Remember the arcades? Were you saddened when they closed up one by one, leaving no outlet to actually go out and socialize while you played video games? With all the home consoles and internet connectivity, gaming has evolved, but the social factor has been eliminated. Sure we ...more
Welcome to the first annual Next Reality 30, our list of people who've made the biggest impact on the augmented reality space in the last 12 months — and what a 12-month roller-coaster ride it's been. Apple introduced ARKit-powered apps last fall, Google launched ARCore for An ...more
When you're capturing video with a DSLR, not having some type of stabilization system can lead to some pretty awful and shaky scenes. Camera instability is not only painful to watch, but breaks the fourth wall. Once that the invisible barrier between filmmaker and audience is ...more
Automatic phone menus are the worst. You call the number, listen to prerecorded prompts, press button, listen, press button, listen, press button, listen, until you're routed or connected to the right extension, directory, menu, person, or whatever. But you can bypass these au ...more
This morning, I received a message from a friend who was reading a hack log, and she had some questions about the commands used. This got me thinking, as Linux has a ton of commands and some can be archaic, yet useful. We are going to go over everything you need to know to rea ...more
Toss aside that Sudoku. Take a stab at the new craze to hit the Times: KenKen. New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz introduces KenKen and gives a brief play-by-play demonstration of this new puzzle craze. In this video, Will Shortz speaks about how he found out about and ...more
The latest film addition in the American-produced Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web, was just released on Blu-ray a few days ago. As you could expect, the movie has many hacking scenes throughout, just like the previous English and Swedish language movies centere ...more
Every summer for the last 26 years, hoards of hackers have descended on the Las Vegas Strip for DEFCON, the biggest hacker conference in the US. There's a wealth of talks every season (DEFCON 27 has at least 95 scheduled), and there have been some essential topics to learn fro ...more
Get some tinfoil hats and make a time machine because we are about to go back to the 90s and learn about some phreaking. Step 1: What Is Phreaking? Phreaking is the action of hacking into telecommunications systems, especially to obtain free calls. Phreaking was big in the 9 ...more
It should come as no surprise that, according to Details Magazine, nearly half of all people who make New Year's resolutions pledge to lose weight, eat healthier, and/or get fit. There are innumerable companies out there that are ready and willing to take advantage of this mom ...more
When we are building programs that communicate over a network, how can we keep our data private? The last thing we want is some other lousy hacker sniffing our packets, so how do we stop them? The easy answer: encryption. However, this is a very wide-ranging answer. Today we'r ...more
Welcome to the second Goonight Byte! Our second coding session was kindly hosted by th3m, so props to him for letting this happen. Our task this time was to hack the bot that we made the week prior, which was only capable of connecting to the channel and then printing message ...more
Hobby rockets are tons of fun. Vicarious astronaut adventures abound with every launch. What if you want to be closer to the action though? What if you want to feel what it's like to be in a rocket at takeoff? With the discovery of tiny keychain cameras, we have technology sma ...more
If you have an iPhone running iOS 15 that's connected to Google Fi or another mobile virtual network operator, you may not be getting any photos or videos in Messages. That may be because you recently installed a software update, and you'll have to restore your cellular data n ...more
There are many reasons to use Filmic Pro if you're a mobile videographer. Chief among them is its automated controls, called "pull-to-point" sliders. These pull-to-point controls not only allow you to manually adjust focus, zoom, exposure, ISO, and shutter speed before and dur ...more
What would it be like to have a super-realistic humanoid modeled after you...and then come face-to-face with the moving, life-like version of yourself... Creepy? To say the least. For the first time, the Geminoid family of robots and their human doppelgangers reunited at the ...more
For $0.25 per transaction, PayPal will soon be allowing you to transfer money through their app that will get delivered within seconds rather than days. The plan was announced this morning, and it comes just after Apple's new Apple Pay features and big bank's move into the pe ...more
Fujitsu Limited has developed what they call the world's smallest Windows 7 PC, which will become available shortly on NTT DoCoMo, Japan's predominant mobile phone operator. The dual-boot device acts as both a smartphone and a portable personal computer that runs the Windows 7 ...more
How is it possible that Iron Man is not yet a reality? DVICE reports that super-powered exoskeletons are indeed within our grasp (if not quite as flashy as Hollywood SFX just yet). Real life exoskeletons fall into the realm of not-too-distant futuristic warfare. Below, five e ...more
