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How to encrypt your Android device
Your Android device is a pocket-size container of important information that you don’t want to fall into the wrong hands. Think of your emails, SMS messages, contacts, credit card numbers, files, photos, etc. being exposed to someone who whether by intent or by accident got a hold of your Android phone or tablet.
No one wants to be in that vulnerable scenario. That’s why you can lock down your Android device with a combination of protective security measures, one of which is encryption, a pretty important one.
Learn everything about what encryption is, how it works, and how you can encrypt your Android device from this guide.
What is encryption?
Encryption refers to the process of scrambling information in a way that makes the information non-understandable by anyone else except those who know how to unscramble it. The only way to bring it back to a readable or recognizable form is to decrypt it using a key.
This can be better understood with an analogy. Take the case of your diary written in English. If you lose the diary, the finder who understands English will be able to unravel the secrets that you keep in between the pages. But, if the entries were written in a secret code or language, no one could easily understand the contents, even if one has physical possession of the pages.
A similar analogy can be applied to the personal data on your Android device. A thief could take hold of your phone and access personal data such as your account info, app data, emails and SMS, files, and other sensitive info on your device. But, even if the thief does have access to your data, for as long as your data is “garbled” or encrypted, the data will just be a bunch of gobbledygook to the thief. It will be practically just junk and useless.
In short, encrypting your data won’t prevent a thief from accessing or getting a copy of your information. Rather, it will prevent the thief from reading and understanding your information.
How does it work? What does it do?
To illustrate encryption further, let’s encipher (or encode) the word “Android” using simple substitution which replaces each letter with the second letter that comes after it in the English alphabet. That is, A is replaced by C, B is replaced by D, and so on. Using this substitution system, the word “Android” is then encrypted into “Cpftqkf” and your data thief won’t be able to make any sense of it at all. One has to know the “key” to decode the message. In this case, the key is the equivalence of A and C, B and D, and so on.
But, such substitution is too simplistic and can be easily cracked. Such simplistic encryption methods and algorithms are not used, of course, because they are not safe or secure. Thankfully, cryptography these days uses methods and algorithms more complex than just mere substitution or transposition and not very easy to solve even by computers.
Encryption of digital data comes in various shapes, sizes, and flavors. You can encrypt whole disks (e.g., hard disk drives, USB drives, SD cards), individual files or folders, network traffic, emails, and databases. It is a great way to “hide” or “disguise” your data from unauthorized people.
Although not all Android users feel the need to encrypt their phones and tablets to add an extra layer of security, Android does come with built-in ability to encrypt your phone or tablet. But, is encryption for you and do you really need it?
Why do it at all?
Foremost of all, you will want to encrypt your phone to further protect the data that it holds. A mere PIN or password may suffice for keeping your little ones or friends from tampering with your files — even the less-secure pattern lock could do the trick — but it may not be enough to keep a knowledgeable thief from accessing your data. Although, arguably, the difficulty of access will increase if the data are encrypted. While no security method or system is completely foolproof, you can use a combination of methods to help increase security.
You will want to encrypt your phone not as much to preserve your data as to prevent the finder (e.g., a phone thief) from being able to use your data. Provided you’ve PIN- or password-protected your device, an unsophisticated thief will most likely only go as far as booting the device into recovery mode and doing a factory reset from there — before selling the gadget.
If you’re a casual or average Android user, you can probably get by without encrypting your phone or tablet. For as long as you follow the tenets of basic protection for Android, you’ll most likely be fine. Most petty thieves of phones or tablets simply don’t care as much about what’s on the stolen phone as how much they could sell the stolen gadget for.
But, if you work for the government, you worry about corporate espionage, and/or you simply want to increase the security of your data, you’ll want to encrypt your device to protect your data against people who might be interested more in the data that you lug around in your mobile device than in the device itself.
Knowledgeable thieves who know their way around stuff like custom recoveries, bootloaders, or Android Debug Bridge (ADB), can easily extract data from your phone — even if it is PIN- or password-protected. German researchers, for example, have found a technique known as FROST (Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones), which uses cold booting to extract phone data even if the phone is protected by a PIN or is encrypted.
Competent data thieves can easily access your data. Having a rooted phone and/or an unlocked bootloader can also make data access easier for such folks.
But, still, encrypting your phone data makes the data harder to access by most knowledgeable thieves. Ensuring that your phone’s bootloader is secure and that your phone is not rooted also adds protection. Encryption is not altogether perfect and has its own sets of flaws. Nevertheless, encryption adds an additional layer of protection to your device, making it more secure than one with unencrypted data.
Some considerations
Before deciding whether or not to encrypt your Android, take note of the following:
- The process of encrypting and decrypting adds an additional load to and uses resources on your Android device. This can take a hit at your device’s performance and can result in lag. On slower devices, the lag can be noticeable. But, generally and in most cases, the delay is negligible. Your mileage may vary, though.
- The initial encryption process usually takes about an hour to finish — or more, depending on the amount of data to be encrypted.
- Do not interrupt the encryption process. Doing so could lead to permanent loss of data.
- Encryption is irreversible. You cannot toggle encryption on or off. The only way to remove it is to perform a factory reset, which also wipes your device’s data.
- To use an encrypted Android device, you’ll need to enter your password or PIN at boot time. This allows the device to decrypt the data so that you can use the device as you normally would.
- Pattern and swipe lock screens will be disabled when you encrypt your device. These aren’t as secure as a PIN or password anyway.
