How to Make Things with String

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! At minimum, our task was to create an IRC bot for #nullbytez that could ...more

Have you ever wanted to ride a rollercoaster while listening to Lady Gaga? Or have the Star Wars theme auto-play when you enter your house? You can with Minecraft. Search Youtube for a popular song + Minecraft, and chances are there will be a video for it! Minecraft gives pla ...more

Got a knack for speeding? Like running red lights? Believe or not, the police have better things to be doing than pulling you over, like catching real criminals. That's why more and more cameras are popping up at known speeding zones and on street corners—so the cops can clean ...more

Technology: The Less You Know the Better? I'm sure everyone is now aware of GPS technologies and tracking techniques these days, with the release of numerous documents (even lawsuits) on big name companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Yes, 2011 was a good year for eye-o ...more

Big brother is watching when you're playing around on another system—and big brother is that system. Everything from operating systems to intrusion detection systems to database services are maintaining logs. Sometimes, these are error logs that can show attackers trying vario ...more

With the Google+ team members being generous and free-flowing with advice on some of the more advanced features of Google+, we'll be publishing a weekly summary of the latest pro tips. Chances are, if you've been following the Google+ team members, you've seen some of these al ...more

Planning the Trip Get lots of brochures Send for brochures of the places you will be visiting. Make a travel book with the brochures to get the grandchildren and their families excited. The best place to contact for these brochures are the Visitors Bureaus or the Chamber of ...more

Many people get so discouraged by their failures with redstone that they give up using it entirely, or never progress beyond using simple switches. However, by incorporating logic gates into your redstone designs, the applications are nearly limitless. The ability to add multi ...more

Welcome to the sixth Community Byte for coding in Python and beating the challenges presented to us by HackThisSite. These sessions are created to bring our community together, to learn from each other, and essentially grow together. Everyone is welcome, from novice programmer ...more

Image via Tiger Mom Says. Amy Chua didn't realize what she unleashed when the Wall Street Journal published a string of excerpts from her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and titled it "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". The article sparked a lot of interest and anger, ...more

A First Timer's Guide When some new guitarists break their first string they stash it in the closet and forget about it. Me, I put the sweaty axe back in its case and asked my parents to take me to the local music store. After a morning full of senseless racket emanating from ...more

Guitar Essentials My friends and I would secretly scribble tab in the darkly lit practice rooms in our university even though we were educated musicians. So, being able to read tablature, or tab, is essential for beginning guitarists. Tab is a curious way to write down music ...more

Chi gyo ichi nyo is a familiar expression in the dojo. The word chi means knowledge. Gyo means doing, or action. Ichi nyo means inseparable. Action and knowledge are one! Acting without adequate knowledge or understanding is a constant source of frustration and problems. In ou ...more

Kick Ass Review Part 2: Gameplay and Design In the game, you can play as Kick Ass, Hit Girl, or Big Daddy. Each charater has a light and heavy attack that can be strung together into small combos. Each character also has three special attacks assigned to the Square, Triangle, ...more

Smartphones are crazy awesome. You can do your banking, track your children, find directions, and even pretend to have a mustache. The only thing that these personal supercomputers are missing is physical interaction with the environment. I wanted to be able to call my house ...more

In my Wireshark article, we talked a little bit about packet sniffing, but we focused more on the underlying protocols and models. Now, I'd like to dive right back into Wireshark and start stealing packets. The filtering capabilities here are very comprehensive. You can filte ...more

I may be a bit weird, but I enjoy listening to music at night as I fall asleep. Sure, you could create a playlist of songs so that it stopped after all the songs finished playing, but I have a rather extensive database of music and I enjoy listening to them randomly. Also, I l ...more

This week, Google held back on introducing a slew of new Google+ features, and introduced new Chrome extensions instead. The new additions won't replace of your favorite Chrome extensions, but they are very useful, and elegant. Google+ Chrome Extensions From Google +Timothy ...more

