Next to spam calls, few things are more annoying than being inundated with spam, scam, and smishing texts. Your iPhone's Messages app should be a place for your friends and family to stay in touch, not a minefield of phishing attacks, malicious links, and viruses. Luckily, there are quite a few methods to block and report your way to a more spam-free iPhone.
Progressive Web Apps hope to one day bridge the gap between websites and apps by giving the former more access to your phone's features, but they're not very common yet. In the meantime, you can take matters into your own hands with an app that uses your system WebView to render websites in a full-screen, borderless window with a few extra features — a lot like a native Android app.
URL tracking codes: you'll see them on almost every link you copy online to share with friends and followers. It could be tens or hundreds of extra characters appended to the end of a URL, which websites and marketers use to tell how you got to the link in the first place. These excess tracking tokens not only make the links you share look sloppy and spammy — they could even invade your privacy.
After a slow phase-out, Google Play Music was shut down in December 2020. The songs you uploaded or purchased are still on Google's servers, but even those will be deleted on Feb. 24, 2021.
How do spammers get your email? You give it to them. Not directly, no — you sign up for an app or service and happily hand over your email to verify your new account, then that app or service sells your email address to marketers who now know what kinds of apps and services you like.
As a means to combat annoying and intrusive advertisements in Safari, Apple added native support for content blockers on the iPhone. Instead of being bombarded by notifications, banners, and pop-ups, content blockers prevent them from opening, which can also be said about those annoying cookie consent notices that many websites now have.
Videos hosted on Streamable may be fleeting or forever. So when you come across a cool video that you want to watch again later, it's a good idea to download it to your device in case it's one that disappears after a few months. There is no built-in download button in the Streamable player, but that doesn't mean you can't save anything on your iPhone.
You know that you have the Gmail app on your iPhone. After all, you get Gmail notifications, you see it in the app switcher, it's in the Settings app, and there's an "Open" button in the App Store instead of "Get" or a download icon. But you cannot find the app on your Home Screen. If this situation sounds like something you're dealing with on iOS 14 or iOS 15, there's an easy answer.
Spotlight, Apple's system-wide search feature, lets you search for apps, contacts, messages, webpages, music, notes, and other content that's on and off your iPhone. On iOS, it's known as "Search," and you can access it by swiping your home screen down or swiping open the Today View screen. It's not exactly convenient, but an accessibility feature can unlock Search so you could open it from anywhere.
Apple pushed out the second beta for iOS 14.3 to developers and public beta testers, which includes a few quick fixes for issues in Apple ProRAW for iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max and HomeKit. It also gives home screen shortcuts a more seamless transition. It is not yet known if the update addresses missing SMS texts that have been plaguing users across carriers, including us.
What does it mean when a software company obsessively focused on innovating the way we use our mobile devices to see and communicate with the world adds virtual voice agents? Possibly e-commerce magic, with a powerful layer of augmented reality.
Apple just released the third public beta for iOS 14.2 today, Wednesday, Oct. 14. This update includes new glyphs for the HomePod mini and Beats Flex, support for HomePod's upcoming new "Intercom" feature, new core media features, and SwiftUI fixes.
Nearly every native app on the iPhone received an upgrade or new features in iOS 14 — and Safari is no exception. The web browser now has better password protection, faster performance, privacy reports, and built-in translations, just to name a few. Some of the Safari updates went unnoticed by many, but they're there and ready to use in iOS 14.
The moment arrives when you finally pop a shell on the web server you've been working on, only you find yourself in a strange environment with limited functionality. Restricted shells are often used as an additional line of defense and can be frustrating for an attacker to stumble upon. But with enough patience and persistence, it is possible to escape these restricted environments.
There are countless tutorials online that show how to use Netstat and Tasklist to find an intruder on your computer. But with a few PowerShell functions, it's possible for a hacker to evade detection from the almighty command line.
One of the most promising avenues of attack in a web application is the file upload. With results ranging from XSS to full-blown code execution, file uploads are an attractive target for hackers. There are usually restrictions in place that can make it challenging to execute an attack, but there are various techniques a hacker could use to beat file upload restrictions to get a shell.
Instagram makes it easy to view a public account without that person or business knowing unless, you know, your finger accidentally slips and hits the like button on a post. Aside from that, if you're careful, you can browse anonymously through an account without anyone noticing — only you can't do that with Instagram Stories.
After teasing the feature in Android 10, Google finally added proper native screen recording to Android 11. But when you start a capture, you'll see a small red indicator in your status bar as long as recording is ongoing, which can really distract from your video. Thankfully, it can be removed with a little ingenuity.
Automation has been a buzz word for quite some time now, but the principles behind it are as strong as ever. For a hacker or pentester, Bash scripting is one form of automation that cannot be ignored. Virtually any command that can be run from the terminal can be scripted — and should be, in many cases — to save valuable time and effort. And a Bash script just happens to be great for recon.
As protests surge in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer, powerful photographs and videos from the demonstrations have gripped the world, putting our nation's very real and very justifiable widespread civil unrest out into the digital world. Unfortunately, these pictures could put you or others in danger if precautions aren't taken before uploading them online.