It is well documented that what you say and do online is tracked. Yes, private organizations do their best to protect your data from hackers, but those protections don't extend to themselves, advertisers, and law enforcement. Whether you are a journalist, a protestor, or a hi ...more
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that began on April 20, 2010, was the largest maritime oil spill in history. Killing 11 people and discharging 4.1 million barrels of oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico, the event was an unparalleled personal, environmental, and busines ...more
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 wi ...more
If you have just purchased a new Ford Taurus, you may have noticed the new SYNC feature. SYNC is a GPS built right into your dashboard. If this is your first time using a global positioning system, you may need a few pointers. Check out this video and learn how to access step ...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
Anyone who has used Linux long enough is familiar with sudo. Short for superuser do (or substitute user do, depending on who you ask), it allows users to run commands as either root or another user on the system. From a hacker's point of view, sudo is often all that stands bet ...more
Hello null_byters, after some time out here we are again with another tutorial, continuing our beautiful series, today we will write our first real world bash script. BEFORE WE START Before we start today's lesson Let's recap what we learned in the previous lesson, right now ...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
Welcome to a tutorial on XOR encryption. We'll be looking at what XOR is and how we can use it to encrypt or decrypt data. What Is XOR? XOR is a bitwise operation in which each of the bits are compared and applied with the XOR operation according to the following table: We c ...more
Today, on our first episode of Steampunk Research and Development, we'll be interviewing Thomas Willeford, owner and operator of Brute Force Leather. Thomas is a man of many talents, and has worked in a vast array of fields. His Steampunk work can be seen in his book, Steampun ...more
Now that it's been a week since Google+ rolled out pages, we've gotten over our euphoria at finally getting the feature after a long wait, and reality is starting to sink it. It's not as flexible as a Facebook page, it seems to be time consuming, and you can't even get a uniqu ...more
In the previous section of this series on dynamic user interfaces for HoloLens, we learned about delegates and events. At the same time we used those delegates and events to not only attach our menu system to the users gaze, but also to enable and disable the menu based on cer ...more
Cryptography is the science of keeping secrets, or more specifically, the science of disguising them. As a point of fact, cryptography has progressed quite a bit farther and now encompasses file and message integrity, sender authentication, and pseudo-random number generators. ...more
Sometimes you need more than just your brain to split the bill at a restaurant or to calculate how much your cable company is ripping you off. If your math skills are shaky like mine, or you just want to make sure you're unequivocally correct with your calculations, you obvio ...more
While there are many uses for augmented reality in the automotive industry, adoption has been slow. With the plethora of makes and models on the road today and rolling off assembly lines tomorrow, developing and deploying knowledge bases that utilize augmented reality to deale ...more
Now that we have unlocked the menu movement — which is working very smoothly — we now have to get to work on the gaze manager, but first, we have to make a course correction. A misunderstanding of how raycasting works on my part forced me to rethink a portion of the dynamic u ...more
ExcelIsFun will show you how to use indirect text and substitute in Excel. Select any date and product and create an intersession. Use Vlookup to look up your columns. Use the match function to find the value range. To do the same thing with dates, highlight the dates and name ...more
This holiday season, two lucky consumers will have the opportunity to purchase a robot twin, specially made by Japanese robotics firm Kokoro. Says Pink Tentacle, "Department store operator Sogo & Seibu has announced plans to sell two humanoid robots custom-built to look like ...more
User interfaces for computers have evolved over the years, from the introduction of the keyboard and mouse on the personal computer, to touchscreens on mobile devices, to natural voice recognition. However, the same cannot be said for robots or drones—until now. There are two ...more
While the technology companies continue to drive forward with autonomous vehicles, Nissan's vision of the future of self-driving automobiles lies in a cooperative experience between human and machine, facilitated by augmented reality. At CES 2019, which officially kicks off t ...more
Video: . IF function This article describes the formula syntax and usage of the IFfunction in Microsoft Excel. Description The IF function returns one value if a condition you specify evaluates to TRUE, and another value if that condition evaluates to FALSE. For example, the ...more
Hey readers! This tutorial will be the entry point for the introduction of buffer overflows. Something like requesting user input is a very common place for vulnerabilities to pop up and we will definitely have fun while trying to make programs crash. But for now, let's start ...more
