Daring phones done dirt cheap: Moto X goes contract-free for $400, Moto G for $100

PCWorld - Motorola's smartphones just keep getting cheaper.

The flagship Moto X (pictured at left above) has received a permanent $100 price cut for the unlocked, contract-free version. The new price is $399 with 16 GB of storage, and $449 with 32 GB of storage.

Meanwhile, Best Buy is selling the mid-range Moto G (pictured at right above) on Verizon Wireless for $100 without a contract. The phone was originally priced at $179.

As Motorola points out, some wireless carriers such as T-Mobile offer month-to-month or prepaid plans that are cheaper when you pay full price for the phone, so it's possible to save money with an off-contract Moto X in the long run. Motorola also offers zero-interest financing plans if you'd rather pay off the phone over time instead of up-front.    Read More

15 Free (or Almost Free) Wi-Fi Security Testing Tools

 

Wi-Fi Security Testing Tools

Attempting to “hack” into your own wireless network can help you better understand Wi-Fi security vulnerabilities and how to protect against them. Here are some Wi-Fi hacking techniques and the tools — nearly all free — you can use for penetration testing. These tools will help you uncover rogue access points, weak Wi-Fi passwords, and spot other weaknesses and security holes before someone else does.

 

Stumblers and Sniffers: Vistumbler

Wi-Fi stumblers can detect nearby APs and their details, like the signal level, security type, and MAC address. You might find APs set with weak WEP security, which can be easily cracked, or possibly rogue APs setup by employees or others that could be opening your network up to attack. You can use wireless sniffers to capture raw network packets sent over the air. You could import the captured traffic into other tools, such as to crack encryption. Vistumbler is an open source Windows application that displays the basic AP details, including the exact authentication and encryption methods, and can even speak the SSID and RSSI. It also displays graphs of signal levels. It’s highly customizable and offers flexible configuration options. It supports AP names…

 

Stumblers and Sniffers: Kismet

Kismet is an open source Wi-Fi stumbler, packet sniffer, and intrusion-detection system that can run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD. It shows the AP details, including the SSID of “hidden” networks. It can also capture the raw wireless packets, which you can then import into Wireshark, TCPdump, and other tools. In Windows, Kismet only works with CACE AirPcap wireless adapters due to the limitation of Windows drivers. It does, however, support a variety of wireless adapters in Mac OS X and Linux.

 

Stumblers and Sniffers: Wifi Analyzer

Wifi Analyzer is a free Android app you can use for finding APs on your Android-based smartphone or tablet. It lists the basic details for APs on the 2.4-GHz band, and on supported devices on the 5-GHz band as well. You can export the AP list (in XML format) by sending it to email or another app or take snapshot of the screens. It also features graphs showing signals by channel, history, and usage rating and also has a signal meter feature to help find APs.

 

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Build a Mean Productivity Machine for Under $1K

PCMag.Com - We found more ways than we expected to add speed to an everyday-use PC designed for using medium-high-end software—especially in one surprising place and all for under $1,000.

 

Here at PCMag.com, we have easy access to all kinds of technology products, which we test, write about, absorb, and return to their manufacturers. But sometimes all this isn’t enough, and we need products for the long haul. When that happens, we’re not above buying the things we need—or, if possible, building them ourselves.

So when one of my colleagues approached me recently about helping him put together a system he could use for mid-high-level software testing, we had to give serious thought to what would work best. And because he didn’t want to spend a mint—he was trying to keep it under $1,000—we couldn’t just instantly grab all the highest-performance parts out there.

We approached the problem systematically, just as we always advise you to do when you’re shopping for either finished tech or the pieces to assemble it. Was the most important consideration for this system? Speed. And we wanted to wring as much of it as possible from the parts we chose—all while keeping an eye on the running total as we furiously clicked around Newegg.com.

For the CPU, we picked one of the top current-generation value parts on the market: the Intel Core i5-2500. Priced at just over $200, this chip lacked the unlocked multiplier of its nearly identical sibling, the Core i5-2500K, but had its zippy 3.3GHz clock rate, four processing cores (but no Hyper-Threading), and the other features of the second-generation Core (“Sandy Bridge”) family. Uniting this with 8GB of memory was a no-brainer; we went with Kingston’s two-DIMM kit, which ran us less than $60.      More