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Way back when the MS is a Monopoly ruling first came out in late '99 I put together a site called MS-Monopoly.com. It was covered by /. but damned if I can find the story on /. now but here's a Linux Today blurb.

I'd used the well known Monopoly game board as the basis for our site, with a different company that MS had bought for each square. The Community Chest and Chance cards were contributed by users. Satire is meant to be protected by copyright law, at least here in Canada. Anyway, we got slashdotted not once but twice, Yahoo site of the day, we were in Mac Addict, a whole bunch of portals, etc. Basically we were getting tonnes of traffic... then came the letters from Hasbro.

Long story short, I didn't own the domain name and the guy who did got cold feet after we received the fourth letter. I was holding out for a registered letter, but it wasn't my neck. We'd checked with lawyers and while we had a case fighting a case, even one your most likely going to win, gets expensive in a hurry. We reluctantly closed up shop.

Interestingly enough before we got shut down we heard from a fellow who produced his own version of Monopoly. According to him the game itself is in the public domain because it was a popular game long before it became a Hasbro product. He shipped us one of his board games and gave us permission to copy it for our site, but by that time we had moved on to other things.

To the folks making Facebook apps, I wish you luck. Fighting a Hasbro will require deep pockets and in court nothing is 100%. Yes, if you win you can sue for costs... but you can't be sure you'll win.

ms-monopoly.com lives on... as a advert site. Google it though and you'll still find copies of the site (minus a working backend) and references around, I guess people like a good joke.. In the end it had to end, but I guess that's life.

- The Jester, Department of Jest

it's not wierd, it's a meta tag with http-equiv="refresh". it's, erm, pretty normal. see here: http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/metatags.detail .html

The Navman GPS4410 is a bluetooth GPS module, which has a battery life of 30 hours. See here for more details.

While it's primarily used for car navigation, you can get GPS NMEA data out of it (here is a good info site) which is the standard for GPS receivers.

It would be relatively easy to write a Palm/IPAQ/other app to record coordinates/tracks so you could tie them into your photos later.

Rob :)

Don't forget BackOrifice!

Most of these are Windows-specific. Call it a hunch.

Take a screenshot and make it their desktop, then close all windows, hide the taskbar, and move some (only some) of the desktop contents to somewhere other than the desktop.

If you use VNC, then set up a full-screen vncviewer to a secondary victim's desktop. Watch them fight it out. (Be very careful; privacy issues crop up in this one.)

Download the original hampster dance. (Note: website makes sound.) Use the ActiveDesktop feature to make a copy of that as the victim's desktop. Turn the volume to max, and immediately shut down or suspend. For maximum effect, do this on a laptop just before the victim leaves for a flight.

Depending on the OS version, add about eighty folders at the top and bottom of the "Programs" menu. Doesn't matter what you name them; some versions of Windows make it a pain to open a folder in the middle.

Set their Internet connection to, instead of using the LAN, auto-dial their phone.

If you can get an X server running on their box, then run greasymouse against their display. (You mentioned not downloading anything, but since it's on the X contrib tape, you may already have it on a local Unix box.) I find a factor of 1.8 or so works well. The good news is, this works on some rootless X servers for Windows. Of course, if your victim runs Unix, no such need.

Fun with fonts. Set the fonts and colors to something terribly garish, and just barely useable. Then export the relevant parts of the registry, and set things up to merge that in every boot.

Setting sounds is a good one, and there's a lot of ideas already posted to get you started.

All this is assuming your friend isn't a coder. There's much better ways to get at coders, such as #define struct union or other ideas from here for more ideas.

And the number one way to ensure to drive them mad at the office computer:

Force the victim to use Windows.

I looked around at sites like ircache.net, vancouver-webpages.com, and elsewhere looking for a way to get pages from caches besides of course hitting them from the side of the served network (i.e. with a browser or a spider like wget or wwwwoffle).

There is a hierarchical cache at U. of Melbourne for students there, so if anyone is reading this from a dorm there you might be able to spider the cache of the site to preserve it on your hard drive.

If anyone is familiar with caching protocol and how to query other caches on the net, why not share them here. Much of the data may be on the net. Likewise if anyone knows how much is replicated on other sites it will save people the trouble. I'm just worried that the contents of these caches may expire one day soon..

We need web caches... It's stupid to have files crossing the ocean thousands of times. Besides not using web caches causes that those who cannot afford bandwidth costs cannot put content in the web... Caches now!.

Web developers must not be afraid of web caches, since the HTTP/1.1 protocol allows them to precisely define how and when their content will be cached.

