During a power outage at my apartment this year, I watched movies on my MacBook Pro instead of on my television. While I had no complaints about the screen size, I did have an issue with how low the audio coming from my speakers was. External speakers would help, but I don’t want to buy them or lug them around every time I want to watch a movie.

I didn’t do anything about it at the time, but then I realized that I should be able to crank up the volume to any unsafe level I want. Turns out, there are a few different ways to boost a Mac’s volume level, some of which work system-wide, and others… more

Welcome back, my amateur hackers!

Over the course of the next year, we will be developing our own zero-day exploits. In my first article in this series, I introduced you to buffer overflows, which are the source of some of the most lethal exploits, particularly the “remote code execution,” so we are focusing our exploit development here on a buffer overflow.

Developing your own exploits requires considerable knowledge and skill, so this series will toggle between providing you background material and information and labs to test and expand your skills.

In this tutorial, we will build a… more

The upcoming W3D gaming smartphone by Snail isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s pretty much a cross between an Android phone, Nintendo 3DS, and PlayStation Vita. It runs on Android, has a 3D screen similar to the 3DS, and gamepad controls like the Vita, making it one hell of a portable gaming device (that’s also a phone).

It uses Android 4.4 KitKat as its base (though it could be upgradeable to 5.0 Lollipop when released), has a gorgeous 5.5-inch 1080p display, a 2.2GHz octa-core MTK6595 processor, 16GB internal storage, 2GB of RAM, a 13MP rear camera, 4,000mAh battery, stereo… more

By default, any app that requests a certain permission can run automatically as soon as you start your device. Since Android doesn’t offer a granular permission control system like iOS, this gets lumped in with all of the other permissions that you have to accept when you’re installing an app from the Google Play Store, and you effectively have no choice in the matter.

Considering the fact that apps running in the background are a big draw on RAM and battery life, more apps running on startup means lower efficiency. That’s why developer Gard Ynych created a mod that will add a settings menu… more