GeekWriter

Forgot to address points in previous entry... As far as the phone pinging the network periodically, my experience with T-Mobile was that my phone would ONLY ping the network on startup. Technical support told me numerous times that if I left my phone on for more than a couple of hours, the towers would lose track of it and nobody would be able to call me or even leave a voicemail. This kind of sucks when you have memory and attention problems and don't want to add more tasks to your routine, but it might be an advantage if you don't want the network to know where you are all the time. (I'm not sure how well this would work in an area with high cell density... seems like when the system does handovers, it would have to update the location. But out here in Small Town, USA I can go for days without moving to another cell.

The more information the government collects on ordinary people going about their business, the harder it will be to get any useful information out of it. Which is completely counterproductive for finding actual threats. It's like having a mailbox full of spam--the more spam you have, the harder it is to find actual messages you want to receive. I presume it would actually make it harder to find a specific innocent person they wanted to track. Not that I like the idea they're doing this... My cell phone is set to send coordinates only if I call 911. Whether that actually affects it or not, I don't know. I'm sure it's possible they designed the phone with a bogus setting that doesn't really turn off the GPS signal, just to placate civil rights defenders. I'm not sure how probable it is. Is there a way to check whether it's sending or not? Unfortunately, it's hard to receive calls if you take out the battery to power down the GPS sender. Might be feasible for "emergency-only" cell phone owners, as long as their emergencies (flat tires, out of gas, etc.) allow time to unwrap the battery and reinstall it. Re the triangulation: I think I'm usually in range of only one tower, since we have three towers to cover two small towns. Kathryn

How about a Nalgene-type water bottle? You can get 4 for $9 at Costco, each a different transparent color. If they hold water in, could they hold it out... or would the pressure differential make them leak? Kathryn

Parsa, The story I read doesn't seem as black and white now that a few details have been filled in. Maybe I was mistaken, but I thought the original story described the network he accessed as a free WiFi site at a business that was closed for the day; it turns out this was a private residence, although the owner deliberately left his network open to share his bandwidth. (In which case, this is like arresting someone for taking something out of a "free stuff" box by the sidewalk. It's just that the suspect was lurking around at night and claiming he can't afford an ISP while driving a SUV that looks bad, circumstantially.) http://wifinetnews.com/archives/005481.html There's a comments section on that story which is probably a better place to discuss wardriving ethics than this forum. However, when I Googled for the "wardriving arrest" story, I got a lot of hits for something a bit more unsettling than just the computing equivalent of using someone else's security lights to read a map. Back in 2003, a Toronto man was arrested for downloading child pornography using people's home WiFi as he drove around town with his pants off. http://news.com.com/Wi-Fi+arrest+highlight..._3-5112000.html It only takes a few bad apples to spoil things for everyone, particularly when most people are intimidated by computers anyhow. It's harder to come up with calm, reasoned answers about something if you don't understand how it works. The grade school disciplinary methods are all too easy to apply: "Johnny broke the principal's window on purpose, so nobody gets to play with baseballs any more" instead of figuring out a solution that doesn't punish the innocent. "Mr. X used someone's open WiFi to download bad stuff, so we'll make using open WiFi a crime" could be turned around to "Let's figure out how to keep people from doing bad stuff on open WiFi networks." And of course there's the "But what about the Children?" angle. Back to geocaching... if I could afford a Palm Life Drive and the rest of the gear you described, it would be nice to check Geocaching.com for new caches in my area as I walked home from the lab. Down the street, there's a WiFi Free Spot coffee shop, but it closes at 5:00 or so. Perhaps it might be safer to wait until I got home, if I didn't remember to use the network on campus. Next time I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere in southern Oregon, I can ask the desk clerk if they mind if I use the WiFi in their lobby to e-mail my boss and my roommate with a revised ETA and find out if I have anything urgent I'm missing. I've already decided a Palm & a phone are too delicate to use in the field anyhow. I haven't found my current GPSr is "accurate enough to find a small box to a few meters" but that's probably just the darned redwoods blocking the satellites. (How does the GPSr know what size the box is, anyhow? ;-) ) However, I managed to exchange .LOC waypoints between my Mac and my old Magellan 315! Now, if I could work a membership upgrade into my budget so I could use the extended format downloads... --Kathryn