The mpeg file is gone... See? We need web caches... It's stupid to have this file crossing the ocean thousands of times. Besides not using web caches causes that those who cannot afford bandwidth costs cannot put content in the web... Caches now!.

Buy a Serial Data GPSAnd Grep the detail from the output.

Little Program can easily be found on google (search NMEA GPS).
List of Progs

Here is a simple one

Two Standard Exist for the GPS Output NMEA. Most can provide this information via RS232

Less Than 20 Char to read from the Port. Automatically received once per second. Parse the data with PERL/AWK/SED/JAVA/C it's very simple.

Buy a Serial Data GPSAnd Grep the detail from the output.

Little Program can easily be found on google (search NMEA GPS).
List of Progs

Here is a simple one

Two Standard Exist for the GPS Output NMEA. Most can provide this information via RS232

Less Than 20 Char to read from the Port. Automatically received once per second. Parse the data with PERL/AWK/SED/JAVA/C it's very simple.

The easiest way is to get a basic TV+teletext card and use the teletext time signal. This certainly works in the UK -- does the US have teletext? The Linux program alevt has date setting capability -- not very complicated!! The teletext time signal is extremely accurate and can be yours for the price of an Hauppauge TV tuner (40 pounds?)
I also have a Garmin Etrex GPS linked up to my car machine: it is very easy to parse the NMEA sentences with the correct time. Make sure that the receiver can get reception: my gps is fine near the window. Take a look at Peter Bennett's site for NMEA information.

I believe the Soviet Union once launched a system of satellites called GLONASS that worked like GPS. Are they planning to do an upgrade or repair of this system? The GPS FAQ has more information (see section 5.2).

Heck, it's understandable why they'd want to build an alternative GPS; the US Department of Defense could suddenly decide to turn selective availability back on again if they felt like it someday...

They can also track you if the battery is disconnected from the phone.

The only way to make your phone untracable is to wrap it six times in lead foil.

You keep a piece of black electrical tape over the lights on your cable modem, don't you?

Site-based filtering is broken . [...] If you don't like the content on the web, then filter on the web content by all means. Let's see PICS rating more commonly used.

This is exactly why my site has two PICS labels: the SafeSurf one, and the VWP one. Let me tell you, it was interesting to go through and rate my "Canadian-ness" or rather my "British Columbian-ness".

Go to Peter's GPS Archive's Garmin Protocol Page

Any program from 1998 will work fine with the newer units. The NEMA protocol is quite old and the documented parts of the Garmin protocol is the same as it several years ago.

There is some old (1995) sample source on my webpage at
http://web.abnormal.com/~thogard/gps/

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Check out Peter Bennett's website it contains a fair block of data, and some free/shareware programs.
Unfortunately, Garman are keeping some cards close to their chest, so you can't (for example) upload maps for handheld tracking unless you use the "official" windows-based software.
--

(Sorry if this is a repost, this didn't post the first time)

This is awesome news. I use gps nearly every weekend, and it's always bothered me a little knowing that it was off a little bit.

Anyways, for more info here are a couple of links to gps sites:
GPS Info Website is an awesome starting point. Tons of links and info.
GPS and NMEA- A good FAQ site on gps in general and also hooking a unit up to other equipment (hand computer, autopilot, etc.).
US Coast Guard Nav Center has some good updates and status of gps.
Garmin- A well known gps maker, their site also has some good general info on gps (not just their units).

Anyways, have fun out there!
Jason

This is awesome news. I use gps nearly every weekend, and it's always bothered me (just a little) knowing that it wasn't as accurate as it could be.

Here are some good links to gps info:
US Coast Guard Nav Center Great status info and general policy stuff.
GPS Info Website The best central source of info on gps that I've found so far. Tons of links and content.
GPS and NMEA Site Another good source of info, including hooking up a gps to other equipment (hand computers, autopilots, etc).
Garmin A well know maker of gps units, their site also has some decent info in general on gps.

Anyways, have fun out there.
Jason

You can get the data for yourself from the government, or by looking for APRS maps (a ham radio application). The format of APRS is published, so the data should be transportable. Start with TAPR - they have a very good set of APRS files.

The GPS units themselves output the data in a format called NMEA. You can get some info here, though I don't know if the GPS spec is published for free through this site. I have seen it on line, though, so it wouldn't be hard to find. Another good site would be here.


...phil

Well, jeez. My squid wasn't able to cache it, and it's already getting /.ed for its trouble, methinks. Perhaps a nice "Cache-friendly-Apache-HOWTO" or similar should be sent to them.

Cache now! campaign and the Squid proxy server make my LAN life easier. IJB latches onto Squid quickly & easily, so less spam, more content, and lots of calamari for all!
---

I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this weed.

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?