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Today, we are going to combine what we learned from the Introduction to Cryptography article with our Java programming skills. If you are new to Java, check out Matthew's Learn Java: Part One for a quick beginner's lesson, or check out some of the Java tutorials directly on Or ...more

It's no secret that water and electronics don't mix well, but somehow, people always manage to combine the two. I've had my fair share of water-damaged electronics, everything from cheap headphones to a desktop computer. My devices are getting dunked in water so much, it's lik ...more

Christmas is no more than a week away and you've still got some holiday shopping to do. Need an easy, thoughtful and personalized gift idea? Phone Snap is here to show you how to bring those cell phone photos off-screen with these DIY marble photo magnets. It takes less than f ...more

I've come across a few very stubborn Xbox consoles in my day. A previous Null Byte demonstrated how to fix the Xbox with just eight pennies and some electrical tape. But if you've got one of those hell-born boxes that just refuses to be fixed in any way, shape, or form, there ...more

In Linux, all password hashes are normally stored using the MD5 hashing algorithm in the /etc/shadow file, but MD5 is algorithmically weak due to collision vulnerabilities. The new recommended standard are the higher level SHA-2 hashing algorithms, SHA256 or SHA512. As a frien ...more

Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills. Submit your best shot to our weekly competition for a chance to win an awes ...more

+Eric Cattell, the Social Graph Technical Lead of Google+, announced a lot of improvements and added features this morning, most of them having to do with circle management and blocking people. Invite People More Easily You can now invite people with just a single link, in a ...more

One of my biggest frustrations with Google+ right now is the inability to search my stream, as well as the lack of any bookmarking features. To find posts I want to refer to, I either have to type in the name of the person who posted the status, or I have to keep hitting the " ...more

He may have just started his teenage years, but Laurence Rock's future is looking pretty good after inventing an ingenious doorbell device called Smart Bell. He's already sold 20,000 units to telecoms giant Commtel Innovate, and is securing a second deal with an unidentified c ...more

Introduction This is one of the things I am asked the most and there are so many different answers. It is hard to just tell you without know your computer's current speed or what type of hardware it has. So here I will talk about how to speed up a slow computer and how to kee ...more

Building Material Request Links for Brick, Nail, Wooden Board Update: Watering Can Request As the Make a Wish feature from the gift box often end up with errors, here are simple directions to create a personalized gift request that will allow your friends to send you the ite ...more

New Levels! Levels 70-90 released. You will get your 20 farm cash if you skip straight to 90 because you had enough xp, or the appropriate amount for however many levels you've completed. Game changes No more pink 'ready' dots all over when taking farm photos. Wheat is now ...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

As you may have seen in your city or town, red light cameras are on the rise in the United States. In many instances in my area, these cameras have sprung up seemingly out of no-where, and mostly without any reason. Over use of these systems can make privacy (even on the road) ...more

House plants are a refreshing reminder of the rich biosphere teaming with life just outside of our hermetically sealed human dens. They calm us and clean our air. But what would you do if you came across a glowing green flower on your dinner table? I would be startled, but not ...more

There's a time in everyone's life when they need to become immortalized and reprographed in a full-blown comic spread, complete with halftone dots and speech bubbles—or squares, if you're a square. With our favorite program Photoshop, you can quickly turn any hyperbolic celebr ...more

Hello, nubile young Photoshop explorers! As we all know, besides design, Photoshop is best used for revenge, as will be demonstrated below. This is my ex-girlfriend, Cassandra. She dumped me because I had "poor bone structure." I'll bone her structure! Well, not anymore, I gue ...more

Here at Null Byte, we try to inform and teach the community on ways to navigate the Internet in that special way, as well as staying safe along the trip. That being said, I need some help from all of you! There is a lot of information to cover and I know we have some smart use ...more

Last time, we looked at archaic cryptography, so you should have a basic understanding of some of the concepts and terminology you'll need. Now, we'll discuss one of the most important advances in computer security in the 20th century—public key cryptography. What Is Public K ...more

I recently posted a link to what seemed to be a very useful guide on Lifehacker for creating a TOR button in Chrome. However, when I tried it myself, it did not work. Also, it lacked a warning on the limits of Tor, which I think are important. Therefore, I decided to create an ...more

Are you the expert hacker we're looking for? Do you have a great idea for an article on Null Byte? Do you have a passion to write, and more importantly... teach? We're officially looking for Null Byters on a weekly basis who are willing to take the time to educate the communi ...more

Although +Google Chrome has been getting many deserved kudos for its innovations and speed, many people still prefer to use +Mozilla Firefox as their primary browser. If you’re a dedicated Google+ user, you know that there are many Google+ Chrome browser extensions available t ...more

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 s ...more

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 ser ...more

I'm sure we've all heard about MSN and Yahoo! Messenger, right? They can be useful, but the setup can be quite time consuming for those who need to use it just once or twice—and the privacy statements are a real bother. For example, we must provide our real details. You could ...more

Yesterday, I started receiving emails from Google+ that looked like this: I was really confused. I was confident that I had already gone through my personal Google+ account notification settings, and turned off all email notifications. I noticed that there was a link at the b ...more

Scrabble Bingo of the Day: TRAVOISE [n] Today's word is in honor of Joel Sherman, whose record-breaking game last weekend netted him seven bingo plays, one of which was TRAVOISE. A travoise is a type of sled, but no… it's not like a toboggan or snow sleigh. Though it can be, ...more

In honor of the new Astronomy World, I thought we should look at a few planetary icosahedrons. The icosahedron is the most round of the Platonic solids with twenty faces, thus has the smallest dihedral angles. This allows it to unfold into a flat map with a reasonably acceptab ...more