Label Profile: Night-People [Night-People founder Shawn Reed, playing live in Montreal as Wet Hair] By Jenn Pelly MP3: Ela Orleans: "I Know" MP3: Cellophane Spill: "Zaj Mak Ta" If you really want to get inside the mind of Night-People founder Shawn Reed, start with his we ...more

“On this day he had lived with that feeling, with death breathing right in his face like the hot wind from a grenade across the street, for moment after moment after moment, for three hours or more. The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he found sometimes when ...more

Anonymity is something that doesn't exist today. Everything you do in the world is tracked, from the purchases you make to surfing the internet—even taking pictures on your iPhone. Everything you have ever said and done on the internet is still there—somewhere. This is called ...more

WonderHowTo is a how-to website made up of niche communities called Worlds, with topics ranging from Minecraft to science experiments to Scrabble and everything in-between. Check in every Wednesday evening for a roundup of user-run activities and how-to projects from the most ...more

Do you need to email your wife your Social Security number? Send confidential business plans to your partner in Thailand? Send your hacker buddies the recovered hashes from last night's breach? Try using GPG, a valuable and easy to use open-source encryption program. In my fi ...more

Bash (Shell) Scripting for Beginners Intro I am an occasional Linux user currently playing around in CrunchBang and loving it. Prior to this, I used to dual-boot Windows and xfce-buntu (or xubuntu) at work, and due to some unforeseen circumstances, my screen always went fuzz ...more

Using only a circle and straight lines, it's possible to create various aesthetic curves that combine both art and mathematics. The geometry behind the concentric circle, ellipse, and cardioid dates back centuries and is easily found in the world around us. From an archery tar ...more

There are many impressive accomplishments in Minecraft, too many to name in fact. Sprawling builds, complex machines, and massive servers are the hallmark of Minecraft and things keep getting bigger and better. No one doubts the epic scale Minecraft has reached, but every once ...more

I have had a lot of people ask me, "How does my neighbor keep getting into my wireless?!". Chances are, these people are all using WEP, a deprecated wireless encryption protocol. Either that, or you are using one weak WPA passphrase. If someone can access your wireless networ ...more

Last week, I demonstrated how to go a little deeper into your Google+ profiles, photos, and introduced cross-posting. This week, I'm highlighting a bunch of different unofficial resources that have sprung up that will help improve your Google+ experience, and give you the late ...more

One of the things I consistently notice amongst fellow internet users is that many people don't know how to properly search for stuff. Google may have served you well in the past, but I'm going to share a few little tricks with you to help make your search results even spiffie ...more

Lori Nix is a photographer whose stunning work depicts curious scenes of danger and disaster: abandoned spaces, architecture in a state of extreme deterioration, natural calamities, and more. But the mysterious places she captures with her 8x10 large format camera aren't actua ...more

Tomorrow's the 1st of April which means it's the one day of the year you can put aside the daily grind, and go at it Dwight Schrute and Jim Halpert style. Yes, there are easy apps to do your dirty work, but if you're old school and you like to do it the old fashioned way, here ...more

A common problem for many guitarists is what I call the intermediate plateau. As a beginner, you improved rapidly. You got faster and more fluid almost on a daily basis. Then it stopped. However hard you practice, you don’t seem to get any better. The solution is simple and o ...more

Note: The article assumes that the reader has a fundamental understanding of at least one other programming language, and that this is intended serve as a quick reference for Perl's basic syntax & behavior in regards to Variables, Control Structures, & Functions. Learning to ...more

In python, or any scripting language for that matter, there are certain things that you will carry with you throughout your entire scripting career. Some of the most basic things that you will keep with you are output, variables, and their value types. We'll start by going ove ...more

A stager is a small piece of software that's typically used by malware to hide what's happening in the early stages of infection and to download a larger payload later. We're going to explore how it works by creating a single line that downloads and runs potentially infinite ...more

