Facebook is constantly evolving, and lately it seems like a bad thing, at least for its users. First, you had to opt out of Instant Personalization, which shared your personal information with Facebook's partner sites. Then, you had to take drastic measures to secure your home address and mobile number from third-party apps and websites. And now?—Now you need to opt out of Facebook Ads.
I remember a time when I had to rent a VHS from the local video rental store. It wasn't all that bad, with the only real annoyances being the trip to and fro, having to rewind the movie and the possible malfunction of my VHS player, which liked to eat tape from time to time.
Collapse At Hand Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy.
I read Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God on the recommendation of a philosophical friend and before I had finished it I was adding Keller’s The Prodigal God to my list of books to read. Keller has a gift for succinct and wise writing. I believe he truly has his finger on where society currently is spiritually, and where it might be going. In The Reason for God, Keller says that our society is both more spiritual and more secular than it has ever been. The book is a great look at the Christi...
Representative Henry A. Waxman is in charge of California’s 30th Congressional district. He is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ever since he began his career in the government business, he has been involved with health and environmental issues. He represents cities such as Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu, Westlake Village and West Hollywood, as well as such areas of Los Angeles as Beverly-Fairfax, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Beverl...
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, realistic 2. This second mission in a series of realistic simulation missions was designed to be exactly like situations you may encounter in the real world, requesting we help a friend take down a racist hate-group website.
Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, realistic 1. This is the first in a series of realistic simulation missions designed to be exactly like situations you may encounter in the real world. This first mission, we are asked to help a friend manipulate the website voting system for a Battle of the Bands vote count in his favor.
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.
How many people use the big search engines here? I'm going to estimate 90% of everyone on WonderHowto uses one of the following on a regular basis: Google, Bing or Yahoo! Search. The question is: are you in that 10%? You should seriously consider dumping Google search for DuckDuckGo. Why? DuckDuckGo does not track you.
Welcome to the Goodnight Byte for HackThisSite, Basic Mission 4. In Friday's session, we tackled some coding in Gobby. Nothing special, just a few modifications to the NullBot script we made a few session ago, and some education on regular expressions. Apart from coding, we did our scheduled HackThisSite mission. We had to take on some JavaScript, which was a new thing for Null Byte. This mission taught us about client-side HTML manipulation through JavaScript injections. This just means that...
Welcome to the closing of the second HackThisSite and programming Community Byte. First and foremost, I would like to ask that people start showing up on time to the Community Bytes. If you need help converting your time zone to PST, go to Time Zone Converter. When users do not show up on time, we have to go backwards and catch everybody up. This wastes time and will also make other users' experience less enjoyable when they have to watch and listen to the same thing 100 times. Punctuality as...
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...
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...
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.
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.
Welcome to the second Goonight Byte! Our second coding session was kindly hosted by th3m, so props to him for letting this happen.
In a recent announcement, Hewlett-Packard announced that they're considering spinning off their PC hardware business, but even more recent was the decision to completely off webOS devices. Though they aren't eradicating the once popular Palm platform altogether, they are liquidating all of their HP branded smartphones and tablets in a fire sale, including the Pixi, Pre and Veer phones and TouchPad tablet, which is less than two months old.
One of the biggest advantages iOS has over Android as a mobile platform is how readily and fully it has embraced mobile gaming. There are over 200,000 games available in the Apple store, compared to approximately 100,000 in the Android Marketplace. As an Android-using gamer, this has always bothered me.
For most street artists, it takes a considerable amount of time to paint large art installments on the walls of urban structures. The more time it takes, the better chance there is of getting caught, since nearly all of the rogue artwork is slapped on the sides of city and privately owned buildings.
Little Ethiopia is the place to get ahold of authentic African cuisine. African food mainly consists of spices and fresh ingredients. Ethiopia is a country in Africa that demonstrates the use of spice in its cuisine. The Ethiopian cuisine follows the Islamic rules, the religion Ethiopians are accustomed to, and its old custom, which is the caressing of the earth. The Ethiopian Islamics prohibit the eating of pork so their meat choices are limited. The Ethiopians are specialist whenit comes to...
Granted the iPhone is an awesome phone... but their choice for default ringtones kind of, well, stinks. They have plenty of apps you can BUY to PURCHASE ringtones... but why waste money when you can make an unlimited amount of ringtones yourself forFREE? At first glance, it looks complicated and confusing, but I'll break it down so simply, you'll be making ringtones for everyone in iTunes.
Type: Digital, Theme Theme: Kid of the Year
In the dojo, what ISN’T said is often as important as what IS said. To most of us who’ve been raised in the USA, the reticence we encounter in the dojo can be off-putting. American society is very “content” oriented. Our legal contracts, for instance, run for pages and pages. Everything needs to be spelled out. In “context-oriented” societies there is far less reliance on such a literal approach. Much more importance is placed on the relationship between the two parties entering into an agree...
