How to Root a Nexus 5

Today I will be giving an overview of how to root the nexus 5. Before getting started its important to understand that rooting a phone has its own set of disadvantages. One being that rooting will void any warranty that your device may have. Beyond that rooting will completely wipe your device so you might consider backing your phone up before if you aren’t okay with losing everything on it. Lastly it’s important to understand that attempting to root a phone can end up with a bricked phone. This is always the chance you take when dealing with reinstalling operating systems. If you phone somehow gets turned off or loses power during the rooting process you may never recover it. Now that I got that disclaimer out of the way lets jump into this process.

All you need to root a device is the device itself, a computer and a couple types of free software that I will link to below. OK let’s get started.

First Enable the hidden developers menu on the phone. You do this by going to “settings” then “about phone” listed in this menu is “build number”. You want to rapidly tap “build number” until it unlocks the hidden developers menu. 

Now that you have access to the developers menu open it and check the “USB debugging” check box.

Next you want to switch to a PC and download CF-Auto-Root which you can get here https://download.chainfire.eu/363/CF-Root/CF-Auto-Root/CF-Auto-Root-hammerhead-hammerhead-nexus5.zip

 

Once downloaded you need to extract the entire folder, I use 7-Zip but WinZip and WinRar will also work perfectly fine.

Next you’re going to download and install Android Studio from here https://developer.android.com/studio/install.html

Once you have CF-Auto-Root and Android Studio downloaded and installed it’s time to switch back to your phone. You’re going to want to turn off the phone and boot into bootloader mode. You do this by holding down the physical volume down and power buttons at the same time.

 Once you’re in the bootloader menu notice that next to lock state it says locked. We need to change that so connect your phone to your pc via usb. Wait a second for your computer to install the phones drivers and then launch the command prompt. In the command prompt navigate to where you installed the SDK tools. Once in the correct directory type

Type “fastboot oem unlock”

Follow the prompt on your phone to unlock the boot loader. You should now see that next to lock state it says unlocked.

Now that the boot loader is unlocked its finally time to root your phone.

Navigate to where you installed CF-Auto-Root. Hold shift and right click to open the command line from inside of the file. Now type the command

Root-windows.bat 

This will restart your phone

Your phone should now be rooted you will be able to tell if when its booting you see a red android with an eye-patch instead of the classic green android.

LastPass Password Manager Overview and Tutorial

Today I will be giving a quick overview of the LastPass password manager platform, how it works, what it all supports and how to install and configure LastPass. LastPass is a very popular password manager that runs on almost any platform imaginable. How password managers work is they store and encrypt all your account login credentials across all your platforms. Once all this information is compiled it is then encrypted and your encryption key is your “Master Password”. This allows not only the security of having all your login information encrypted but also the convenience of only needing to remember one password to unlock every account you have. LastPass is my preferred password manager because it’s free tier is a fully featured secure manager and it is supported by so vary many browsers, computer operating systems and mobile platforms. Making LastPass a complete solution. Below is a list of all the different supported LastPass offerings.

Windows

Officially Supported

·       LastPass Universal Windows Installer

Installs Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera plugins in one package

·       Internet Explorer

·       Mozilla Firefox

·       Google Chrome

·       Apple Safari

·       Opera

·       Maxthon

Compatible but not supported

·       SeaMonkey

·       Pale Moon

·       Epic

Confused by “Compatible but not supported”? LastPass’ website states “As a courtesy to the overall open source community we attempt to keep these browsers running, however we do not officially support it. As we do not officially support, we are not currently taking bug reports for these browsers.”

MAC

·       LastPass Universal Mac Installer

Installs Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera plugins in one package.

·       LastPass MAC App

·       Apple Safari

·       Mozilla Firefox

·       Google Chrome

·       Opera

Mobile Apps

·       LastPass for android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lastpass.lpandroid&hl=en)

·       LastPass for iOS

(https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lastpass-password-manager/id324613447?mt=8)

·       LastPass for Dolphin

·       LastPass for Windows Phone

·       LastPass for Microsoft Surface RT

Linux

·       LastPass Universal Linux Installer

Installs Firefox, Chrome and Opera plugins all in one package

·       Mozilla Firefox

·       Google Chrome

·       Opera

Also offer

·       LastPass Sesame

Provides two-factor authentication to significantly improve your security when accessing your LastPass Vault from untrusted computers.

·       LastPass for Applications

Extends LastPass from the web to the desktop and allows you to automatically fill and login to Windows desktop GUI applications

Step by step guide to installation and configure LastPass

1.       Go to https://lastpass.com/misc_download2.php download which ever plugins that you will use, I selected to install the LastPass Universal Windows Installer because I personally use several web browsers and it just more convenient this way.

 I also installed the android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lastpass.lpandroid&hl=en) because that is my mobile platform.

2.       Once installed open LastPass and you will be prompted to “Create an Account now”, click the prompt and it will bring you to a page where you will enter your email address and create your master password. The master password is very important this is the one password you will have to remember to access all your other securely encrypted passwords, so choose carefully and be sure to memorize it. Once entered don’t forget to tick the terms and policy box and click on “Continue”

You will be prompted one last time to reenter your master password to ensure that you remember it.

3.       Now it’s time to save your passwords in the LastPass vault. Simply surf the internet as you normally would, hitting all the accounts you use. Each time you enter credentials to log into a site you will be prompted by LastPass

Simply select “Add” for each account you visit to populate your LastPass vault

4.       Now that you have all your various passwords saved to your vault it is time to make them more secure. first in your browser click the LastPass icon. Next select My Vault, once in your vault click the Security Challenge tab. Then click on Show My Score. Enter your master password when prompted. Wait for LastPass to analyze all your passwords.

Once it is finished decrypting and analyzing all your passwords hopefully you will get this popup

Select “Show My Score”. You will be shown a dashboard with all your security scores, if you are scored low do not fret, this is the very reason this feature exists. My score was lower than I had imagined.

If you scroll further down this page you will see steps to help boost your score and standing. There are four main steps:

1.       Change Compromised Passwords

2.       Change Weak Passwords

3.       Change Reused Passwords

4.       Change Old Passwords

Depending on what is making your score low you will not have to necessarily do every step. As you can see below I need to work on steps two and three, but not one and four.

From here just work the steps and watch your security score climb! Congratulations you are now living a more secure life. All your various passwords are saved and encrypted. All you need to remember is one master password. Simplicity at its best.