Just a couple Saturday's ago, we were blessed with the Supermoon, where the moon was at perigee with our planet, creating a larger than usual Moon for us here on Earth. Now, we've got another spectacular show in the skies coming up, only this one isn't at night. There will be an annular solar eclipse on Sunday, May 20th!
You're probably already impressed at some of the photos amateur astrophotographers can capture with their 16-megapixel digital cameras. I know I am. That's why I'm beefing up my camera skills, so I can also take some amazing pictures of our skies above. But if you can take photos this good with a 16-megapixel camera, imagine what you could do with something a little bigger, say, 3.2 billion pixels! That's a whopping 200 times more pixels!
We've talked about the deep web before, but we never really covered the details of what's out there. It occurred to me that a nice list of resources would be very helpful to all of you anons out there. Think of this like a helpful brochure to the hidden web.
If you've ever been inside of a real laboratory, you probably noticed how expensive the equipment is. You'd never be able to afford even just one of those ultra high-tech machines required to splice genes or split atoms. Even the lesser machines can be prohibitively costly, including a stir plate.
"The suspect is based out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. He has been identified as a staff sergeant in the Stryker brigade who was taking part in a village stability operation in Afghanistan. He is a 38-year-old married father of two on his first deployment to Afghanistan after three previous deployments in Iraq.", reads an article from MSNBC.
Industrial espionage, social engineering and no-tech hacking are all very real and there are simple precautions that you can take to protect yourself, which this article will discuss. Whether you are a high-profile businessman or a housewife (or husband), keeping information you want to keep private, private, should be important to you.
Ivy League schools aren't just places for people to row and sip their drinks out of glasses normal people would never use (i.e. snifters). They also the place for trolling on a grand scale. Just take a look at these Trolls de la Resistance!
In this article, I'll be showing you how to make a simple yet effective static electricity generator. Basically, this device allows you to carry a constant static charge on your body and discharge it on anything grounded or of opposite polarity. The electricity generated is around 8-10 kV, at a very low current. The shock is enough to startle your friends, just like a static shock from a trampoline or carpeted room. You'll need a little experience in soldering and circuit design to build the ...
Last week's social engineering phone calls were a blast. We made some friends, and even some enemies. We scored cheap food for some buddies, made some phone bills disappear, and even got a few people some free pizzas. So overall, it was a very successful night. In light of its success, I figured we'd all do another one!
Does this video prove that otherworldly intelligent life has visited Earth? No. It does not prove anything other than there are designs ‘etched’ onto the surface of a field. Does the video immediately above prove that otherworldly intelligent life hasn’t visited Earth? Yeah, you saw it coming; no, it proves nothing more than humans are able to ‘etch’ designs in a field of grain.
How many Facebook friends do you have? The average person on Facebook has around 140 friends while some hit the ridiculous Facebook friend limit of 5,000. Facebook states that its services are for people you know in person. I don't think anyone has 5,000 friends in person, do you? Personally, I don't even think Megan Fox has 5,000 friends in person, so how could any regular person have that many? But that's beside the point.
Dealing With Stress
There was a huge ban wave recently on Xbox Live. In the unfortunate event that you decided to do something against Microsoft policy, and have consequently gotten yourself banned from Xbox Live, you may have come to the realization that doing whatever got you banned from Xbox Live in the first place was not worth the risk.
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.
Null Byte is looking for forum moderators! Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, basic mission 9. This mission delves a little further into Unix commands and remote directory traversal (which is just a fancy term for going through folders blindly).
We love tearing apart security here at Null Byte. Several years back, upon returning items to Wal-Mart due to a malfunction, I noticed something very peculiar about the way their overall procedure goes. I brought the item up to the desk, and the woman asked if it didn't work, which I responded affirmatively. Without a moment's notice, she takes it right off to the defective items area and asks if I would like cash or store credit.
Scrabble Bingo of the Day: * FINNESKO [n/pl.] A finnesko is a boot made of tanned reindeer skin, with the reindeer's fur on the outside. It's an especially good, warm boot for subarctic regions. These boots originate from the Sami, indigenous people from the cultural region of Sápmi, located across four countries in the Arctic Circle; Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. This area is also referred to as Fennoscandia.
Skyrim really took the cake this year. With its awe-inspiring gameplay, much improved combat and leveling system, and a fresh new look, it's no wonder the game has already received a Game of the Year award. But for hardcore gamers, the fun may be over. You've played the game for thousands of hours, and have exhausted the entire game's main and auxiliary quests. You need more.
If you take two flat mirrors and place them front to back and look at them, you can see an infinite number of reflections. While this is a self-replicating pattern and can be somewhat mesmerizing, it isn't anywhere as interesting as looking at the chaotic scattering of light that can occur between 3 or 4 spheres.
Welcome to another Community Byte announcement from Null Byte! The goal of the Community Bytes is to teach people in a co-operative, hands-on manner. Learning from experience and immersing yourself in a subject is the best way to learn something foreign to you, so that is exactly what we do! In our sessions, we have started to both code and complete HTS missions. This means that there is something for everyone here, so make sure you join us.
With the rather large success of the Community Byte activities, both programming and HackThisSite, I have decided to continue to do both activities every session! With that said, when programming sessions occur, they will be lead by Sol Gates in Gobby. Also, the programming mission will no longer be to code a tool, we have changed it to be even more "noob friendly". This means that instead of coding a tool, you will be walked through puzzles and challenges that must be solved by coding a scri...