Kali Linux has come a long way since its BackTrack days, and it's still widely considered the ultimate Linux distribution for penetration testing. The system has undergone quite the transformation since its old days and includes an updated look, improved performance, and some significant changes to how it's used.
An attacker can repurpose public MyBB forums to act as command-and-control servers. It only takes a few lines of code to configure a MacBook to fetch commands and send responses to any website the attacker desires.
For enterprise augmented reality platform makers, remote assistance apps represent one of the greatest opportunities to show off the power of immersive computing. These apps enable experts to guide front-line workers or customers with AR prompts and other content in the field of view of their smartphones or smartglasses.
People fundamentally distrust magicians. And they should. The illusions they proffer are just that, illusions meant to astound rather than tangible interactions and results that have weight and meaning in our real world. Our lizard brains know this, and, no matter what the outstanding feat of "magic" presented, we nevertheless hold fast to our survival-based grip on the truth: we just saw simply "can't be real."
Apple shocked us all yesterday when it released iOS 13.1 developer beta 1. It was an unprecedented move since iOS 13.0 is still in beta testing and since Apple has never pushed out a "point" beta release before the stable base version. And now, you can get your hands on iOS 13.1 for iPhone if you're on the public beta.
One of the most exciting things as an ethical hacker, in my opinion, is catching a reverse shell. But often, these shells are limited, lacking the full power and functionality of a proper terminal. Certain things don't work in these environments, and they can be troublesome to work with. Luckily, with a few commands, we can upgrade to a fully interactive shell with all the bells and whistles.
Life's pretty good for iOS public testers — we get to check out new iPhone features months before the general public even knows they exist. That said, we aren't first to the party. Developers get priority during beta testing, as evidenced by yesterday's iOS 13 dev beta 6 release. It's not all bad though since Apple just released the public version of that software, public beta 5, this afternoon.
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.
There's no doubt iOS 13 has dominated the talk around the Apple community this month. Since the announcement and release of the first developer beta, we iPhone users have had a treasure trove of new features and changes to explore and discuss. Now the fun continues with iOS 13 dev beta 2. Who's ready to start up the conversation all over again?
Imagine being able to play a video instantly on hundreds of thousands of devices across the globe. It's totally possible, as long as all of those devices have a Chromecast plugged in. When Chromecasts are left exposed to the internet, hackers can use add them to a botnet that can play YouTube videos at will. The "attack" is made even easier thanks to a simple Python program called CrashCast.
Apple Watch owners know there's a built-in way to remove water from the device's speaker. However, even though modern iPhones are IP67 and IP68 water resistant, there's no official way to deal with water-clogged speakers that can muffle audio and cause prolonged damage if not ejected. Older iPhone models have it even worse, but there are some easy things you can do to get that water out.
Out of the box, Apple's digital assistant could be a godsend or a nuisance, depending on your daily interactions it. No matter which camp you fall into, Siri can always be better suited to your personal needs with a little customization. You can make Siri a powerhouse not to be reckoned with, or you can minimize its presence if you only need Siri help sometimes — all without any jailbreaking.
To hack a Wi-Fi network, you need your wireless card to support monitor mode and packet injection. Not all wireless cards can do this, but you can quickly test one you already own for compatibility, and you can verify that the chipset inside an adapter you're thinking of purchasing will work for Wi-Fi hacking.
If you have ever wanted to mod your Android device, your new best friend is easily going to be Team Win's TWRP custom recovery. This gives you access to file flashing on the fly, which can include such things as Magisk for root access, or even a custom ROM to replace the stock firmware that came with the device.
Apple's latest mobile operating system for iPhones, iOS 12, was released to everyone Monday, Sept. 17, and it's the same exact build that developers and public beta testers received as the "golden master" on Sept. 12, the day of Apple's 2018 special event. Install it to start taking advantage of the 100+ features iOS 12 has to offer right now.
If you're on the hunt for a profitable side-gig, or even a completely new way to to make money, you'll want to take a look at Upwork, a leading freelancing platform that connects skilled freelancers with clients from all over the world.
Just like cash, bitcoin is used for everything from regular day-to-day business to criminal activities. However, unlike physical cash, the blockchain is permanent and immutable, which means anyone from a teen to the US government can follow every single transaction you make without you even knowing about it. However, there are ways to add layers of anonymity to your bitcoin transactions.
In our last ARKit tutorial, we learned how to measure the sizes of horizontal planes. It was a helpful entryway into the arena of determining spatial relationships with real world spaces versus virtual objects and experiences.
If you're using a mobile device, it's a pretty safe bet that your apps are sending lots of information back and forth from their servers. To make sure there is no inappropriate data collection going on, it's worth setting up a web proxy to spy on this traffic, so you know exactly which apps are "phoning home" and when.
When you can't reach your iPhone or don't have it on you, how do you get help from emergency services? Unless you have one of those life-alert mobile triggers, someone nearby, or some amazing telepathy skills, hope might be the only answer — unless you wear an Apple Watch, that is.