- You can’t encrypt Android tablets with existing multiple user accounts. Delete the additional accounts first before you encrypt your tablet.
If you’re all good with these conditions, go ahead and encrypt your Android device.
Encrypting your Android
Android encryption is a straightforward procedure. Take note that the menu locations may vary from device to device. Certain custom Android UIs and skins (e.g., Samsung TouchWiz UX) may also include other requirements. The steps below will guide you through the process.
First, set a PIN or password as screen lock for your Android device. The PIN or password that you assign will also be the decryption key and is, therefore, needed before encryption can proceed.
Some device manufacturers impose additional security lock requirements, such as this on the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4.
After setting a PIN or password, head to the Security submenu under the Settings menu and select Encrypt Phone or Encrypt Tablet. The encryption menu may be in a different location on some devices. On the HTC One, for instance, it’s under the Storage submenu in Settings.
The Encryption menu will look something like the following:
A short reminder will be shown on the screen. Encryption takes some time, so it is important to have enough power to last through the whole process. If your device has little power left, you will be notified before encryption can proceed. You will also need to plug your device to its charger before you can encrypt your device.
If you’re all set, tap the Encrypt Phone or Encrypt Tablet button at the bottom. Your device will ask for your PIN or password. Enter your PIN or password to confirm. You will see a warning message. Tap the Encrypt Phone or Encrypt Tablet button again to begin the encryption process.
Your device will reboot and will start the encryption. You’ll see a progress indicator of the encryption process. Encryption time varies and will depend on the amount of data on your device.
While encryption is ongoing, do not use or play with your device. If you interrupt the encryption process, you could lose all or part of your data permanently.
Once encryption is complete, your Android device will reboot, and your phone will ask you to type the password to decrypt storage. Type your PIN or password. Your device will decrypt your data and will boot back to Android.
You will know that your device has been encrypted when you find the label “Encrypted” in the Security submenu, or when at boot time your device asks for your password to decrypt the storage.
Encrypting external SD card
Some devices with external storage (e.g., Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4) allow encrypting the data on the external SD card.
Usually, you can choose which files from your external SD card to encrypt. You can encrypt the entire external storage, or include/exclude multimedia files, or encrypt only new files (without encrypting the existing ones). So, in a sense, you have several encryption options for your SD card data.
The encrypted data on your external SD card won’t be accessible if you use the SD card on another Android device that wasn’t used for encrypting the SD card. Some devices will even report the encrypted SD card as either blank or having an unsupported file system.
External SD card encryption can also be undone. Unlike full-disk encryption of your phone’s internal storage. You can decrypt your external microSD card. On the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4, for instance, you can decrypt your external microSD card through the Encrypt External SD Card menu. The specific steps may vary depending on device or the firmware version.
Also be careful when you decide to encrypt or decrypt your external microSD card because some Android devices will erase all existing content when encrypting or decrypting your external storage.
Encrypting Android tablets with multiple-user accounts
In my experience with the only tablet that I have, the Nexus 7, encryption is impossible when other user accounts besides the primary account exist on the tablet. When I attempted to encrypt my Nexus 7, it just rebooted but did not go through the encryption process.
Only after I deleted all other user accounts did the encryption proceed. I suspect that this behavior is also the same on other tablets that have Android’s multiuser feature. So, if you run into the same road bump when trying to encrypt your Android tablet, try removing the other user accounts first.
After encryption, I was able to add new users. However, only the primary owner’s PIN or password can be used as the decrypt key. The primary user can’t use Swipe or Pattern for the lockscreen, but the other users can.
Encrypting through an Android app
Android’s built-in encryption function is for the whole of your internal storage, but what if you want to encrypt only some of your files and directories/folders? That’s what encryption apps are for. With the help of encryption apps, you can choose which files to encrypt rather than choose to encrypt everything on disk. You can even permanently decrypt your encrypted data without having to wipe your device.
There is more than a handful of encryption apps on the Google Play Store, but here I’ll tell you a bit of two of my favorite ones: SSE – Universal Encryption App and Encryption Manager.
SSE – Universal Encryption App
The no-cost and ads-free SSE – Universal Encryption App is a simple encryption app that lets you encrypt and decrypt files on your Android device.
To encrypt your files, launch the app and select File/Dir Encryptor. Locate your desired file or long tap on a folder and select Encrypt. You will then need to enter a password that will serve as your decrypt key. Afterwards, the app will then begin the encryption process.
By default, the app will keep a copy of the unencrypted original and create a new, encrypted copy which will have *.enc as filename extension. For security’s sake, of course, you’ll want to delete the source or original copy. Or, simply enable the Wipe Source After Encryption function in the app’s settings menu; it will cause the app to automatically delete the original file after encrypting it.
To decrypt a file or folder, simply tap on the encrypted file and select Decrypt. Enter your password for that file and the app will produce a separate decrypted copy of that file.
Aside from encrypting files, SSE – Universal Encryption App also features a Password Vault and a Text Encryptor.
Password Vault allows you to store your personal passwords of different accounts. While the Text Encryptor app allows you to encrypt and decrypt texts such as confidential notes or personal messages that you want to keep from prying eyes. Both features also need a password to access them.
Encryption Manager
Another encryption and decryption app that you can use on your mobile device is Encryption Manager.
First time you run the app, you will need to set a PIN. This will serve as your master key to be able to access all the features of the app. You will need to enter your PIN every time you use the app to be able encrypt and decrypt files within the app. Make sure to remember your PIN. If you entered the wrong PIN, you will only have 6 attempts to enter the correct PIN before the app deletes all encrypted data within the app.