Carol Baldwin-Moody of Wilmington Trust describes the challenges that are present in her line of work as senior vice president and chief risk officer. There is a strong legal backing to every major issue in today’s society. Baldwin-Moody has come across several scenarios that aren’t covered by the dated constitutional law in effect today. In past years, a risk officer was thought to be a management concept that would be useful, but not worth the investment. Lately, a risk officer career has b...
Our mission for this week's Community Byte was to create a Python program to crack web-based passwords, like the ones you would see on an email or router login. I wanted it to be universal in the sense that it could be easily modified and adapted to another website just by changing a few variables. That was a success! Even though people weren't on time to the coding session, everything went well.
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.
Learning the basics of SEO In this tutorial I will go over the basics of Search Engine Optimisation. The "white-hat-way" ("black-hat" SEO is tricking Google and other search engine providers, this will get you into trouble quick!).
Google announced a lot of great feature updates this week! Most of them are content-related, and help you more easily find out what's going on in the overall Google+ community.
Google Reader is ostensibly just an RSS aggregator, a tool that lets you catch up on your favorite blogs. How could Google have anticipated that getting rid of its social features could have angered so many people who were actually using it as their default social network, and who enjoyed it precisely because it didn't function like Facebook or Google+?
Our first Community Byte went well! We had around 8 people in the room coding collaboratively and watching to learn. LukeStav did the kind task of hosting it on Gobby for all of us, so big thanks to him!
Since its inception, Google+ users have been a loud, vocal bunch, and they've made their displeasure known about many issues, especially on the lack of support for pseudonyms, Google Apps, and brand pages. It's been especially galling for many Google loyalists, who found their Google+ profiles suspended, when they ended up violating the Google+ "common name" policy.
University video game design programs have been spreading like wildfire around the world over the last ten years. They allow students, researchers and game developers to work on their craft in an academic environment away from the harsh realities of the market, and have led to some interesting products like Fl0w from USC and Ulitsa Dimitrova from Germany. Both games take on topics not often addressed in mainstream games and do so in simple, poignant ways that aim to influence the rest of the ...
I've seen numerous tutorials on how to create a "strong" password. This makes me laugh. These titles imply "one" password, which is wrong in and of itself. A person should have many passwords, all different, and all extremely long. People may ask how they're supposed to remember lengthy passwords and why their current password isn't good enough. Well, I'm going to show you.
For more than a decade, free-to-play games with microtransactions (also called In-App Purchase or IAP) by which players can pay real money for in-game content have been the industry standard for online success in Asia. Mainstream American gamers have long resisted these "freemium" games, with World of Warcraft and other subscription based online games reigning supreme, and being seen as more AAA than their free-ish counterparts. Casual games developers have encountered no such problems, and m...
Welcome to the Google+ Insider's Guide to all things Google+. We're dedicated to keeping you updated with all the latest news, tips and tricks on Google+, and this official index will serve as a one-stop catalog of all our How-To articles, as well as all the news & updates we've covered over time.
Last month, mobile application consultant Jonathan Stark unleashed his Starbucks Card to the public as an "experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones." Basically, he purchased a Starbucks Card and registered it via the Starbucks Mobile App for iPhone (there's an Android one, too) which allows caffeine addicts to pay for coffee and baked goods with their mobile device. He then took a screenshot of the barcode and let anyone on the web download it for...
To most gamers, video games are largely devoid of place. In the post-arcade era, the only real world locations most associate with video games are GameStop and the couch. But there's so much more to them than that!
Hangouts are one of the most fun features in Google+. As long as you have a webcam and a microphone, you can "hangout" with up to 10 of your buddies on Google+ and do just about anything. Of course, sometimes it can get kind of awkward when you are hanging out and you don't really have anything to say. This problem can be mitigated if you host hangouts with a plan.
Electronic Arts is the biggest game publisher in the world, and have been for years. And yet, their only successful internally developed games nowadays are the EA Sports mega-franchises like Madden. Most of their success has stemmed from their ability to buy other companies on their way up, squeeze the creativity out of them, and then sell them to someone else or just let them go. This week they made their largest acquisition ever when they purchased PopCap Games for $750 million upfront—as m...
It's been a great year for video games, kind of. Sure, the AAA release lineup has been a trainwreck and hacking has been a bigger problem than ever. But two things have happened involving the federal government that have made video games more legitimate in the United States than ever before. The Supreme Court ruling establishing that video games were the equivalent of movies and books, not porn, was the more significant decision. But in May, the National Endowment for the Arts made another si...
+Randall Munroe, the man behind the web's most popular web comic, XKCD, has always had a knack for getting to the heart of the larger social issues on the web. During the 1st 48 hours after Google+ started letting non-Googlers in, one of the most shared posts within its private walls was his latest comic about Google+:
The African Soft Fur Rat though new to the pet trade is a unique little rodent with unusual qualities. Not only is this little rat a great step up for people who feed reptiles it is virtually odorless and that is definately a plus for those who would like to have a pet rat or mouse they can keep inside the house and not spend a fortune in bedding or spend a lot of time cleaning to keep the rodent odor down.
