Android 8 is arguably the most significant Android update in years. Oreo introduced a modular architecture that allows OS components to be updated independently, a system that limits apps’ background activity to extend battery life, and a…
CONTINUE READING 🡒 Author: Eugene Zobnin
TrueOS Review: The Desktop Edition of FreeBSD
“An inexplicably still-walking corpse” — that’s roughly how people tend to talk about FreeBSD these days. The hype around Linux and the GPL did its job, pushing what was once the most popular server OS to the…
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Tor‑Powered Secure Smartphone on CopperheadOS: How It Works and Why…
The world has seen plenty of attempts to build a secure smartphone: from Blackphone, which promised end-to-end encrypted communications, to the rather dubious BlackBerry Priv, and even the GATCA Elite, whose creators didn’t bother to innovate and…
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Google’s Fuchsia OS: Inside the Next‑Gen Android Successor
The source code for Google’s mysterious new OS first surfaced online in August 2016. By May 2017, it had gained some documentation and an alpha-stage user interface. Today, Fuchsia is well-documented and under active development—not just an…
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Mobile Mesh Networking: How to Build a Router-Free Smartphone Network
The internet stopped being a lawless free‑for‑all a long time ago. Today it’s tightly policed, and any attempt to step beyond the hazy line of “free expression” gets shut down—a line even its architects can’t clearly define.…
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Tuning a Minimalist Linux Desktop for Power Users: i3 and…
Recently we put together a basic geek desktop around i3, but we left a lot of smaller, less obvious pieces out of the write-up. Today we’ll finish polishing the setup: teach dmenu to control brightness, volume, and…
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Android: Island app to isolate and freeze apps — no…
On Android, it’s all too easy to pick up malware. But what if you still have to install a sketchy app? Don’t sweat it—Island lets you not only keep that app away from your data, but also…
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The Problems with Xiaomi’s MIUI
MIUI is a great OS and a prime example of how far you can push Android if you want to turn it into something more. And, paradoxically, for that very reason it’s also a bad OS—one that…
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Android: 8 Universal ROMs, Modern Click Bots, App Hacking, and…
In this issue: universal Android 8 ROMs, multi-headed trojans and chatbots, clickbots, abusing Android notifications, breaking into apps via trusted components, and of course a quick network pentest—how to make apps trust us. We didn’t forget coding…
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Android for Linux Users: Integrating Your Smartphone with Linux
Android and Linux distributions aren’t just related OSes—they share the same kernel and are very similar under the hood. Most Linux commands work on Android; you can install bash, write scripts, and even run servers. Set up…
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3 Reasons to Skip the Latest Android Updates
For power users and app developers, Android has long been a very comfortable platform. Open-source code, rich capabilities, and the absence of heavy-handed control from Google made an Android smartphone a true pocket computer. But times change,…
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Hiding Sensitive Data in Android Apps: Techniques for Storing and…
At some point, almost every developer has had to hide data inside an app. This could be encryption keys used to decrypt parts of the program, API endpoint URLs, or strings you’d rather conceal to make a…
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Is Google Building an Android Successor?
In April of last year, without any fanfare, Google quietly published the source code for a new OS called Fuchsia, written in Dart. Because Fuchsia was built on a tiny microkernel, the knee‑jerk reaction from journalists and…
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How to Build an Unconventional Raspberry Pi Media Center: A…
In the six years since the Raspberry Pi appeared, countless guides have shown how to turn it into a home media center. The problem is, the classic media-center setup on a Pi is so underwhelming it loses…
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8 Practical Ways to Use Android’s Fingerprint Scanner for Security…
Official fingerprint reader support arrived in Android 6.0, yet many people still think it’s only for unlocking the phone. In fact, if you know your way around Tasker, you can map it to virtually any action.
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Android Performance Optimization: Eliminate App Lag, Jank, and Long Loading…
Performance is one of the most critical aspects of a mobile app. Your app can be as feature-rich, polished, and useful as you like, but if it feels sluggish, failure is almost guaranteed. The good news is…
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How to Install VirtualBox on Tails OS and Route VM…
Tails is the best operating system if your goal is to maximize your anonymity online. But it has a few quirks, and one of them is that you can’t properly install VirtualBox using the standard tools. We’ll…
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Android Code Injection with Frida: Hooking and Instrumenting Third-Party Apps
When we talk about reverse‑engineering and modifying third‑party applications, we usually mean using a decompiler, a disassembler, and a debugger. But there’s a tool that takes a very different approach: Frida—a toolkit that lets you inject into…
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Supercharge Nmap: Advanced Penetration Testing with Firewall Evasion, Dirbusting, DoS…
Nmap is the gold standard among port scanners and one of a pentester’s most important tools. But can you honestly say you’ve mastered all its features and use cases? In this article, you’ll learn how to use…
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Why Smartphone Home Screens Are Broken—and Why I Built AIO…
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found it odd that a powerful smartphone—connecting people to each other and to the rest of the world—uses an utterly useless, uninformative screen of icons as its primary interface.…
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