To encrypt a file or folder, just tap the Add button on the app’s main menu and locate the desired file or folder. Long-tap on the file and select Manage Encrypted.
Before you begin encryption, you can set the app to delete the original files after encryption. If you have selected a folder, you can choose to encrypt files and subfolders and to delete empty folders after encryption. You can also choose which encryption algorithm to use before encrypting a file.
What I like best about this app is that you can easily decrypt a file when you want to use it, and the app deletes the decrypted file after use. Just tap on an encrypted file on the list of encrypted files and the app will decrypt it. Once you’re done using the file, the app will ask you if you want to delete the decrypted file.
The free version of the app, called Encryption Manager Lite, lets you encrypt up to only five files. To remove the limit, you can go for the premium version which costs about US$4.00.
These two apps are just sample of encryption apps available on the Google Play Store. There are other encryption apps that you can use to protect your messages, photos, call logs, and other sensitive data on your Android handset.
Final thoughts
Our Android devices are filled with all sorts of confidential data that we don’t want unwanted people to mess with — messages, contact information, credit accounts, and other more. That’s why we need to safeguard not just our Android devices but also the data that they contain. For the latter, encryption is a reliable way of securing your mobile digital data. On Android, this is easily achieved through its built-in encryption feature.
Although encryption can’t give full protection to your sensitive data, you’ll sleep much more soundly at night knowing that potential data thieves won’t easily be able to use your confidential information because of encryption.
Credits: AndroidAuthority
Facebook Experimenting With a ‘Sympathize’ Button
You wouldn’t have to awkwardly ‘like’ sad statuses anymore
The long-coveted “dislike” button may never make its way Facebook. But a Facebook engineer said Thursday that the social network has informally experimented with an alternative to “like”: specifically, the “sympathize” button.
Facebook’s members have for years demanded a less cheery way to quickly respond to friends’ posts, pointing out that “liking” becomes awkward and inappropriate when someone posts about a breakup, a death or even just a bad day.
The social network evidently hears their complaints: During a Facebook hackathon held “a little while back,” an engineer devised a “sympathize” button that would accompany gloomier status updates, according to Dan Muriello, a different Facebook engineer who described the hackathon experiment at a company event Thursday. If someone selected a negative emotion like “sad” or “depressed” from Facebook’s fixed list of feelings, the “like” button would be relabeled “sympathize.”
Playing around with a “sympathize” button at a hackathon — a chance for staffers to brainstorm new ideas for site features — hardly guarantees it’ll pop up in feeds soon. The social network relies on its hackathons to explore out-of-the-box ideas, many of which never materialize.
Muriello said his colleague’s creation was well-received by fellow Facebookers, but isn’t making its way to the site. For now.
“It would be, ‘five people sympathize with this,’ instead of ‘five people ‘like’ this,'” said Muriello. “Which of course a lot of people were — and still are — very excited about. But we made a decision that it was not exactly the right time to launch that product. Yet.”
Muriello spoke during a presentation at Facebook’s Compassion Research Day, a day-long public event at which researchers from Facebook, Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley shared findings from studies on human behavior on Facebook.
A Facebook spokesman called the hackathons “the foundation for great innovation and thinking about how we can better serve people around the world.”
“Some of our best ideas come from hackathons, and the many ideas that don’t get pursued often help us think differently about how we can improve our service,” the spokesman wrote in a email to The Huffington Post.
Yet many of the site’s signature features, like Facebook Chat, the friend suggester and the Timeline profile pages, have indeed emerged from hackathons.
If you’re someone who loves the idea of “sympathizing” your way through the News Feed, here’s one reason to be hopeful: The “like” button itself was a hackathon invention.
Computer Manufacturers Ranked: How to Pick a Laptop That Won’t Fail
With so many options available, picking the right laptop can prove awfully difficult. How do you know you’ll end up with a reliable model? Or one that will last you at least three years without feeling outdated? While you can’t predict the future, you can use information from the past to figure out your best bet before you make your purchase.
Know Your Statistical Chance of Success
Any laptop can break, but some manufacturers have a better track record than others. A 2012 study by SquareTrade, that looked at failure rates over the course of three years, found that Asus’ electronics broke the least often (followed very closely by Toshiba) and HP’s broke the most often. In fact, with HP, you had more than a one in four chance of getting a broken laptop in those three years. That may seem high, but even the best couldn’t achieve a failure rate below 15%. Let’s take a look at the rankings, from best to worst:
- Asus: 15.6%
- Toshiba: 15.7%
- Sony: 16.8%
- Apple: 17.4%
- Dell: 18.3%
- Lenovo: 21.5%
- Acer: 23.3%
- Gateway: 23.5%
- HP: 25.6%
Some of these numbers should come as a surprise to most people. If I purchased based on anecdotal evidence I heard from friends and colleagues, I’d assume Apple made the most reliable machines and Dell and Sony made the worst. Everyone probably has their own, somewhat incorrect idea of failure rates based on a few stories they’ve heard. While these numbers don’t account for everything, they do matter somewhat. If you want a better chance of a lasting machine, Toshiba and Asus are more likely to provide one.
