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Mod parent insightful if you remember the Cuecat debarcle (http://air-soldier.com/~cuecat/)

I'm not talking about decrypting what it outputs, I'm talking about actually modifying the cat so you never see the encryption crap. See?

Perfect also as a low cost camera for attaching to radio controlled plains and kites. All that's required is figuring how to trigger the exposures.

I wonder if the guts are dipped in epoxy to discourage what happened to the CueCat, i.e. they sell/give out several thousand but only half ever come back or are used as intended.

There's already precedent for this in the postal system, at least here in the United States.

If you receive something unsolicited in the US Mail (which includes something addressed to you by accident, but not addressed to someone else and simply left in the wrong mailbox), you are free to do with it as you wish. The sender cannot compel you to obey any license agreement or follow any restrictions they might wish to place on its use, within the bounds of the law. (That is, you can't go out and beat someone up with a billy club someone sends you in the mail, because that would otherwise violate the law, but you're free to use it as a billy club even if the company who sent it to you says it's a sex toy for cows.)

There was a great deal of discussion about this back when DigitalConvergence (remember them?) was sending unsolicited CueCats to people and then suing them for taking them apart and hacking them.

Some info on that situation:

http://www.beau.lib.la.us/~jmorris/linux/cuecat/
http://air-soldier.com/~cuecat/
http://www.xmission.com/~rebling/pub/cuecat.html
http://www.logorrhea.com/cuecat/mirrors.html

More on Google; search for "CueCat."

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There's a big problem with software-services, and that is that the consumer doesn't feel like they're getting the same "value" (whatever that is) that they get when they have something they can hold in their hands. With hardware, you can usually repurpose it, but with software, you feel like you're held hostage and we know that companies sometimes stop support (DOS, QuickBASIC, J#) if not disappear altogether. Even though alternate guide services exist, I like TiVo's, but feel secure by TiVo's policies toward [friendly] hackers.

Witness TiVo, by far the best piece of consumer electronic to come along in a long while. To get the full value, you need to buy a TiVo box -and- get a lifetime subscription. Now, pretend you're standing in BestBuy in the TiVo section and you're looking at price tags.

Alternate Universe #1: Buy a TiVo box for $50 and purchase the lifetime service for $450. How do you feel? (Personally, I wonder why the box is so cheap and how long they'll stay in business.)

Alternate Universe #2: Buy a TiVo box for $450 and purchase a lifetime service for $50. How do you feel? (Now, I feel like getting several boxes.) ...what changed? The fact that I'm walking out of the store holding something I *perceive* to put value in. I can see the TiVo box. I can't see the service.

Incidently, this is why a $250 box with $250 service causes so many consumers to sit there and ponder about making the plunge. (You should. -ed.)

The point being that free hardware is perceived as cheap hardware, even if it isn't. We also know, free hardware gets repurposed. (Witness the Cue:CAT barcode readers.)

No, if I'm going to have to pay for software, I want it to be like Apple's model for OS X -- everytime an update comes out, I *want* to shell out cash to get the new, _stable_, features that breath new life into my system.

I do NOT want to have to deal with the hassle of license codes.

As for me, sell me the hardware -- give me the software.

Obviously you are not the proud owner of a CueCat.

This by far is the best hack. It removes all encryption and allows you to scan in items and it shows their REAL barcode's.

I'm trying to take this, query boarders.com and dump the info back into a database to catalog my 3k cd collection. I need help on parsing a url like: http://search.borders.com/fcgi-bin/db2www/search/s earch.d2w/Details?mediaType=Music&searchType=ISBNU PC&code=601215309928 into id, performer, title, style, track_name, type, publisher, date, producer, engineer, guest, cost using perl. Some of them wont be there for every record so that needs to be taken into account. There will be 1 record like that for every track, so if a cd has 12 tracks there will be 12 entries with only the track_names changing. Cost will be divided by the # of tracks so when added back together it equals the original cost (i wanna know how much this is worth :).

If you can help great, I know most of you need something better to do with your time :)