Dear Lifehacker, I have some background in coding, but I’ve never touched Android development before. I’d like to get started, but I’m not entirely sure what I need. I don’t need to “learn to code” per se, but I could use some guidance on where to start with Android. Can you help?
Tag Archives: howto
How to Spot Ingenico Self-Checkout Skimmers
The overlay skimming devices pictured here include their own tiny magnetic read heads to snarf card data from the magnetic stripe when customers swipe their cards. Consequently, those tiny readers often interfere with the legitimate magnetic card reader on the underlying device, meaning compromised self-checkout lines may move a bit slower than others.
Source: How to Spot Ingenico Self-Checkout Skimmers — Krebs on Security
How does iptables hashlimit module work?
Hashlimit is an iptables module that allows one to define rules that in effect will limit traffic speed (bytes / time unit) or frequency (connections / time unit) per target or origin ports / IPs. The inner workings of this module and / or how to make it work correctly remains a mystery for many.
Hashlimit is also close friends with the limit module, only much more powerful, capable of expressing rate limiting per source IP (for example) in a single rule.
Source: Stuff I do: How does iptables hashlimit module work?
Image Processing 101
In this article, I will go through some basic building blocks of image processing, and share some code and approaches to basic how-tos.
Source: Image Processing 101
Getting Started with GNU Radio
There are several key building blocks that combine to make SDR possible. The first is some input device (a source) that is sampled at some sampling rate. For an audio device, the samples will be real numbers. However, radio devices will more likely provide complex numbers with an I and Q component.
Logjam: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice
We have published a technical report, Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice, which has specifics on these attacks, details on how we broke the most common 512-bit Diffie-Hellman group, and measurements of who is affected. We have also published several proof of concept demos and a Guide to Deploying Diffie-Hellman for TLS.
Source: Logjam: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice
What should I do?
If you run a server…
If you have a web or mail server, you should disable support for export cipher suites and generate a unique 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman group. We have published a Guide to Deploying Diffie-Hellman for TLS with step-by-step instructions. If you use SSH, you should upgrade both your server and client installations to the most recent version of OpenSSH, which prefers Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.
Graphics from the command line
This article shows how to perform image manipulation using command-line tools. I do this job quite often, since I’ve picked up a some digital cameras and now manage a library of several thousand happy snaps. For Web developers and administrators who frequently have to batch-process large numbers of images, command line tools are an especially attractive option, because the developer can incorporate them into scripts. But even if you only want to perform a manipulation once or twice, a command-line alternative can save time.
The command line tools discussed in this article are part of the excellent ImageMagick suite, which ships with Red Hat Linux and is freely available online (see Resources). ImageMagick can also be accessed via C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and several other languages, which Linux programmers will appreciate.
how to calculate packet loss from a binary TCPDUMP file
You can measure packet retransmits from the client to the server by counting the number of duplicate sequence numbers.
Packet retransmits from the server to the client can be measured by counting duplicate Ack numbers.
Note that a retransmit is triggered by more than just total loss (= timeout); if the remote machine rejects the packet, or the packet is corrupted, the local machine must also retransmit.
via networking – how to calculate packet loss from a binary TCPDUMP file – Server Fault.
I needed a way to measure this on a wifi network where packet loss can be very high and bursty. This answer seems relatively simple to implement — just store off ACK sequence numbers into an array of limited size and count how many times every new ACK matches in that array. By monitoring this count I can determine where and when certain areas are getting bad and perhaps alert or alarm based upon a certain threshold.
How To Create a Pure CSS Dropdown Menu
With the help of some advanced selectors a dropdown menu can be easily created with CSS. Throw in some fancy CSS3 properties and you can create a design that was once only achievable with background images and Javascript. Follow this tutorial to see the step by step process of building your own pure CSS dropdown menu.
via How To Create a Pure CSS Dropdown Menu.
Also here: Another Simple CSS3 Dropdown Menu
The beginners guide to breaking website security with nothing more than a Pineapple
What you’re looking at in the image above is a little device about the size of a cigarette packet running a piece of firmware known as “Jasager” (which over in Germany means “The Yes Man”) based on OpenWrt (think of it as Linux for embedded devices). Selling for only $100, it packs Wi-Fi capabilities, a USB jack, a couple of RJ45 Ethernet connectors and implements a kernal mode wireless feature known as “Karma”.
via Troy Hunt: The beginners guide to breaking website security with nothing more than a Pineapple.
But why on earth would a victim connect to the Pineapple in the first place?! Well firstly, we’ve become alarmingly accustomed to connecting to random wireless access points whilst we’re out and about. When the average person is at the airport waiting for a flight and sees an SSID named “Free Airport Wi-Fi”, what are they going to do? Assume it’s an attacker’s honeypot and stay away from it or believe that it’s free airport Wi-Fi and dive right in? Exactly.