Moving a 2000 pound safe isn't easy... I was working as manager for a construction company that was performing an up fit on a century old building in downtown Concord, N.C. The owners wanted us to move a two thousand pound (that's a ton!) safe up to the second story so that i ...more
We will be setting up a portable radio in the mountains. It will be established in a clearing with available rocks for setup. The equipment we will be using is a Yaso radio with microphone and headphone, coaxial cable, slight line and weight, 13.5 battery pack, 2o and 40 meter ...more
Nowadays, with the convenience of online shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers and malls have to work harder to draw shoppers to stores. This year, many of them are turning to augmented reality for assistance. Mall mainstay Swarovski has partnered with AR developer Perfect Cor ...more
Greetings, hackers and friends! I know it has been a while since I posted a tutorial, and hopefully I can make up for that by posting a series. At this point many of you may be asking, "What the heck does it mean to hug the web?" Don't be discouraged, as this is not a hacking ...more
Hey guys, in this tutorial, we are going to learn about the heap segment and how to use it for storing data in our programs. We will also go into the details of its use in conjunction with the char pointer and struct data types. The Heap We've already discussed the stack in ...more
There are a lot of famous steadicam shots where the camera floats just ahead of the actors as they walk along having a conversation. (See just about any episode of "The West Wing" or "Battlestar Galactica.") Perhaps you imagined the cameraman walking backwards, carefully stepp ...more
Rumors have had Google making a foray into the mobile carrier world for quite some time, but today, the Mountain View tech giant finally made things official. The new service, dubbed Project Fi, will be a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MVNO, that uses existing Sprint and ...more
Hello again, reader! In this post, we are going to cover some data types and how to declare variables. It shouldn't be too hard so just sit back, relax, grab some popcorn and enjoy the ride (while you still can!). What Is a Variable? For those who do not know, a variable is ...more
It was brought up a while back in a Community Call to Arms that *math* is handy for encryption (and let's face it, everything) so let us go over things you just have to know. "In its simplest meaning in mathematics and logic, an operation is an action or procedure which produc ...more
In this Houdini 9 software tutorial you will learn how to use the creep sop. The creep sop is a surface operator used for creating surfaces and modeling as well as animating. As the name suggests, you learn to use the creep sop to creep objects or surfaces along another object ...more
This week on the Steampunk Research and Development Podcast, our guest is Joey Marsocci, better known to the world as Dr. Grymm. He's a full-time, professional Steampunk maker, and is the owner and operator of Dr. Grymm Laboratories. He's written several books and has worked a ...more
The Job Board is a weekly entry of the most ridiculous Cinematography related jobs posted online. Note: This posting was from a year ago. Vacancy: DP / Steadicam Op / AC Employer: WTF Productions Location: Hollywood Duration: Four 7 day weeks, starts tomorrow --------------- ...more
Hello there! This will probably be the final tutorial on functions where we will be looking over a method called pass by reference. This technique allows us to modify large amounts of data without the overhead and return multiple values. Let's go! Passing by Value Until now, ...more
This week, another guest returns to our Steampunk R&D show for the second time, Thomas Willeford. In our very first podcast, Thomas talked to us about creating his empire; this time we most notably talk about his recent appearance on the Science Channel's program Odd Folks Hom ...more
Hello again, readers! In our previous crypter tutorial, we looked at how we could obfuscate our malware (or any program) by using a simple one-byte XOR key. In this quick tutorial, we will be looking at how a simple little tweak can create a better means of obfuscation. Let's ...more
Looking for a party game for your child's next birthday party? Follow these directions to have your party participants skipping around the room, playing "Musical Pillows". You Will Need: • A radio or other music player • A music operator • Participants • Pillows Step 1: ...more
Until Star Wars-style 3D hologram projection technology becomes commonplace, the near future of certain kinds of remote work is in robotics. Now, a new dynamic is using augmented reality to give this kind of telepresence a kind of superpower. This week, Double Robotics unveil ...more
Kings Dominion, an amusement park located in Doswell, Virginia, just announced a mobile augmented reality game for park visitors. Gameplay in The Battle for Kings Dominion — available on May 19 for iOS and Android devices — follows the playbook designed by Niantic through Ingr ...more
If it's an emergency, sometime you just don't have enough time or energy to pick up your mobile phone and call 9-1-1. Sometime you just can't move and the only thing still working is your mouth. Ford's new SYNC system provides an option for hands free 911 Assist. In a crash in ...more