Today's Tidbit: Expensive Hotels Nickel and Dime Their Customers
Expensive hotels are frequented by business travelers who charge everything to their companies, and therefore don't care about the cost of incidentals.
Expensive hotels are frequented by business travelers who charge everything to their companies, and therefore don't care about the cost of incidentals.
If you have a limited mobile data plan on your iPhone, you know how tricky it can be to stay within your given allotment. Large app installs and updates, 4K resolution videos, and photo backups can waste precious data resources in no time. And apps like Apple News, Facebook, Mail, and Netflix eat data like it's candy. But you can nip the problem in the bud by restricting data hogs from your cellular network.
You've probably connected your Android device to dozens of Wi-Fi networks since you've had it, and your phone or tablet remembers each of them. Whether it's a hotspot at home, school, work, the gym, a coffee shop, a relative's apartment — or even from a friend's phone — each time you type in a Wi-Fi password, your Android device saves it for safekeeping and easy access later.
Fireworks are the best part about the Fourth of July and other celebrations, but they can easily cause accidental injuries. It's both safer and more fun to set them off remotely, so we'll hack some standard fireworks with nichrome wire, a relay, and an Arduino to ignite remotely over Wi-Fi using any smartphone or computer.
Fortnite's long awaited arrival on Android has ramped up excitement among gamers who are installing the beta version in astounding numbers. With so many midrange and budget devices running Android, however, it's important to stay on top of your device's performance to ensure smooth and uninterrupted gameplay.
Kali Linux is known as being the de facto penetration-testing Linux distribution but can be a pain to use as an everyday OS — even more of a pain if that means carrying around a second laptop or the constant frustration of using the finicky Wi-Fi on virtual machines. But there's another option: installing a Kali subsystem on your Windows computer as a convenient compromise.
If you've ever connected your iPhone to a computer before, you know iOS prompts you to "Trust" the computer and enter your passcode to confirm. According to Apple, trusted computers can "sync with your iOS device, create backups, and access your device's photos, videos, contacts, and other content." That's a lot of permissions to hand off, especially if the computer's not your main laptop or desktop.
After the success of the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm now has its eyes set towards the future with the arrival of its next-generation SoC, the Snapdragon 845. Debuting alongside the Samsung Galaxy S9, the 845 is now set to take over the market for flagship Android phones in 2018.
Surveying a target's Wi-Fi infrastructure is the first step to understanding the wireless attack surface you have to work with.
An app from the development team at ts-apps has the potential to make your Android device smarter than it's ever been. At first glance, you'd think it's just an ordinary home screen folder—but depending on what you're doing at a given time, the folder can show a completely different set of apps.
Heads up! We've done a new, more thorough review of the best Android file-sharing apps. You can check that out here. Our old file-sharing app roundup can still be viewed below for posterity.
With all of the personal data that's stored on our smartphones, it's of vital importance that we have some sort of lock screen security enabled. One of the Galaxy S5's killer features is obviously the fingerprint scanner. It makes the process of dealing with a secure lock screen a bit easier than typing in a password or PIN.
We live, work, and play in drastically different environments, so it only makes sense that we'd want our Nexus 5 smartphones to automatically adapt to our needs when in certain locales at certain times.
Welcome back, my greenhorn hackers! Continuing with my Wi-Fi hacking series, this article will focus on creating an invisible rogue access point, which is an access point that's not authorized by the information technology staff and may be a significant security vulnerability for any particular firm.
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! As part of my series on Wi-Fi hacking, I want to next look at denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and DoSing a wireless access point (AP). There are a variety of ways to do this, but in this tutorial we'll be sending repeated deauthentication frames to the AP with aircrack-ng's aireplay. Remember, hacking wireless networks isn't all just cracking Wi-Fi passwords! Our Problem Scenario
Android's settings menu is actually pretty daunting. There are options for nearly everything, so in the sea of various menus and submenus, it's easy to overlook important privacy and security settings. On Google's Pixel phones in particular, there are 20 such settings that you should double check.
With an ordinary birthday card, we can introduce a physical device which contains malicious files into someone's home and deceive them into inserting the device into a computer.
Don't be too disappointed if you don't have the spiffy new Kindle Touch, there is an up side. The benefit to owning the older (duller) models is that the firmware remains the same throughought generations, so the hacks retain their usefulness. This has given the modding community for Kindle a bunch of time to flourish, with tons of great code, hacks and homebrew. Today's Null Byte is going to show you how you can root, and then remove the crappy original screensavers that come installed on th...
As with practically any other device, the Samsung Galaxy S3 has its fair share of complaints. Some have workarounds, some can be solved with mods or apps, and some seem to have no fix at all.
Google recently released a new mesh router known as Nest Wifi. The updated and rebranded Google Wifi brought many improvements, such as faster processing power and an increased level of wireless security called WPA3. But while it's not enabled by default, you can still get the new WPA3 security on your original Google Wifi.
When it comes to Hi-Fi music streaming services, Jay-Z's Tidal is one of your only choices. But as you can imagine, true High Fidelity audio requires faster download speeds than your average music service. So the question becomes, how do you listen to Hi-Fi tracks on Tidal when a speedy internet connection isn't available? Offline music is the answer.
