for you. Even with today's most advanced methods of defeating piracy in place, it is still relatively easy to crack almost any program in the world. This is mainly due to computer processes' ability to be completely manipulated by an assembly debugger. Using this, you can completely bypass the registration process by making it skip the application'...
Zynga just added another game to their Zynga with Friends series called Scramble with Friends. If you've ever played Boggle, it's basically the same thing, but is dedicated to playing your buddies just like Words with Friends or Hanging with Friends.
With the purchase of my latest computer, installing Linux turned into a nightmare from Hell. The graphics drivers are probably the biggest issue that anyone with a newer computer will run into when installing Linux. AMD and NVIDIA are the dominant ones on the market, both of which have awful support.
Paying for web hosting isn't ideal in most situations. If you have your own website, hosting it yourself is very acceptable and easy to do, assuming your internet bandwidth permits. Most people want to run a personal site, nothing crazy, so hosting from home on low-bandwidth internet is actually a better solution in most cases.
Shortening URLs has become a necessity in this age of Twitter and limited-character status updates. It not only allows us to cram more words into our oh-so-important Twitter statuses, but it also helps us with a few other things.
Having an SSH or Secure SHell to tunnel your traffic through is something we have talked about many times at Null Byte. As we know, it allows us to securely route and encrypt our traffic through a remote server, effectively anonymizing us and protecting our traffic from all forms of analysis—simultaneously. We have gone over how to make a home SSH tunnel. However, the question has come up, "How can I get an SSH tunnel to somewhere other than my computer?" This would be useful in a situation w...
Flash memory can be a tad unpredictable at times. I have had 4 flash drives die out on me over the last few years, and they usually die without warning. When a flash memory based device dies, the data is likely impossible to recover. Adversely on an HDD, or Hard Drive Disk, even if the disk dies out, someone will probably be able to fix it and get it back to working order—at least long enough for you to back up your data. Hard drives are a bit more forgiving. As you can guess, due to the unpr...
