This tutorial will show how to use GPG and the FireGPG plug-in to encrypt and decrypt messages in Gmail. GPG is an open source implementation of OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy) , a public-key-encryption system. With public key encryption you don?t have to give away the secret key that decrypts data for people to be able to send you messages. All senders need is the public key which can only be used to encrypt, this way the secret key never has to be sent across unsecured channels. Encrypt Gmail...
Ever hear of Spokeo? No, it's not a city in Washington state. It's a website called Spokeo.com, and it marks the complete end of privacy on the internet. If your phone number and address has been posted in a phone book, it's on there. If you own a house, chances are there's a picture of it. If you have a Facebook profile, it's probably listed.
"Connect via Facebook" — these words are coated on over a million websites nowadays, but Facebook Connect poses a risk of leaking personally identifiable information to those third parties. If you're not convinced Facebook Connect is safe, then turn off the flow of personal data to those websites!
National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion "transactions" — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Dir...
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...
More than 100 missions targeted at Earth's moon have been launched by space explorers since the late-1950s. NASA landed a total of 12 men on the lunar surface, collecting more than 800 pounds of moon rocks and lunar soil samples. But still, the moon remains a mystery, especially its formation. NASA's new mission aims to find out exactly how the moon came to be with the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, part of NASA's Discovery Program.
Anonymity is something that doesn't exist today. Everything you do in the world is tracked, from the purchases you make to surfing the internet—even taking pictures on your iPhone. Everything you have ever said and done on the internet is still there—somewhere. This is called caching. For example, when a site is down, you can view its cached page on Google.
Have you guys seen this yet? Ben Purdy used projection mapping to create a "real life" Minecraft block. If you don't know what projection mapping is, it works like this:
It's only been a few weeks, and already there are a lot of misconceptions and myths floating around Google+. Let's take a deep breath, and tackle some of the more prominent ones.
There are a few different types of Apple iPhone and iPad users: general household users who largely consume media—e.g. surfing the web, watching movies, listening to music. Other iPhone and iPad owners use their device(s) to produce stuff—written documents, edited movies, blog posts, music tracks, and the like. And then there are those who are very mobile with their devices. They commute to and from work on a regular basis with their iPhone or iPad. Some users may travel a lot on business, or...
Want to see which country or city uses Google the most? Try Google's new eye-stimulating tool, Search Globe.
By now, you probably know that your iPhone secretly tracks and stores the locations you've visited in a backup folder on your computer's hard drive. The files are unencrypted, which means anyone with access to your computer or device can retrieve the information, which is downright scary. But Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan are making it fun with their iPhone Tracker application, which lets you map out everywhere you've been with your smartphone.
Have you ever left your computer one all night? Maybe downloading something, or just out of habit? Well there is a way you can turn that unused CPU usage in to cold hard cash: Distributed Computing.
About two months ago, the massive Gawker Media hack was a wake up call for many web denizens on the importance of proper password security. Data analyzed by the Wall Street Journal revealed the three most popular passwords recovered from the hack were downright idiotic—123456, password, and 12345678. If past events weren't motivation enough for crafting a strong password, then maybe a racy 8-bit stripper is. Naked Password is a jQuery plugin by Platform45 that rewards you with an accelerating...
Norwegian designers Timo Armall, Jørn Knutsen, and Einar Sneve Martinussen visually capture invisible WiFi signals by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. The trio set up a four-meter long WiFi-detecting rod with 80 LED bulbs to depict cross-sections through the WiFi networks of various Oslo neighborhoods. Armall says:
By John Timmer, Ars Technica How much information can the world transmit, process, and store? Estimating this sort of thing can be a nightmare, but the task can provide valuable information on trends that are changing our computing and broadcast infrastructure. So a pair of researchers have taken the job upon themselves and tracked the changes in 60 different analog and digital technologies, from newsprint to cellular data, for a period of over 20 years.
Ever wonder what you look like to someone else as you walk, talk? How it looks from above, behind, or to the side? Seeing yourself in a video flattens the experience into two dimensions, but this wireless camera rig experiment from Instructables member BigRedRocket brings it into the third dimension:
What if everything in life was controlled by augmented reality? Keiichi Matsuda imagines: "The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
100% functional LEGO ATM by Ronald McCrae. This bonafide brick bank performs the following functions:
Remember, in the Terminator movies, when Arnold's field of vision is superimposed with all sorts of data? Sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge also described electronic contact lenses, technology that "projects" information right before the eyes.
Don't worry, the robot apocalypse is not upon us...yet. Wired reports it may be closer than you think:
Are Twitter and Facebook in trouble with the advent of Google's brand new social networking tool, Google Buzz?