Often times when staying at a hotel or anywhere for that matter, you'll whip out your laptop and check the local area for Wi-Fi. I know you've all been in my shoes when you find an unsecured network that appears to be public Wi-Fi belonging to the hotel or airport, and you connect to it. You connect fast and perfectly, only to find that when you open your browser, it says you don't have an account, and are filtered from accessing the web. This is because the owners of the network want to keep...
We've shared a capture-the-flag game for grabbing handshakes and cracking passwords for Wi-Fi, and there are some upcoming CTF games we plan on sharing for other Wi-Fi hacks and even a dead-drop game. While security-minded activities and war games are excellent ways to improve your hacking skills, coding a real video game is also an excellent exercise for improving your programming abilities.
When it comes to sniffing Wi-Fi, Wireshark is cross-platform and capable of capturing vast amounts of data. Making sense of that data is another task entirely. That's where Jupyter Notebook comes in. It can help analyze Wi-Fi packets and determine which networks a particular phone has connected to before, giving us insight into the identity of the owner.
Project Fi, Google's MVNO, is running a new promotion on the latest and greatest from LG. From July 16 until the 29th, whenever you order and activate the LG G7 ThinQ or LG V35 ThinQ, you will receive a $300 service credit. When you do the numbers, that equals a minimum of three free months of service.
While I love Spotify, I don't like it devouring my data plan when streaming music away from a Wi-Fi network. If you have the foresight or time to download Spotify tracks for offline playback later, great. For those of you who like to listen to your music more randomly like I do, based on your current mood, streaming is the only way to go, and there are settings you can tweak to use up less data.
The new iOS 11 was just released by Apple, and you can install it right now. Overall, it's got some great features, but how does it fare battery-wise on your iPhone? And how can you increase daily battery life for more juice and less charging every day?
The internet, as I understand it, is a wonderful, magical place where people congregate to share memes and viral videos. Well, okay... there's a lot more to it than that, but let's just focus in on the good stuff.
We don't know exactly what form 5G cellular technology will take, but it intends to bring faster Wi-Fi-like performance to mobile devices. While that'll provide major advantages to lots of connected technology, PC Magazine notes that it could be what augmented and mixed reality needs to become widely adopted.
Starting in Android 4.3, Google added some code to AOSP that tagged your internet traffic when you were running a mobile hotspot, which made it incredibly easy for carriers to block tethering if you didn't have it included in your plan. But as of Android 6.0, this "tether_dun_required" tag has been removed, which means you no longer have to edit a database file to get tethering up and running.
No one is perfect, and this goes double for software developers. All of the quality assurance testing in the world does nothing when you put a new OS in the hands of everyday users, since we all use our devices in different places and for different reasons. Recently, Cyanogen released their version of Android Lollipop, Cyanogen OS 12, and with it came a whole lot of great features, but some bugs also slipped in.
After I traded in my Samsung Galaxy S5 for an iPhone 5S, the one feature I truly missed was the Smart Remote app. My television remote was broken and the S5 saved me from, you know, actually having to get up and change the channel.
Those of us with girlfriends understand that in order for the relationship to run smoothly, you have to keep your woman happy and let her know that you're thinking of her—even when you're not.
Getting caught using your iPhone at school or work (when you're using it for personal reasons) can be a little bit embarrassing. Even worse, it can be detrimental to how you're perceived by your teacher or boss. But sometimes you just have to beat that next level of Candy Crush, view a risqué photo on Snapchat, or send an important WhatsApp message.
It's becoming more and more apparent that Siri continually drops the ball when it comes to lock screen security. In the past, Siri was exploited in iOS 7.0.2 to send messages without needing a passcode. Then in iOS 7.1.1, Siri was use to bypass the lock screen again to access contacts, make calls, and send emails and texts.
Restoring data is not always the easiest thing to do when you flash a new ROM on Android. Google can back up your contacts and Wi-Fi passwords, and various tools can back up your apps and data, but the rest is usually lost in-between ROM flashes. This leads to a lot of wasted time getting everything back into place, and it'll take a long time before your new ROM feels like "home" again.
Ever use an open hotspot on your Note 3, only to find out that it's severely restricted to what sites you can access? While getting online with free Wi-Fi is great for those who have a limited data plan, when that one site you absolutely need to visit is blocked, you're left frustrated and sent back into the Wi-Fi menu for another access point.
Lock screen apps are a dime a dozen, but every now and then one pops up that defies expectations. We've already covered some good ones for the Samsung Galaxy S4, including Picture Password Lockscreen (which gives you secret unlock gestures), SlideLock (which improves notifications), and TimePIN (which gives you a more clever PIN).
In a era where cyber security is becoming increasingly important, Comcast has decided to use its customers' routers to provide hotspot access to the public. A new program, outlined by Dwight Silverman over on the Houston Chronicle website, seeks to provide Xfinity customers with city-wide Wi-Fi hotspots by using, well...other customers' wireless routers.
I love getting notifications for every email received on my Samsung Galaxy S3 and whenever a download finishes, but there are some alerts I could definitely do without.