Choose a Company with Good Tech Support
If you plan to keep a machine for several years, you do want to know the customer support you receive won’t suck. Personally, I hate dealing with customer support so much that I replace my laptop yearly before it has a chance to break. This improves resale value considerably and, therefore, doesn’t come at a particularly high premium. Of course, this isn’t the path for everyone and many people would prefer to have their machines functional for several years before they have to replace them. If that’s the case, you want a company with a good track record in tech support.
The hands-down winner in this category shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing as they love to tell everyone. According to a 2012 study conducted by Consumer Reports, Apple received a much higher rating than every other manufacturer surveyed. Acer (and their acquired company Gateway) scored the worst. Here’s the breakdown, scored out of 100 from best to worst:
- Apple: 86
- Lenovo: 63
- Asus: 62
- Dell: 60
- Toshiba: 59
- HP: 58
- Acer/Gateway: 51
- Sony: No Score Available
When combining tech support ratings with failure rates, who comes out on top? Apple comes out with the highest average thanks to their very high support rating. For those who don’t want to buy Apple, Asus claims the next highest score. Unfortunately we don’t have a number for Sony, so don’t necessarily count them out here. As we’ll discuss in the rest of this post, the numbers aren’t everything.
You can look at statistics all your like but they don’t paint a complete picture. Sometimes companies have a bad track record with overall machines because they make a lot of crappy, budget laptops and desktops. Others may suffer in the ratings because of who they sell more of those machines to, as groups of people (e.g. large companies, students) may or may not have higher repair and return rates. You don’t know, so you shouldn’t take the statistics mentioned here as a definitive reason not to buy from a particular company. Most manufacturers will create a lot of crappy computers along with the good ones. You have to pay attention to the outliers to get a better picture of your best buying options.
This is easier said than done, but certain resources can help. The Wirecutter profiles several laptop categories to help you find your best options. While the models they choose won’t always fit your exact needs, they offer several alternatives if you need to spend a little less, a little more, need a different screen size, and so on. If you want user reviews, you just need to know what to focus on when looking through Amazon or the like. Instead of paying attention to star ratings or overall critiques of a laptop, search the reviews for information that pertains to your questions and requirements. For example, if you need a quiet laptop for note-taking in a meeting or class, search for reviews that talk about fan noise and heat. This way you can see how people feel about the things that matter to you and ignore complaints that might make you think better or worse of a machine unnecessarily.
Consider Your Needs
Buying a great laptop isn’t the same as buying a great laptop for you. You have to consider your needs when making a choice, otherwise you’ll wind up with generally great hardware that may not do what you want it to do. While obvious, when you get lost in statistics and reviews you can start to convince yourself you want what the numbers and the professionals say you want. Before you jump into your laptop buying research, make a list of your goals. Decide what you want this laptop to do for you, how long you’ll need it for, and what you consider most important when buying it. When you weigh your options, make sure those options meet the criteria on your list. And, of course, make sure you get a chance to actually try that laptop out in person. This way you can help ensure you get your perfect machine.
Lifehacker:
How the feds snoop: What happens when you hit ‘send’ on your email
The Internet makes it easy to send information to far-flung places in an instant – hit “send,” and poof, there it goes. But where does that information go, how does it get there and who gets access to the data?
Every second of every day, billions of bits of data speed through an elaborate network, much of it created and controlled by companies such as Yahoo and Google.
Indeed, the latest leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, say that NSA has tapped into Google and Yahoo’s data cables and vacuumed up emails and phone records, although security official say Americans are filtered out.
Big tech companies — among them Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, in addition to Google and Yahoo — say they worry they’re losing an arms race to secure their users’ information and have called for new laws to stop U.S. intelligence agencies from breaking into data centers.
Those data centers, often misleadingly called the “cloud,” in reality have nothing ethereal about them. They’re thousands of miles of cables and high-tech switches and computers. They’re warehouse-sized buildings that hum with servers to collect and store huge reams of data.
“For your email account, you know you can have years worth of data stored in your account,” Kim Zetter of Wired magazine told NBC News.
Google alone has six such large data centers in the United States and seven more overseas.
“A lot of people think if I’m in the U.S., my data is stored in the U.S., and that’s really not the case,” Zetter said.
Jim Stickley, a cybersecurity expert, said it’s those cables where the vulnerability lies.
“You have thousands and thousands of miles out there of this fiber optic cable,” Stickley said. “And so presumably the NSA has found somewhere to gain access to this cable and physically attach some sort of device to capture data on this network.”
On Thursday, Google issued a statement, which said, in part: “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks.”
Google said it is now working to encrypt its high-speed fiber optic lines in order to counter NSA snooping.
But even if that company’s system is secure, it’s clear that these Internet giants have become the gatekeepers of our digital lives.
“We have put all of our digital eggs into their baskets; they’re not in ours anymore,” Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NBC News. “And whether that’s wise in terms of privacy and security is, I think, a very open question.”
Bruce Schneier, a Harvard Law School fellow who writes frequently on cybersecurity, said there’s only one surefire way to protect yourself from snooping, and it’s an idea most people won’t like: Give up your email.
“You cannot be on the systems. That’s what you can do,” he said in a telephone interview. “Whenever you go into a cloud, you have to trust the cloud provider. There’s nothing you can do. It’s not your data. It’s their data.”
One reason there is so much data collection, Schneier said, is that “surveillance is very, very cheap — that’s the problem.”
He added, “Adding encryption makes surveillance more expensive, which means they can’t do it as much.”
So, for anyone feeling a little digitally vulnerable, there appears to be only one way around it: Write a letter and get a stamp.
