198 DEAR HACKER

198 DEAR HACKER

new cart, there is a notice that the cart won’t go past the yellow line in the parking lot. I assume that this is an attempt to prevent theft of what I’m told are $2,000 shopping carts (sounds a bit high, doesn’t it?). Anyway, out in the lot I played with a couple of the carts to try to determine how they knew they were crossing the yellow line and inspecting the method of preventing movement past (metal skid drops over left wheel). I found that the silly things work via a simple opti- cal sensor tucked under the big wheel cover that I assume detects the color yellow and engages the metal plate to stop the cart from moving forward. Does this sound stupid to anyone? All you’d have to do to avoid the wheel lock engaging is trick the sensor into not seeing the yellow line with, say, a piece of tape or aluminum film or aluminum foil over the sensor or maneuver the cart around the line somehow? Just thought I’d mention this to everyone. I don’t expect to ever try it as Wal-Mart does a very good job of protecting their assets and there is no shortage of outside cameras.

LabGeek This might explain why people have been spotted carrying Wal-Mart grocery carts

over their heads in the parking lots. If you really want to cause some mayhem, a nice yellow line painted right next to the store will certainly accomplish this.

Dear 2600: Started using Google AdSense several months ago. Here’s something

that all webheads should know—lawyers like to get clients, especially on cases where they know that their odds of winning are very good. For that reason alone, lawyers really spend a lot on Google AdSense words like asbestos, cancer, or mesothelioma, etc.

Mesothelioma pays out big—we’re talking like 20 clicks can get you near one hundred dollars! Here’s another neat thing to know: if you sign up with the Google search thing via AdSense and put the search on your site, you can search for those high paying words and click on the first Google ads that come up on the search and then you can pull up the keywords that you want to when you want, not having to wait

TECHNOLOGY

for the ads to rotate up to your site for clicking. If you are using a proxy server to do all of that, it’s possible that it may be a little harder for them to follow your IP address back to you!

Please note that some folks overdo this or do it stupidly and get their accounts shut down, but if you are careful, you can succeed at this pretty profitably for the long term. Never thought that lawyers would

be filling your pockets with cash for free, did ya? jeff affiliate

And somehow we still don’t.

Dear 2600: Recently I was taking the placement test at Mercer County Community

College here in New Jersey and made a very disturbing discovery. MCCC uses a web-based testing system called “ACCUPLACER” (which is approved and normalized by the College Board). The cli- ent machines were standard Windows 98 machines, accessing the ACCUPLACER system via IE (obviously this may be different at other locations).