WHAT THE HACK!

Ankit Fadia’s latest book offers quick tips for technologically challenged people, to help improve their digital life

Having already written 14 books on hacking, Faster 100 Ways To Improve Your Digital Life, Ankit Fadia’s latest book offers straightforward pointers. The idea came to him while hosting a show called What The Hack! for MTV. “In every episode, I would include some tips and the response has been fantastic. This is for non- technical people who may have a smart phone but are not sure what all they can do with it.” Here are some tips. How to send an email in advance If you need to send an email a few days later but have some free time with you now, it would be a good idea to send it right away and not forget later. That’s where the app ‘ Boomerang’ comes into play. “I get a lot of emails every day. Many times I’d want to send an email in advance. That’s when I found the app Boomerang useful,” says Ankit Fadia. To enable the feature in Gmail, you can visit www. boomeranggmail.com and follow the instructions you see on the screen. You will see a Send Later button along with your Send button, the next time you log in. Catch a cheating partner redhanded Do you wish there was a way you could spy upon everything on your

partner’s mobile phone and catch them red- handed? Ankit tells you how in one of his chapters. “That’s what most people wanted to know about. Even before the book, I used to get a lot of queries on how to hack the FB account of a partner.” He did not proceed to do that. In the chapter Ankit discusses various apps like FlexiSpy, MobileSpy and SpyPhoneGold. To spy, register on any of these websites, sneak out the partner’s phone, install the app. Login to your online account from anywhere in the world and start spying! How to identify a caller who is not on your contact- list There are a lot of us finicky about picking unknown numbers. But what if you could identify a strange number that’s not in your list? That’s what the app True Caller does. It can installed from true caller. com To create a global database, True Caller sources its details from public directories, yellow pages and crowd sourcing techniques. “Only problem is it will access your address book, so I don’t personally subscribe to it.” How to trace a lost or stolen digital camera Yes, there is a website for that too – www. stolen camera finder. com. Every photo you take using a digital camera contains something called EXIF data, and this site will help you search the Internet for photos that contain the same EXIF data as yours. “I had once lost my camera on a holiday which had all the photos from the trip. Luckily I got it back, but then I thought there had to be a way to find out a stolen camera,” and that’s how Ankit landed on the site. Once on the site, once can upload a photo once clicked with the missing camera, any from the past. The site will search for a match and report to you. How to hide files inside photographs This technique is used by terrorists and other criminals to communicate with each other, says Ankit. “I have worked with the police to decode such photographs and retrieve the hidden messages inside.” The technique is known as Stenography and Ankit discusses a Stenography tool called S- Tools, which is available as a free download.