Source: Stephanie Gosk and Jeff Black, NBC News –
How to Break Into a Windows PC (and Prevent It from Happening to You)
If you’re trying to break into a Windows computer—whether you’ve forgotten your password or are hatching a more sinister plan—you have quite a few options. Here’s how to do it, and how to keep your own computer protected.
There are a few methods to breaking into a computer, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Here, we’ll go through three of the best and most common methods, and nail down their shortcomings so you know which one to use—and how to exploit their weaknesses to keep your own computer secure.
The Lazy Method: Get at the Files with a Linux Live CD
1.
If you don’t need access to the OS itself, just a few files, you don’t need to go through much trouble at all. You can grab any Linux live CD and just drag-and drop files onto a USB hard drive, as you would in any other OS.
How It Works: Just download the live .iso file for any Linux distribution (like the ever-popular Ubuntu) and burn it to CD. Stick it in the computer you want to access and boot up from that CD. Pick “Try Ubuntu” when it comes up with the first menu, and it should take you right into a desktop environment. From here, you can access most of the hard drive just by going to the Places menu in the menu bar and choosing the Windows drive. It should see any NTFS drives just fine.
Note that depending on the permissions of some files, you might need root access. If you’re having trouble viewing or copying some files, open up a terminal window (by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in sudo nautilus, leaving the password blank when prompted. You should now have access to everything.
How to Beat It: This method can give you access to the file system, but its main weakness is that the malicious user still can’t access any encrypted files, even when using sudo. So, if the owner of the computer (or you) has encrypted their files (or encrypted the entire OS), you won’t get very far.
Break Into Windows, Method One: Clear the Password with the Trinity Rescue Kit
If you need access to the operating system itself, the Linux-based Trinity Rescue CD is a good option for breaking in. You’ll need to do a bit of command line work, but as long as you follow the instructions closely you should be fine.
How It Works: Just download the ISO file from the Trinity Rescue web site and burn it to disc. Boot from the disc and wait for everything to load. When you get to the main menu, choose the “Windows Password Resetting” option, and go to “Interactive Winpass.”
Next, just follow the onscreen instructions. Choose the partition you want to edit, select “Edit User Data and Passwords,” type in the name of the user you want to edit, and choose option 1: “Clear (Blank) User Password” (option 2 did not work for me). When you’re done, you can type an exclamation point (!) to quit that menu, then press q to quit the Winpass menu. Restart your computer and you should be able to enter Windows password-free.
How to Beat It: Once again, the weakness of this method is that it still can’t beat encryption. Wiping the password will disallow you access to those encrypted files, which, if the user has encrypted their entire OS, makes this method pretty useless. If they’ve only encrypted a few files, though, you’ll still be able to access all the unencrypted stuff without a problem. This method also doesn’t work with Windows 8 PCs that use Microsoft accounts to log in, though it will work on local accounts.
Break Into Windows, Method Two: Crack the Password with Ophcrack
2.
Where the other methods are vulnerable to encryption, this method will give you full access to everything the user can access, including encrypted files, since this method relies on finding out the user’s password instead of bypassing it. It also works on Windows 8 computers even if the user in question authenticates with a Microsoft account.
How It Works: All you need to do is download and burn the Ophcrack Live CD (use the Vista version if you’re cracking a Windows 7 or 8 PC) and boot from it on your computer. It’ll take a little bit of time to boot, but eventually it will bring you to a desktop environment and start attempting to crack passwords (if it doesn’t, try choosing “Text Mode” from the original menu). This may take a while. You’ll see the passwords pop up in the top pane of the window, though, when it finds them (or, if it doesn’t find them, it’ll notify you). You can then reboot and log in to Windows using those passwords.
How to Beat It: Ophcrack uses Rainbow Tables to crack the password directly. So, while this method works on encrypted OSes, it can’t crack every password out there. To increase your chance of having an uncrackable password, use something complicated and greater than 14 characters. The stronger your password, the less likely Ophcrack will be able to figure it out.
There are a lot of methods to break into a Windows computer, but these are a few of the best and most widely useful. Try it for yourself on your own machine—you’ll be shocked at how easy it is for someone to get into your machine. The takeaway? Encrypt your data and use a long, strong password if you want to keep yourself protected, or you could be vulnerable to the above tricks.
iGoogle is shutting down this Friday, November 1st. Luckily, you’ve got alternatives.
Five Excellent, Customizable Start Pages to Replace iGoogle
Google is shutting down the super-customizable iGoogle start page on November 1st—this Friday—but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck without your daily dose of news and other widgets. Here are five great alternatives to iGoogle that you can use as your new do-anything start page.
This post originally appeared in July of 2012, when the shutdown was first announced. We’ve since added a few more alternatives to get you ready for the shutdown, happening on November 1st.
Note that there are a ton of different kinds of customizable start pages out there. For the purposes of this post, we’ll be focusing on the ones with widgets for things like news, weather, and other information, like iGoogle had. If you’re looking for something a bit similar, though, there are a lot of other great options, like Myfav.es or Symbaloo.
My Yahoo Is a Beautiful, Easy Start Page
My Yahoo is my personal favorite of the bunch. Just like the awesome Yahoo Weather app, Yahoo has focused on making their start page actually attractive. You can choose from a number of themes, chose how many columns you want, and add a ton of different content—and not just Yahoo-focused content, either. Yahoo’s Mail widget supports Gmail for all the Googlers out there.
