Everything Else
How To: Turn Your House Lights On & Off Using the Internet
Haven't you ever wanted to live in a futuristic home? I think that homes are headed towards an era where they will be controlled by our computers and smartphones. No longer will you have to find your keys to unlock your door, or wait until you get home to monitor your security, because X10 is here.
How To: Get Free Netflix for Life
Null Byte is looking for moderators! In today's Null Byte, we're hacking Netflix. As most of you know, Netflix is a subscription service that streams movies and TV shows to your devices over the internet. A common stance amongst my Xbox Live friends is that Netflix isn't worth the cost. The instant movies predominantly consist of old titles, and new movies aren't added often enough.
How To: How Credit Card Algorithms Work: The Anatomy of Credit Card Numbers
Have you ever wondered how credit card numbers work? I mean, how they really work? How do they come up with the numbers? Credit cards actually follow a very specific pattern. Let's take a look at how they're set up.
How To: Downgrade and Jailbreak Your iOS Devices Stock Firmware for the Holidays
Lots of people are going to be getting the latest iOS devices this holiday season. But what good is a portable device if you don't hack it? Jailbreaking on the latest stock iOS, version 4.3.5, is a bit of a trivial endeavor. Not many people know how to downgrade from this firmware to a firmware that can be jailbroken (pre-iOS 5). If you want the added functionality and the complete control over your device that comes with jailbreaking, then read on.
How To: Get Unlimited Money in Skyrim by Hacking Your Game Saves
Skyrim is a time consuming game. I know I'm not alone in saying I constantly find myself looking for more time in the day. There is never enough time to read the books I want to read, or learn what I want to learn, or play the games that I want to play.
How To: Defend from Keyloggers in Firefox with Keystroke Encryption
Null Byte is looking for moderators. More threats to computers exist every day. Not only do we have computer viruses and malware, but we have rootkits and other nasty pieces of code that can log your keyboard strokes or even add your computer to a botnet to attack other websites. Your computer can be infected even if you have anti-virus software installed. I can't stress enough how easy it is for a hacker to write a piece of code that gets around every piece of anti-virus software.
How To: Hack Your Xbox Gamerscore
Nearly everyone has the capacity to be a cheater. Sometime or another, all Xbox users have yearned to get their gamerscore to unimaginable thresholds—for bragging and egotistical purposes. I can relate to this desire. However, I also don't want to mod my gamerscore, because it's just unfair and not nearly as much fun as doing it the honest way. To me, it's synonymous to entering the cheats into a game after you've beaten it. Cheats can add new life into a game once you're done, but since the ...
How To: Copy & Convert your Skyrim Game Save from the Xbox 360 to your PC
Gamers like myself who have switched back and forth between Skyrim on PC and Xbox lack the ability to share game saves. This really sucks. I love playing Skyrim on a console. It's a very comfortable, easy and relaxed gaming experience. You don't have to worry about your frame rate being optimized, or wrist pains from using a keyboard. However, gaming on the PC can allow you to use texture enhancing mods and get an overall smoother experience due to a lack in glitches and bugs that plague the ...
How To: Windows 7 Won't Boot? Here's How To Fix Your Master Boot Record
With a lot of Null Byters playing around with Linux because of its excessive use in the hacking world, some of you are bound to run into some trouble with the installation at some point or another. If you make a mistake, or you're intimidated by the wonky-looking installation screen, you may want to just stick with Windows. However, you may notice it can be hard to go back once you've crossed a certain point in the installation. Your Windows installation may be broken or unbootable.
How To: Fix the Channel -1 Glitch in Airodump on the Latest Kernel
Ever since kernel 2.6.xx in Linux, a lot of the internet kernel modules for wireless interfaces ended up becoming broken when trying to use monitor mode. What happens commonly (to myself included) is a forced channel that your card sits on. No good! For users of airodump and the aircrack-ng software suite, the software has become unusable.
How To: Fix the Unreadable USB Glitch in VirtualBox
Many users of the virtualization software VirtualBox may have noticed that the USB system has been pretty buggy for quite a long time. I've had my USB randomly duck out on me way too many times to count. This can really be difficult to deal with when you require access to the devices and files from the host system.
How To: Install Linux to a Thumb Drive
Let's face it, CDs and DVDs are a thing of the past. We no longer use them as a storage medium because they are slow, prone to failure in burning, and non-reusable. The future is flash memory. Flash memory is cheap, fast, and efficient. Eventually, flash drives might even replace discs as the preferred prerecorded selling format for movies.
How To: Make Skyrim (& Other Games) Utilize AMD Crossfire Before the Patch is Released
Users of the latest AMD 6xxx series graphics cards may have noticed that when they are playing Skyrim, their framerate isn't anywhere near what it is supposed to be with dual GPUs in Crossfire. AMD is working on releasing drivers with these issues fixed, but it has been too long since Skyrim has come out to just sit and wait.