Increasingly, I'm turning to Google+ as a source of news, and it looks like I'm not the only one. On Thursday, news of a small earthquake broke on both Twitter and Google+. One curious user, +Keith Barrett, decided to try and find out which social network was faster with the n ...more

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, s ...more

Things have been a bit quiet on the Google+ Insider's Guide this week. With the launch of the new Facebook, Google+ is finding itself a bit on the defensive. However, recent data shows that by making Google+ available to the general public, their traffic has jumped 13-fold, ac ...more

This week has been pretty exciting for both Facebook and Google. Facebook announced a slew of features that seem on the surface to copy Google+. For Google+ users, a lot of improvements, updates and features were implemented, and they're seeing a lot more overall integration w ...more

Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills. Submit your best shot to our weekly competition for a chance to win an awes ...more

Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills. Submit your best shot to our weekly competition for a chance to win an awes ...more

We're ending the week with a lot of big announcements and updates. To date, Google+ has updated its name policy, but is still forbidding pseudonyms. Blocking people on Google+ became even easier, and yesterday, games on Google+ launched. Google+ Name Policy Changes Google+ h ...more

We've covered Chrome browser extensions that make your Google+ experience richer and more useful, but there are still many users who prefer to use Firefox. To that end, I've gathered 13 Firefox add-ons to aid in the enhancement of your Google+ experience. A word of caution: m ...more

Dactyloscopy isn’t going anywhere. Forensic science has much relied on fingerprinting as a means of identification, largely because of the massive amount of fingerprints stored in the FBI’s biometric database (IAFIS), which houses over 150,000 million prints. And thanks to the ...more

With so many wireless iOS networking apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch available, there’s very little reason to connect any of these devices to iTunes, except to update the software. Besides, importing and exporting photos using iTunes has never been one of the best fe ...more

Private browsing is all the rage with browsers these days. Once you go into private browsing mode, you can traverse the internet without leaving a trail. Your history? Deleted. Your cookies? Destroyed. Your bookmarks and non-private history? Preserved for when you come back to ...more

Getting the best deal on laminate flooring can take a little time to research all the choices on the market these days. The two basic choices you have these days are buying online or buying in your local market. Online merchants don't tend to carry the high overhead cost as yo ...more

Nope, this isn't a flash game version of SCRABBLE. There's already one of those (and a multitude of imitations) for the Apple iPhone, iPod, and Facebook. This is an electronic game, and it's not a "handheld" game like the SCRABBLE Pocket Pogo Touch Screen Game (pictured right) ...more

Hey, hackers! Now that you've hacked/owned your first "box" in my last article, let's look a little closer at another great feature of Metasploit, the Meterpreter, and then let’s move on to hacking a Linux system and using the Meterpreter to control and own it. Why Meterprete ...more

Just a couple Saturday's ago, we were blessed with the Supermoon, where the moon was at perigee with our planet, creating a larger than usual Moon for us here on Earth. Now, we've got another spectacular show in the skies coming up, only this one isn't at night. There will be ...more

Even if you live in a big city, chances are you have some wild raccoons or foxes that cannot abide a vertical trash barrel. While apparently omnipresent, these phantasmic critters usually vanish in the night leaving only a shameless trail of refuse you never wanted to see ever ...more

Spring has sprung, which means it's time to plant all those delicious vegetables and lucrative cash crops. If you are like me, every year you meticulously plan every aspect of your garden before dutifully neglecting it all summer. I decided enough was enough and built this sim ...more

For a moment, picture a situation where you want to host some files or images, but you do not want it traced back to you. Perhaps you're working on a project with others and need secure data storage. Anonymity is the new shield of the 21st century—and you best protect yourself ...more

You've probably seen those deep-web images floating around on the Internet. Usually, it goes something like this: There is a towering iceberg and the deeper the underwater portion extends, the more “hidden” and “exotic” the content is described to be. Sometimes these images ar ...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

In this article, I'll show you how to built a Wireless Transfer of Energy Transmitter. Simply put, this device will send electricity to a florescent light bulb and light it up, from up to three feet. The idea originally (at least, prominently) came from Nikola Tesla (read more ...more

Valentine's Day is almost here, and if you're like me, you're scurrying to do something special for your mate. The standard chocolates and flowers just isn't cutting it anymore, and you can only make so many homemade cards before it becomes banal and meaningless. So, what can ...more

It's once again Monday, which means it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. Since two of these posts were on polyhedral versions of M.C. Escher's tessellations, I thought we'd take a look at building a simple tes ...more

Last Thursday, on October 7th, indie game developers from around the world walked down a red carpet in Santa Monica, California in the hopes of winning an IndieCade award. We previously discussed the IndieCade festival and conference, but the award show is a smaller, more incl ...more

When you're out and about in the dangerous world of Wi-Fi, it's hard for the average computer user to stay protected, or even know what being protected entails. Little do most people know, Windows 7 has a built-in security that few people take advantage of: a VPN (Virtual Priv ...more

The dreaded moment you hope never happens—someone has stolen your laptop. You could have private information, pictures, or even private information belonging to the company you work for, all lost forever. It can cause you pain, money, or even a job. There are paid services th ...more

Are you finding that the Google+ features you've been waiting for are still not rolling out quickly enough for you? Although we've provided many solutions to Google+ issues with different Chrome extensions, it still seems like it's not enough. Now that we've been using Google+ ...more

Last week's round up was all about third party services that sprang up to fill any Google+ voids. This week, I'll let you know how to keep up with the latest Google+ updates, and give you some great tips for interacting with your followers. Although Google+ updated its naming ...more