The Good: Yahoo’s start page is the Feedly to iGoogle’s Google Reader. It may not be quite as feature-filled, but it’ll satisfy most people, and it looks a lot better. Yahoo’s made it easy to import all your iGoogle widgets and settings with just a few clicks, starts you off with a handy wizard, and has a ton of sites built in. It’s incredibly easy to add and search for content, too. We couldn’t find an option for importing your own RSS feed, which is annoying, but it had all the sites we wanted to add, including Lifehacker. Update: You can, in fact, add RSS feeds! Just copy the feed’s URL and enter it in the box at the top of the “Add Content” window.
The Bad: My Yahoo doesn’t have a ton of configuration options (at least compared to the other sites in this list). News widgets only have the options of “full” or “compact,” and you can only choose how many columns exist on your page (from two to four), but not how they’re laid out. If you want something simple you can migrate to from iGoogle, My Yahoo is great and attractive, but it isn’t for those that like to configure every nook and cranny.
igHome Aims to Be Like iGoogle, but With More Customization
We’ve mentioned igHome before, and it’s still one of the best options if you want something that works exactly like iGoogle did. It has a black bar just like Google did, a search box, and a widget library that looks awfully similar. You can import from iGoogle, which is great for getting up and running right away.
The Good: If you want something reminiscent of the original iGoogle, igHome is a good choice. You can add RSS feeds or preconstructed gadgets from their very large and browseable library, add any background you want to the page, choose your search engine, customize the links in the black bar, and more. In some ways, it’s more customizable than iGoogle ever was.
The Bad: igHome’s biggest annoyance is that you can configure the “format” of your RSS widgets, just like the others—compact or full—but your setting applies to all your widgets, not just one. The all-or-nothing approach is pretty annoying since every other site on the list offers you options on a widget-by-widget basis. We also can’t find any way to create widgets of different widths, and a lot of the widgets just don’t work properly—you can set them to show images, but they won’t always do so, and right now my ESPN widget is completely blank. Some of the widgets are also pretty ugly (like the AccuWeather widget).
NetVibes Is a Super Customizable Start Page for RSS Geeks
NetVibes has long been a popular portal for news, weather, email, and other customizable widgets, and while it’s a bit more focused for business-minded folks and news junkies, it makes a great start page. It has a ton of widgets to choose from, including weather, news, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, stocks, a to-do list, and more blogs and RSS feeds than you can shake a stick at. It has a lot of specialized widgets for more popular sites, but you can also embed web pages and other objects into your page as well, if you want to embed something like Google Tasks. NetVibes probably has more pre-created, specialized widgets than any of the other options.
The Good: NetVibes is very customizable. You can create as many different tabs as you want, each with its own set of widgets, and each with its own movable layout. That means you can have up to four columns of widgets, some wide, some narrow, arranged in many different ways. It also has a ton of pre-made themes as well as the ability to create your own, so you can really customize how it looks. Plus, it has a built-in RSS reader. You can exit the widgets view to go into a very Google Reader-like interface, so you don’t need to use a separate RSS reader if you don’t want to. It’s definitely ideal for RSS junkies.
The Bad: The main downside of NetVibes is that it can be a little difficult to use at times, and ugly if not done right. Dragging widgets around isn’t nearly as easy as it should be, and sometimes creating new widgets from feeds can get a little frustrating. Moreover, some of the widgets can be downright awful, especially if you’re creating your own from scratch (seriously, they look horrible). Its selection of widgets isn’t bad, though, so you’ll have to try it out to see if you can get by without having to deal with ugly ones.
uStart Focuses on Interactive Widgets with Lots of Layout Options
uStart is similar to the others, but with a bit more of a focus on interactive widgets than just RSS feeds. I has widgets for Mail, Facebook, Delicious, Google Drive, Instagram, internet radio, tasks, notes, and a lot more. It has a lot of options for how each one works, so you can make each widget your own. It can also import from iGoogle or NetVibes.
The Good: uStart has more widget options than most of its competitors. You can choose up to six different layouts for RSS widgets, along with how wide the widget is, how many news items show up, and whether to open it in its built-in RSS reader. Interactive widgets have a bunch of similar options depending on what they do. This is extremely nice and makes your layout pretty customizable based on how many columns you have, which widgets are wide, and so on. You can also customize much of the theme, from the background to widget color and background color.
The Bad: uStart isn’t as good looking as most of its competitors, and the top bar seems a little cluttered with no way to clean it up. It has a lot of great interactive widgets, but nothing like the library of igHome, so some users may feel a bit limited. Overall, though, it’s a start page with a lot to offer out of the gate and it’s easy to set up.
Protopage Is an Easy to Use Page with a Free Form Layout
Protopage is very similar to NetVibes: You have your own customizable page to which you can add widgets, create customizable tabs, and change themes to fit your desires. It has a number of built-in widgets, but most of the widgets you’ll create yourself by typing in a feed, connecting it to your email or social networking account, or creating one from a web page (again, like if you use Google Tasks).
The Good: Protopage is very easy to use. Dragging widgets around is smooth as butter, and it has a “free positioning” feature that lets you really customize how each widget is laid out across multiple columns. Feed widgets have a fair number of options, and you can resize them however you want. Anyone can get up and running with a good-looking page in minutes since it’s a bit more one-size-fits-all. You can, however, customize the theme to the nines, from the background to all the colors used.
