Who Owns The Strip

In Vegas, the house always wins.

Many of the largest hotel, casino and resort properties are located on The Strip - MGM Grand, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio, Paris, Luxor, Newyork-Newyork, Excalibur.

It is more than likely that your squandered money goes to fill the pockets of just two.

Wondering how?

You will be surprised to know that despite so many different casinos and varied building themes, most of The Strip is owned by just two companies - MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment.

Harrah's is in fact also the largest gaming company in the world followed by MGM Mirage.

Here is an image from Wikipedia edited to contain what these two big guys own on The Strip.

BTW in my case, the house did not always win. In Atlantic City, I won $900 on slot machines. Sweet huh!

However in Vegas I lost around 200 bucks at the end of a 2 day gambling frenzy.

So when you go to Vegas next time, you will know who is exactly taking your money.

Cruelty and Kitchen

With the International Whaling Commission(IWC) annual meeting underway last month, questions about whaling and animal rights in general surfaced again. Whale meat is a picky issue and demonstrates the schism that exists in todays world.

If you are meat eating or just don't care, you might be inclined to think what's all this fuss about. Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion, a different outlook towards life and I respect that. Be what suits you best.

This article on BBC explores how culture, religion and customs influence what's acceptable and what's not as food and how we have evolved to be so different from each other. The original article is embedded in an iframe here.

I know its kinda hard to read it here, but my site template seems to be restricting the width of the iframe window.

So what is your friend browsing

Curiosity is a good thing. It makes a creature question the how,why and what of its surroundings and as a result increases awareness and understanding.

So how many times have you wondered what your friend sitting across the couch(or in his room) is doing with his head buried in his laptop.

This is intended to be just an experiment and not invade some else's personal space. I wanted to prove to myself that this is something simple to accomplish. Organizations do this all the time but they have more resources, equipment and money.

So I embarked on my research and a possible implementation.

I figured that a network protocol analyzer and a little tweaking on the router should do it for me. And the right software turned out to be Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal). The best part is Wireshark is free.

The fundamental thing that needs to happen to capture packets that are not addressed to your NIC is to run it in promiscuous mode or monitor mode. And not all cards support this feature. Luckily my LAN Adapter supported promiscuous mode.

When I put my NIC into promiscuous mode, I wasn't seeing any packets not addressed to me. Strange I thought.

Researched again and found out all routers are by default switched. What that means is to improve network efficiency(prevent collisions), the router sends only the traffic that is addressed to you on your CAT5 cable. So the router also acts as a filter and to be able to do anything, you will have to capture traffic before it passes to your router( between your cable modem and router )

I then thought"How about my wireless network. By its very nature, it should be amenable to promiscuous capture."

Tried that and no luck there as well since my Wireless NIC did not support promiscuous mode.

Hmm... so much for my sniffing experiment. But I was adamant to get this thing working.

Again researched...and the answer turned out to be the good old Ethernet Hub.

Hubs were the norm once upon a time when switches were still expensive. A Hub is basically a repeater and any packet entering any port is broadcast out on every other port (every port other than the port of entry).

"Thats it !. That's what I need to get going."

Turned out, not an easy thing to find a hub these days. No one sells them anymore. Circuitcity, Microcenter, Staples, Compusa, Frys, Buy.com, JR.com, Amazon(new ones) no where.
At last I found one at BestBuy - Dynex 4 port Hub.

Armed with the hub, I started tweaking my home network again.The key is to plug your hub between the cable modem and the router. And run the LAN cable from one of the ports on the hub to your laptop.

..and viola ! It worked like a charm. The software was capturing all sorts of traffic(URLs) on the network.

Now, I was the God of my home network. I was seeing everything my friends were browsing. So much for their corner seat...

A few hours into the experiment, the network started showing sluggishness because of collision problems. Since hubs are unsophisticated broadcast devices,only one device can successfully transmit at a time and each host remains responsible for collision detection and retransmission. So I had to take the hub out.

In the end, I was happy to achieve what I set out to do and learnt a lot about networks and networking equipment in the process.

May my curiosity rest in peace now, until something else awakens it... AGAIN.

Orkut - Don't scraps bother you

Orkut does an amazing job of networking you with long lost friends. No wonder, According to Wikipedia, Orkut is the second most visited website in India. But your amusing fun scraps and pomp-pomp actions lead to consequences that you will have to face one day.

Orkut should really be commended for making its appeal work at such a personal level. Be it the soothing theme color, ease of use or lack of advertisements on personal profiles.

In this era of web notoriety where people have second thoughts divulging personal information, the scrapbooks at orkut are filled with many intimate, not so public comments. Insanely large number of people have in excess of 1000 scraps. Do they realize that a part of their private life is now public, accessible to everyone.

I do realize that scrapping is a quick way of keeping in touch. Nicely fills a niche between messaging and emailing. But how can people be so naive as to make comments that are not intended for public consumption.

... and I have seen friends (ab)using this information.

Scrounge through the scraps, conversations and you will be surprised as to how much information you can garner.

Its akin to building a missing person profile or a terror-suspect case file for the FBI or Interpol. Analyze the scraps, friends, communities, follow conversations if you find them informative and you have got yourself a plethora of clues.

The more time you are willing to spend, the more of the puzzle you can solve and deduce what kinda person you are looking at.

What better use for this than to clandestinely know about your potential life partner. If you can narrow down a profile based on the information available to you via a marriage proposal, its just a matter of time and patience before you can piece together his/her life.

How about this for marketing tag line - Orkut : The Unofficial Marriage Proposal Search Database.

Doesn't this invasion of privacy alarm you. You better be because you never know who is looking. Friends who have taken note have since then deleted scraps, removed testimonials and altered their profiles. Believe me, I have seen enough negative consequences of profile portrayals in Orkut.

Its never high time to do the right thing. Make the right judgment call and be the boss of what the world knows about you.

Happy Orkuting !!