During our last adventure into the realm of format string exploitation, we learned how we can manipulate format specifiers to rewrite a program's memory with an arbitrary value. While that's all well and good, arbitrary values are boring. We want to gain full control over the ...more

Well, first things firsts, it's been awhile! I'm sorry the series has been dead for a little bit, but I recently hit some personal relationship issues and needed to take some time to think. But, now that it's all said and done, the dust can settle and we can start training aga ...more

Bash scripting is a convenient way to automate things on any Linux system, and we're going to use it here to automate certain tasks we use all the time. Bash is a simple language for stringing together several different Linux utilities. Its simplicity makes it easy for beginn ...more

The one thing that separates a script kiddy from a legitimate hacker or security professional is the ability to program. Script kiddies use other people's tools, while hackers and security pros write their own tools. To that end, we're going to see how a stack overflow vulnera ...more

While our time with the Protostar VM from Exploit Exercises was lovely, we must move on to bigger things and harder challenges. Exploit Exercises' Fusion VM offers some more challenging binary exploitation levels for us to tackle. The biggest change is that these levels are al ...more

Being able to write your own hacking tools is what separates the script kiddies from the legendary hackers. While this can take many forms, one of the most coveted skills in hacking is the ability to dig through the binary files of a program and identify vulnerabilities at the ...more

You may not have thought of dorks as powerful, but with the right dorks, you can hack devices just by Googling the password to log in. Because Google is fantastic at indexing everything connected to the internet, it's possible to find files that are exposed accidentally and co ...more

Welcome back, everybody. In the previous article, we covered the ideas and concepts of well-known ports and trust exploitation in order to evade a firewall. Today, we'll be building the shell, the part that receives commands, executes them, and sends the output back to the att ...more

Welcome to the sequel to the latest post on writing 64 bit shellcode! This tutorial will assume that you are aware of everything mentioned in the last one, as I will try to make this tutorial void of formalities and straight to the point! If you have not read the last one, I s ...more

First, a little evidence on how easily amused the common house cat is to begin with. To purchase special kitty toys seem unnecessary. Cats will go berserk at the slightest thing. The movement of a string, a rouge house fly, or in this case, the buzz of a toothbrush. Cat VS To ...more

After a long hiatus, we shall once again emerge from the shadowy depths of the internet to build an exploit. This time, we'll be looking at how to defeat a non-executable stack by using the ret2libc technique — a lean, mean, and brilliant way of exploiting a stack overflow vul ...more

Hello everyone. It's been a while since I've posted anything (with good reason). But, now that the digital dust has settled, it's time to be an adult about this. I will be continuing to post to Null Byte on a smaller scale, and will also fully participate in whatever communiti ...more

Welcome to another C tutorial. We will be looking at arrays, discussing what they are, when they are used and their special relationship with the char variable. Let's begin. What Is an Array? Think of an array as a sort of container or like... a buffer. They allow us to be a ...more

Last time in how to train you python, we covered the basics of variables and output. While we were covering variables, we talked briefly about strings. "String" is just a fancier way of saying "Word". A string is simply a set of characters encased in quotations, this lets pyth ...more

There has been significant debate over law enforcement's right to access our digital devices in recent years. New tools from Grayshift and Cellebrite are popping up faster than ever to help government agencies, as well as traditional hackers, break into iPhones. If you're conc ...more

Google is an incredibly useful database of indexed websites, but querying Google doesn't search for what you type literally. The algorithms behind Google's searches can lead to a lot of irrelevant results. Still, with the right operators, we can be more exact while searching f ...more

Thanks to a newly discovered iOS exploit, a text message can now ruin your day. It will literally cripple your iPhone, and the worst thing is that anyone with a phone that supports double-byte unicode can do it to you. While it initially sounded like bullshit, we tried it out ...more

UnrealIRCd is an open-source IRC server that has been around since 1999 and is perhaps the most widely used one today. Version 3.2.8.1 was vulnerable to remote code execution due to a backdoor in the software. Today, we will be exploiting the vulnerability with Metasploit, exa ...more