The Bad: Protopage has a lot of layout options, but not a lot of widgets. Its list is pretty short, and most of the stuff you add will probably be from RSS feeds. The widgets are rarely specialized, either. While some other services have a dedicated widget for Gmail, Yahoo, and other mail clients, Protopage only has one mail widget that requires you to connect via IMAP. It takes a bit more work, but it works with everything. The feed widgets aren’t quite as customizable as some others, but they look good out of the gate.
It’s hard to say whether one service is better than the others, since they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. It’s so easy to try them out—usually without having to set up an account—that you can get a feel for them pretty quickly. Pick a few from this list that look good to you, try them out, and see how they work. We’re confident you’ll find one that fits most of your needs.
How to Use Your Smartphone As an Essential Part of Your Disaster Kit
Generally speaking you don’t want to rely on technology at all in your disaster toolkit, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make use of an old smartphone (or your current one for that matter). Before the cell networks are down, here’s what you should load up on your smartphone.
There are also various disaster kits you need to have in the house and any good disaster kit is enough to get you through at least 72 hours without power, food, or water. Those certainly cover your basic survival needs, but if you need guides for living on your own, a backup of data, or anything similar, you can also turn to your smartphone.
Get a First Aid App to Guide You Through Emergencies
One of the most important parts of your disaster kit is your first aid kit, but that doesn’t really do much good if you don’t know how to actually use the materials inside. We’re fans of the official Red Cross First Aid app (the British Red Cross app is also fantastic) and Pocket First Aid & CPR as an easy means to always have an encyclopedia of medical procedures in your pocket.
Store Your Important Documents on Your Phone
One thing every disaster kit should have is a set of your important documents. These include copies of things like IDs, birth certificates, or escape routes. While you want to keep those physical copies, you also want to keep a digital backup. If you want to store those files in the cloud, we’d recommend doing so with an encrypted Dropbox folder. Then, just grab a copy of the Dropbox mobile app so you’ll have access to them from anywhere, even if you can’t get to you computer. Likewise, you can keep a hard copy of those documents on your phone as well. Just make sure you have something to view them with (a free e-reader app like Kindle will do the trick).
Download Offline Maps to Get Around
One of the most important things things to have during an emergency is a map. You never know what’s going to happen, so being able to quickly look at your surrounding area is important. The problem is that most smartphone map apps rely on GPS and data to get you the map. That’s not always available in an emergency. Thankfully, you can prep ahead and download offline maps in the Google Maps app by simply typing “Okay Maps” in the search bar. This saves the local map that you’re currently viewing to your device so you can retrieve anytime regardless of data or GPS access. If you want to be doubly sure you have those maps, an app like Galileo Offline Maps will provide that peace of mind.
Find Your Family and Friends with GPS
They’re a bit odd to use all the time, but an app that tracks your friends and family’s location is incredibly helpful after a disaster. You often can’t text message or call during a disaster, so your best bet to track someone down is with GPS, assuming it’s working. You have a lot of choices for this, but we like Apple’s Find My Friends, Android’s Find My Friends! or the cross-platform Life360. Just remember to keep the apps off when you’re not using them.
Always Know What to Do with Survival Apps
There are guides about how you can survive both in the wilderness and in an urban environment before, but chances are you can’t really remember everything you need to know. So, it’s a good idea to load up your smartphone with apps to help you out. A good place to start is the Army Survival Guide (Android/iOS) which includes pretty much everything you’ll ever need to know about basic survival techniques. Survival isn’t just building fires though, you also need to know how to find food, which is why an app like Wild Edibles (Android/iOS) is handy. With it, you’ll know exactly which wild plants you can eat to stay alive and which you can’t.
From: Lifehacker
Facebook removes a privacy setting you might have been using
The few remaining users who used this privacy setting should see this warning some time over the next couple weeks.
Facebook has removed a certain privacy setting from the accounts of “a small percentage of people” still using it: from now on, there is no way to prevent your Timeline from coming up when someone searches for you by name. But it’s not as dire as it sounds.
The setting allowed a user to control whether their name would appear when other users typed it into the search box. For instance, if Bob Smith set it to “no one,” (as opposed to “friends of friends” for instance) his profile wouldn’t appear when others searched for “Bob Smith” (although other Bob Smiths might).
The problem was that even if searching didn’t work, users could still click on any post or picture in which Bob Smith was named or tagged, or even just type facebook.com/BobSmith into the address bar, and there they were, at Bob Smith’s Timeline. Of course, if Bob had set all his other who-can-view settings to “no one” as well, all a random visitor would see is a profile picture and nothing else.
Since the setting didn’t really keep anyone’s Timeline secret, and often just prevented friends from quickly searching for each other, Facebook actually removed it last year, at least for anyone who wasn’t using it. In fact, the company’s blog post explains, it was eliminated for all but a “small percentage” of users long ago, and Thursday’s announcement marks only the removal for those last holdouts. They should soon see a warning like the one shown above, and the setting won’t be removed until they click the “Okay, I understand” button.
Facebook
Is your privacy at risk? No more than it was yesterday; if someone really wants to find you on Facebook, there have always been lots of ways to do so, including unconcerned friends posting pictures publicly in which you are tagged, for one thing, or just having their friend list available for all to see — on which you might be listed.
If you’re worried, however, your best bet is to go straight to your privacy settings by clicking the lock in the top right corner of Facebook, as you see here. There are a dozen or so options (click “See more settings” to get at them all) — so take five minutes to double check they’re all as you like.
5 problems with iOS 7, and how to fix them
The new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7, was released September 18 to mostly positive reviews.