Versus meeting up with that general hiker or backpacker that you'll run into out there or in the general city park? I would never make that assumption about anybody involved in any sport or hobby I might be interested in. If I don't know them, my trust goes as far as I can throw them. It takes time to get to know somebody and even then, you don't know them completely. You don't know. Your father or uncle, your minister, teacher or nanny can have these tendencies. These are people that have learned how to hold these nefarious secrets close to the chest without detection. It's only a tiny mistake they make that allows their crimes to become visible. To be blunt, assuming geocaching was safer than any other activity is to hold a naive perception. To be honest, although it is creepy to realize this man may have interacted with other geocaching enthusiasts, I'm glad it came out in the open that he did have an interest in the hobby. It has brought home to many people just how complacent they may have been with personal safety awareness. I wasn't precise enough... sorry. I didn't mean "trust" in the sense of "would agree to go somewhere in their vehicle" or "would suggest they babysit my hypothetical kids." What I meant was "no immediate threat, exchange greetings if we make eye contact." I wouldn't run the other way and call 911 (assuming my cell phone had signal). I've seen on the forums that most geocachers will do some sort of "Hail fellow, well met!" on seeing folks with a GPS and/or Geocaching.com swag near a cache. It probably isn't a good idea around here to cache alone in really remote areas due to mountain lion sightings and the usual hazards of hiking. I suppose this particular sex offender is not interested in middle-aged women, but I suppose one who *was* could use geocaching as an excuse to hang out in secluded places where potential victims might show up alone, like a cat waiting at a mousehole. Depending on how popular a cache is, and the demographics of the local geocaching community, this strategy might be feasible or it might be completely far-fetched. I don't know enough about forensic psychology to know if perpetrators always plan the hunt or if they would take advantage of an opportunity like finding someone who fits their preferences while they just happened to be out in the woods pursuing their other hobby, geocaching.

This may be a completely idiotic question, but I'm going to ask because I don't seem to be using the right search terms for the Google Oracle to understand. Cell phones have GPS these days, at least my new Sprint PCS Sanyo RL-4920 does, so 911 can find you in an emergency. So, can you actually do anything fun with it, like use it as a GPSr connected to a Palm with a mapping application? I know there were some applications for the Nextel phones, and the RL-4920 is the next generation. There are USB cables for it (and Mac OS X drivers, at least for BitPim to upload/download phone stuff). Also, since I have a USB Palm (Tungsten C, to be precise), can/how would I connect them? I don't want to subscribe to a service through my cellular provider, since I'd have to pay for it every month on my 2-year contract whether or not I used it. I don't think MapQuest et al. support geocaching, and I might want to find stuff where topo maps are more appropriate than street maps--and where there aren't any cell towers. I really appreciate all the up to date information on GPS and Mac. I just updated to 10.3.9 on my TiBook that rides in the passenger seat on my road trips as a jukebox. (Although the news about an arrest for wardriving is making me think twice about parking by Best Westerns on I-5 to check my e-mail...) Thanks, Kathryn

What creeped me out wasn't the possible tarnishing of our noble hobby by the press, but that having bad guys geocache increases my chances of running into them when I'm out in the woods with my GPS. I would generally assume someone else with a GPS and a cache printout was an OK person, not a potential rapist/murderer. (This is assuming he isn't acting obviously demented. However, I'm on the SCANUSA e-mail alert thingy and all the "newly registered sex offenders" look just like any other rednecks in the next town over.) GeekWriter

I just got a new Sprint Ready-Link phone (Nextel merger) with GPS. Anyone know if it can do anything useful with GPS (not just report location of phone)? I also have a Palm Tungsten C and a Palm IIIxe, as well as an old Magellan 315. Are there ways to connect any of these together to do maps, geocaching, etc.? (Without subscribing to PCS Vision service, since a year's subscription to that would cost as much as a cheap new GPS.) Sorry for the bad grammar--I'm kind of tired now. GeekWriter