How To: Safely Overclock Your GPU, CPU & RAM for Better Speed & Performance
Overclocking is quite an awesome thing. When computer components are designed, they are made to run at a certain speed, otherwise known as their clock and bus speeds. These limits are not actually limits. You can overclock components, which essentially makes them go faster than their set limitations. This can save you a lot of cash when newer components come out and you don't have enough money to upgrade. However, when you overclock components, you must be careful and make sure that the machi...
How To: Shorten URLs from the Command Line with Python
Shortening URLs has become a necessity in this age of Twitter and limited-character status updates. It not only allows us to cram more words into our oh-so-important Twitter statuses, but it also helps us with a few other things.
How To: Backup All of Your Xbox 360 Data to Your Computer
Flash memory can be a tad unpredictable at times. I have had 4 flash drives die out on me over the last few years, and they usually die without warning. When a flash memory based device dies, the data is likely impossible to recover. Adversely on an HDD, or Hard Drive Disk, even if the disk dies out, someone will probably be able to fix it and get it back to working order—at least long enough for you to back up your data. Hard drives are a bit more forgiving. As you can guess, due to the unpr...
How To: Code Your Own Twitter Client in Python Using OAuth
This is my attempt to show people some cool things we can do with programming, and to give a small incentive for people to join the weekly Community Bytes. I wanted to make a tutorial on how to use Twitter from the command line with Python. This would have been an easy project to do not too far back, and a good bit of practice for a beginner to programming. It teaches that you can do useful stuff with programming. However, a while ago Twitter started using something called OAuth to access the...
How To: Encrypt your Skype Messages to Thwart Snooping Eyes Using Pidgin
Skype is a great service. It allows a free solution for VoIP to VoIP calls, and cheap VoIP to landline calling. However, a very disturbing, little known fact that might push you away from Skype does exist. If you closely read the terms of service agreement, it clearly says that Skype is allowed to decrypt your messages whenever they please. Here at Null Byte, we tend to enjoy our anonymity, don't we?
Coding Basics: A Guide to Choosing Your Optimal Text Editor or IDE
When you first become interested in learning how to program, it can be difficult to find a place to start. A lot of questions come up, especially if you're new to the idea of programming entirely. After you pick which language you want to learn, you have to worry about how you're going to write the language.
How To: Set Up Auto-Scheduled Backups to Avoid Data Loss on Any OS
Backing up your files is a requirement in today's world of tech. In an instant, your storage device can fail. This is an unacceptable situation that should never happen to anyone. Storage is cheap, and backups are easier than ever to perform. Most of the time, this can be completely automated, so you can just set it and forget it. Today, Null Byte will be covering how we can automatically, and efficiently back up our data across all OS platforms, while giving a few alternatives to the built-i...
How To: Recover a Windows Password with Ophcrack
When Windows stores a password, it is done so by hashing the password in an LM hash and putting it in the Windows SAM file. In the scary moment that you lose your password, but don't want to pay some geek to have full root access to your computer, you need to recover it using Ophcrack. Ophcrack doesn't remove the password, or bypass it, it cracks the password hash using rainbow tables.
How To: Remove a Windows Password with a Linux Live CD
Back when I was a Windows user, I know I'm not the only one who has experienced password loss—that moment where you just can't remember your password. Sometimes it happens to the best of us. So, how can we get into the system without paying a local geek or geeksquad to do it? First, we have to look into how Windows stores their passwords.
How To: Install "Incompatible" Firefox Add-Ons After Upgrading to the New Firefox
To the displeasure of many loyal Firefox users, Mozilla has been deploying what seems like a new marketing strategy to "catch up" to Google Chrome. I have no idea if this is because the version number is higher than theirs, but it is downright annoying. It's not all complaints, though. Firefox has done an amazing job at completely revamping its source code and redesigning all of its engines, making it a more than worthy competitor to Chrome. However, we are displeased with Firefox because eve...
How To: Run a Virtual Computer Within Your Host OS with VirtualBox
With the computer's rapid increases in power and efficiency, computer virtualization has taken the scene by storm. With virtualization software, and powerful enough computer hardware, your computer can run a virtual computer within itself. This effectively gives you multiple OS's on the host OS. This can be used for a lot of cool stuff that your computer would normally be limited by. Let's take a look at a few.
How To: Securely & Anonymously Spend Money Online
Anonymity is very important to many internet users. By having your "e-identity" exposed online, you can be stuck with a number of unwanted issues, such as:
How To: Burn an XDG3 Formatted Xbox 360 Game ISO with Windows
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...
How To: Reveal Saved Browser Passwords with JavaScript Injections
JavaScript is the language of the internet. It is what allows us to create dynamic, interesting webpages that are fast, web-based applications and so much more. The primary use of JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and that interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page. This is the magic that allows all of what we see to happen, and for our browser to be manipulated.