It was the biggest change to iOS since it was introduced six years ago, overhauled to add a slate of new features and a more streamlined, flat, abstract look.
But nobody’s perfect, right?
It’s not unusual for new operating systems to have some glitches in their earliest days. Nobody’s talking about anything cataclysmic this time, like the Apple Maps fiasco on iOS 6 that led CEO Tim Cook to issue a rare apology — and which some say led to the ouster of Apple senior vice president Scott Forstall.
An introduction to iOS7But a couple of weeks into its existence, iOS 7 has prompted a handful of complaints from users. Here are five of the most frequently heard, along with tips for how to fix, or at least bypass, them.
iMessage failing
Apple says it’s aware of an issue that’s causing texts sent through its iMessage app not to go through for some users.
On various Apple-oriented message boards, iOS 7 users were complaining that they’d send a message which appeared to work fine, only to later see the dreaded red exclamation point that means it wasn’t actually sent.
“We are aware of an issue that affects a fraction of a percent of our iMessage users, and we will have a fix available in an upcoming software update,” Apple said in a statement e-mailed to media outlets. “In the meantime, we encourage any users having problems to reference our troubleshooting documents or contact AppleCare to help resolve their issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes impacted users.”
The fix? Until the update rolls out, some users say they’ve been able to get rid of the problem by turning their phone off and back on.
Animation flu
Some folks say they’re already sick of iOS 7. Literally.
iPhone and iPad users, or at least a few of them, say they’re getting symptoms similar to motion sickness while looking at iOS 7 animations. On the new system, images zoom in and out when users switch between apps.
As TIME explains, the brain gets unsettled when the eyes try to focus on images that don’t match up — for example, when you’re on a rocking ship or moving car and trying to read a stationary item, like a book.
The fix? iOS 7 users can go to “Settings,” then “General” and then “Accessibility.” Click on “Reduce Motion” to make the zooming go away.
Battery drain
This one has been mostly reported by users of older phones like the iPhone 4S. Simply, they say iOS 7 seems to drain their batteries faster than iOS 6 did.
One factor may be that iOS 7 expands the ability to run apps in the background while focusing on another task.
The fix? Again, go to “Settings” and “General,” but then choose “Background App Refresh.” From there, you can choose which apps you’ll allow to run in the background and which you won’t.
There are also general battery-saving steps, like dimming your screen and making sure things like GPS and Bluetooth are switched off if you’re not using them.
Certain apps log you out
This one might take care of itself over time.
When Apple updates its operating system, apps that rely on parts of it (like Camera) must update as well. Until they do, they sometimes kick users out. On Apple message boards, users were mentioning apps like Snapchat and Mailbox as frequent offenders.
The fix? Some developers may have already tweaked their products, and other fixes are probably on the way. But if you’re still having problems, you can go to “Settings,” “General” and “Background App Refresh” again. Turn off any apps you’re having problems with.
Lock screen bypass
This one has already been addressed in an iOS 7 update from Apple just days after the new operating system rolled out.
For the first few days, iPhones and iPads apparently were vulnerable in one particular instance. If users were running the Camera app and had Control Center activated on their Lock screens, there were a few steps someone could take to unlock their phones.
But the iOS 7.0.2 update, released on September 26, “fixes bugs that could allow someone to bypass the Lock screen passcode,” according to Apple.
Website maps 1.2 billion Facebook faces
Are you on Facebook? If so, somewhere on this epic conglomeration, there’s you!
Facebook has so many users — more than a billion, or roughly the population of India — that squeezing them all into one Web page seems almost impossible.
And yet someone has done just that.
A new project, “The Faces of Facebook,” collects more than 1.27 billion Facebook profile photos on one site, arranged in chronological order according to when the person joined the social network. Users can sign in via Facebook to pinpoint their photo on the page and see where they show up in relation to their friends.
At first glance, the site looks like colorful, pixelated white noise. But users can zoom in to see individual photos and then scroll around or click on a photo to visit that person’s Facebook page. (Be warned, however: the page is experiencing heavy traffic and can be slow and buggy.)
The site launched last week and was built by Natalia Rojas, a self-described “creative technologist” in Barcelona, Spain.
“I was playing around with Facebook API, and I discovered that there is a way to access everyone’s public information with a very simple (but not obvious) algorithm,” she said in an e-mail to CNN. “At that time, I thought I could do something beautiful/interesting with that, like showing them all together. Then I started to write the code to achieve it.”
Rojas said she is not breaking Facebook privacy rules because she is not storing anyone’s name, photo or private information — just linking out to public Facebook profiles. She also said she hasn’t heard from the social network, which she thinks is good news because “I was a bit worried about things like using their name in the URL.”
Facebook did not repond to CNN’s request for comment.
Rojas said it took her a year and a half to code the site. The hardest part, she said, was stripping out the default silhouette images that appear on some inactive Facebook profiles.
Asked about her hopes for the project, Rojas said she was inspired by the idea that each Facebook profile photo is an example of that person’s best self, and that millions of those images together combine to present a positive, universal message.
“There is a mix of people from all over the world. And somehow we are all telling our friends: ‘Look, this is me, when I like myself.’ Feeling happy, being creative, looking good, being passionate about something, proud of something, enjoying the life,” she said.
“So I think, why don’t we try to BE our Facebook profile picture? Even if life is difficult some times, there is always a way for us to be what we want to be: happy.”
Creativxtech 