And Dumbfounded Most Watching Game 1 of 2010 World Cup I just finished watching the Mexico - South Africa 2010 World Cup opener and boy was it a good one. The finish of a tie, wasn't totally cool to me, until I realized what I missed.
L4D2: Chapter two - The Underground "Ok explain something to me, how is an under-the-river tour scenic?" - Nick
Junk, junk, junk or so you might think. Remember the saying, your junk can be someone else's treasure! This article is going to guide you through a successful garage sale. With the economy the way it is, more and more people are going to garage sales. They are fun to have and you can earn some extra money.
The DIY industry is booming, despite the desperate blackmailing of society by finance capitalists. Companies like Adafruit and Makerbot are grossing well over a million dollars a year, and Evil Mad Science Laboratories just recently dedicated themselves to running a full-time kit business. Making kits is fun, but starting a business can be scary. If you already enjoy making gadgets and want to take the plunge into selling your own kits online, this article is for you.
If you're a frequenter of Null Byte, I bet you have at least some interest in information security. Furthermore, you have a hobby that if applied in certain ways, will get you arrested. I've received quite a few messages from the community here about federal cybercrime law and how it applies to them, so I decided to get together with my lawyer to come up with some answers.
Eventually, we plan on doing some root the box competitions here at Null Byte, but we're still looking for a server to play on. Anyone want to donate one? You won't regret it. Root the box is like 'king of the hill', except you have to hack a server and maintain access. Each server will have numerous known security holes, but until then, let's get back to the regular weekly coding sessions and realistic hacking missions on HackThisSite.
We'd like this to be one of the last HTS mission announcements, at least for now. As soon as Null Byte finds a server to play with (anyone want to donate one?), we are going to start doing root the box competitions, which is like king of the hill, except you have to hack a server and maintain access. Each server will have numerous known security holes. But for now, back to the normal flow of things...
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.
We're aiming for this to be one of the last HTS mission announcements, at least for now. As soon as Null Byte finds a server to play with, we are going to start doing root the box competitions, which is like king of the hill, except you have to hack a server and maintain access. Each server will have numerous known security holes. But, for now, back to the normal flow of things...
The community tore up the first realistic mission last week. You've applied the techniques learned in the basic missions to a real scenario, so I'm pretty content. The realistic missions are where the learning gets intense and where we can apply real knowledge to extremely realistic situations. We will also be continuing the normal Python coding and hacking sessions. These sessions are created to bring our community together, to learn from each other, and grow together. Everyone is welcome, f...
Community byters, it's time to get serious. We are finally moving on to the realistic missions in HackThisSite. This is where the learning gets intense and where we can apply real knowledge to extremely realistic situations. We will also be continuing the normal Python coding and hacking sessions. These sessions are created to bring our community together, to learn from each other, and grow together. Everyone is welcome, from novice programmers to aspiring hackers.
Friday's Community Byte was weird. The intent was to do a HackThisSite mission, but upon time to begin, everyone in there was programming without my assistance, with the help of Sol Gates. This is great! It's really awesome that everyone enjoys programming that much and will make the effort to learn even when I am not present. So, a tip of my hat to Mr. Sol Gates and the rest of you fine people.
In these weekly Scrabble Challenges, so far we've covered two-letter words, double bingos, high scoring moves, triple-triples, last moves, parallel plays, phoneys and opening moves. For this week's puzzle, we're revisiting the strategy for opening moves.
A phoney word in a game of Scrabble is basically a non-valid word, either played or considered being played. Why? To fool the other player and go from losing to winning. It's perfectly acceptable in Scrabble play, but only if you don't get caught. If the other player challenges your play, then you'll be forced to remove it and your turn will be skipped. That right there—not fun.
Bourbon is the ultimate American spirit, considering the barrel-aged distilled spirit was originally produced in an area known as Bourbon County, Kentucky. To meet the legal definition of bourbon, it must be produced in the United States, must be created with at least 51% corn, and aged in new oak barrels. There are two types of bourbon whiskeys—straight and blended. Straight bourbon means that the bourbon has been aged for a minimum of 2 years, and has no other coloring or flavoring added. B...
Advancements in technology usually lead to the miniaturization of old technologies, and video games are no exception. Since at least 1990, game hardware manufacturers and enterprising DIY electronics enthusiasts have poured their efforts into making full-size video game consoles smaller, even handheld. And for good reason—who would have ever played a black and white Game Boy if they could have had an actual NES in their pocket?
Do you remember when video games came on tiny chips in plastic cartridges? When the CD and 3D graphics just meant ugly games with long load times? Before epic cinematics, spoken dialog, or cordless controllers? Do you still have all of your old games and lament that the consoles, cords, and controllers required to play them have either been stolen by exes or broken while moving apartments?