In this Dreamweaver 8 video tutorial you will learn how to display records by extracting info from a database. Learn how to create a data connection, create a query, work with recordset, display items, and use repeat regions. Note: To use this tutorial you need XAMPP and make sure to hit "play tutorial" in the top left corner of the video to start the video. There is no sound, so you'll need to watch the pop-up directions. Display records in Dreamweaver 8.
In an effort to prevent drones from being hacked, DARPA has been developing an "unhackable system," and seems to think they're almost there. The development team "proved" mathematically that their kernel was unhackable, and they hope to use it for more than just drones (power grids, cars, phones, pacemakers, etc.).
Common programming blunders can be your best friend when trying to craft your own exploits. If you spend a little time reading what some of these common blunders are, they can uncover potential attack vectors or just show you the weird ways in which computers can store and recall data or access system resources.
FBI has taken down a notorious hacking forum called "darkode" where cyber criminals bought, sold and traded hacked databases, stolen bank accounts, and malicious software that steal information from other computer systems and helped each other to infiltrate other computers. The FBI called the site one of the most serious threats to data security in the world. criminal charges has been filed against 12 individuals who were associated with the forum and the investigation is still ongoing, more ...
Lorrie Faith Cranor: What’s wrong with your pa$$w0rd? | Talk Video | TED.com.
For the month of April, Android maintained it's edge over Apple's iOS platform, 52.5% versus 41.4%, with Blackberry, Microsoft, and Symbian rounding out the top five (2.5%, 3.3%, and 0.2%, respectively). Due to the vast number of OEMs that manufacture Android smartphones, Apple does have a solid lead in the device market, with a dominant 41.4% market share, with Samsung, LG, Motorola, and HTC rounding out the top five (27.7%, 6.5%, 6.3%, and 5.3%, respectively). The research, compiled by comS...
Starting today, T-Mobile has begun rolling out the Android 4.4.2 KitKat update to their Galaxy S4s. The roughly 390MB update brings the standard KitKat fare to your GS4, including:
All you Sprint customers still rocking the HTC EVO 4G LTE got some good news last night. Per Martin Fichter, a US Vice President at HTC, the once flagship Sprint device has been issued a final update, taking the device from Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to Android 4.3 (Jellybean). While not the latest Android version, this update also carries the upgrade to Sense 5. As the company stated in their Reddit AMA, HTC will continue to update their flagship devices to the latest Android versions ...
QR Code is a 2D barcode symbology capable of encoding all types of data, such as numeric, alphabetic characters, Kanji, binary, text, url etc. To build a qr code generator in Microsoft Visual Studio, we can use a qr code generator .NET DLL by Avapose.com and follow these steps:
Hello! I am working on merging two databases. The first has 1,500 contacts - just first name, last name, and company. The second has 5,000+, with first, last, company and email. I want to search the 5,000 email list, if the name appears on the 1500 list, I want to copy the email address from the 5,000 list.
As discussed in a previous tidbit, people are over-confident in their abilities for many reasons. Here's an example...
Two former high-ranking officials at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a federal bureaucracy that collects data and intelligence on foreign communications for national security purposes, have come forward with allegations that the NSA actively monitors Americans as well. According to testimonies from both Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior official, and Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA senior analyst, the agency actively monitors and collects intelligence on every single American as part of a m...
You know it's crazy out there when governments start blocking social websites like Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube. But that's what happened in Egypt, when tens of thousands of anti-government protesters took to the streets on Tuesday (January 25th) in hopes of ending President Hosni Mubarak's 30 years of authoritarian power.
Though under a lot of the average consumer's radar, the CISPA is now making rounds again with a coalition of advocacy rights groups. The act, known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, forces companies to ignore existing privacy laws and share information with the Federal Government. This short article will bring you up to date on this bill. The CISPA is another bill 'designed' to help prevent thefts and prevent them in cyberspace. But again, like all the previous bill before...
In this article, I'll show you how to create a simplistic AES python based text encryptor. You'll need python 2.7 and PyCrypto (found here). The code is fairly simple, a user enters an encryption key (which basically tells the program how to scramble the text, using an algorithm), then the text to be encrypted. The program takes the key and text and inputs it into the "cryptograph" or code-based algorithm from PyCrypto. PyCrypto can use 16, 24, or 36 character encryption keys, but for the sak...
When your computer first connects to a nework, it sends out a request on the network to lease an IP from the router. The router then leases your computer an unused IP address, which is used as a unique routing address for sending traffic that is meant for you, to you. As everything tends to, this method has its flaws.
This is the Windows OS counterpart to my tutorial on how to burn the new XDG3 formatted games on Xbox 360. Microsoft invented a new disc format system to trump piracy, it's called XDG3. XDG3's standard is to burn a whole extra gigabyte of data to the disc, to allow more content, but more importantly for stopping piracy. This extra gigabyte of data makes it impossible to burn or rip a game the traditional way. So how on earth can we burn our fully-legal back-ups that we should rightfully be ab...