How To: Recover Deleted Files in Windows
Everyone has deleted a file or folder on accident before. Sometimes people even delete stuff on purpose, only to find out that they needed the files after all. If you're experiencing one of these mishaps, don't worry, file recovery is possible in most cases!
How To: Fix Your Overheating, RRoD, or E74 Xbox 360 with Mere Pennies
Microsoft has had a pretty bad wrap with their Xbox 360 gaming console. Right from the start, the console has suffered a multitude of different hardware failures and design flaws. These problems cause the parts to get too hot and become faulty. I'm sure everyone who's had an Xbox 360 has gotten at least one Red Ring of Death or E74 error.
How To: Recover WinRAR and Zip Passwords
Archiving and compression is a great way to store and prepare files for sending. You can reduce the size of a file, turn a group of files into a single file, and even encrypt and password the contents! Just take a look at this image to see how much it compressed a 28GB text file.
How To: How Hackers Steal Your Cash on Trusted Sites & How to Prevent Against It
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF, pronounce "sea-surf") is a common web exploit. However, for unknown reasons it's not used very often. It plays on a given website's trust in a web browser by executing another website's form action, for example, sending money to another person. It's usually placed in abnormal places like HTML image tags.
How To: How Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks Sneak into Unprotected Websites (Plus: How to Block Them)
XSS stands for cross-site scripting, which is a form of web-based exploitation that uses client-side vulnerabilities in a web page to execute malicious JavaScript codes. JavaScript is referred to as "cross-site" because it usually involves an external website containing the malicious code. That code is most commonly used to steal cookies with a website that the attacker created and hosted on another server. The cookies can then be used to escalate privileges and gain root access to someone's ...
How To: Use JavaScript Injections to Locally Manipulate the Websites You Visit
JavaScript is one of the main programming languages that the Web is built on. It talks directly to your browser and exchanges information with it in ways that HTML simply cannot. With JavaScript, you are able to access browser cookies, website preferences, real-time actions, slideshows, popup dialogs and calculators, or you create entire web-based apps. The list goes on nearly forever.
How To: Chain Proxies to Mask Your IP Address and Remain Anonymous on the Web
A proxy is a server that lets a client to connect to it and forward its traffic. This enables a certain "layer" of protection by masking your IP. An IP address can be used to learn your location and track you on the Internet, thus eliminating any form of anonymity that you may have.
How To: Stream Media to a PS3 or Xbox 360 from Mac & Linux Computers
One of the main reasons I was held back from fully switching over to Linux was the fact that media streaming is nearly impossible. You have two choices in Windows: either you use file sharing with Windows Media Player, or you can just use the Windows Media Center. But both of these softwares are not for Linux or Mac. Microsoft doesn't like to make open source software because they believe in making a profit, instead of allowing others to innovate it.
How To: Share Your Laptop's Wireless Internet with Ethernet Devices
Sharing a laptop's wireless Internet connection with other computers connected to its Ethernet port is a great skill to know. It can be good for a number of reasons; Your computer may not have proper hardware to have a standard setup, or you may have an awkward network topology where sharing your wireless Internet via Ethernet would just be a better option.
How To: Carve Saved Passwords Using Cain
I've previously mentioned how saving browser passwords is a bad idea, but I never went into much detail as to why. Passwords that are saved in your browser can be carved out and stolen very easily. In fact, even passwords you save for instant messaging and Wi-Fi are vulnerable. Windows is very inefficient with the way it stores passwords—it doesn't store them in key-vaults, nor does it encrypt them. You're left with passwords residing in memory and filespace that's unencrypted.
How To: Run Windows from Inside Linux
Something that can shy a user away from making the switch to Linux is not having the option to go back to Windows. Luckily, there are solutions like dual-booting, where you can have both OS's installed right next to each other. However, Windows 8 appears as if it will block dual-boots with its neo-space BIOS that have been developed. Sneaky-sneaky. Windows users could still throw in a Linux live CD to try out Linux, but what does a Linux user do when they need something from Windows?
How To: Mine Bitcoin and Make Money
Bitcoin is a new currency built off "Satoshi Nakamoto's" (alias) 2008 Bitcoin white-paper. Bitcoin provides its users with a way to make peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions without having to use a bank as a mediator. There is no middle man, no corporation backing it, and no one has access to your money, except you. It's decentralized from government, run by the people, for the people.
How To: Defeat SSL in Practice with SSL Strip
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It's an encryption standard used on most sites' login pages to avoid their users' passwords being packet sniffed in simple plain-text format. This keeps the users safe by having all of that traffic encrypted over an "https" connection. So, whenever you see "https://" in front of the URL in your browser, you know you're safe... or are you?