Slashback: Guido, Games, Felines

This time, an astute reader points us to the place where Guido Van Rossum speaks out on the Python license issues recently posted about here on Slashdot, and an Everquest enthusiast points to the Official Word (well, chatroom response) to Everquest server emulators. Oh, and remember that CueCat scanner you picked up last week (and quickly wrote a Linux kernel driver for) -- did anyone at Radio Shack mention something about an embedded serial number? Hmmmm. I thought not. Good thing reverse engineering isn't yet a capital offense ...

That's one long and winding snake of an issue ... Kevin Reichard writes: "Since you covered the original issues surrounding Python licensing, you may also want to note that Guido van Rossum of PythonLabs has officially responded in a Linux Today interview. He has many interesting things to say."

Which things notably include: "The sad thing is that all of this is based on technicalities: Stallman agrees that Python is free software, but a technicality in the licenses prevents compatibility. The choice of law clause in the CNRI license, which is causing the incompatibility, is very common is software licenses, and CNRI doesn't want to drop it because the validity of the general disclaimers in the license may depend on it. At the same time, Stallman doesn't want to allow any choice of law clauses, because one could stipulate the law of "Unfreedonia" which might reverse the meaning of the GPL."

Abort, retry, fail, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate? L Fitzgerald Sjoberg writes: " A recent posting on the official EverQuest boards by a spokesperson for Verant states that even RUNNING an EverQuest emulator violates the EverQuest license agreement.

If the emulator is legal, and emulators seem to be making a lot of legal headway these days, doesn't this essentially amount to Verant forbidding you to use a competitor's product? Not a good sign, if you ask me."

"Sir! Sir! There's something wrong -- this knob goes up to eleven!" Signal 11 writes: "I took apart a cuecat and did a rundown of the circuit tracings on the board. What follows is a short summary of what I found. I'm working on putting together a schematic for it and hope to have it together within a couple weeks.

The cuecat is fairly simple. It uses a pair of infrared LEDs to direct light onto the sheet of paper with the barcode on it. It is then picked up by an IR detector, whose output is tuned by a single potentiometer (adjusted at time of manufacture, I would guess) and then fed into the analog input of a microprocessor. The detector is the same type one can pickup at radioshack. All you do is enclose it in a box and then make a pinhole at one end. Cheap, but it works well enough.

The microprocessor I haven't had time to put together a circuit from the specs provided by texas instruments to download the microcode out of it. It is also a matter of me not wanting to learn about microprocessors although I understand it is common in the industry.. I'm an analog guy. :) I suspect it is nothing more than running the output through a ACD (analog->digital) inside the microprocessor and then referencing the binary input with a list of values to produce the barcode string. After that, as has been previously noted, it is passed to an XOR algorithm, and then modulated to be fed out onto the PS/2 interface. There are a pair of transistors on the board near the outputs of the microprocessor - I suspect these are used to either boost the signal to run over the PS/2 interface (the microprocessor may not have enough power), or as part of an oscillator to get a clock for the processor. Until I finish tracing out the board paths, I can't say for sure.

Somewhere in the chip they probably set the serial number into the nvram, which is prepended to the output. The software does the rest. As has been demonstrated, there isn't much to do on the software side either - one could just create an indexed array containing scancodes. One might even be able to write a new key definition file under linux.. no programming required.

This is a really simple device. This is also probably why they were so concerned about competitors.. it wouldn't take them more than one afternoon with an EE and a microcode programmer to reverse-engineer it and produce their own. Then again, the device was probably designed in the same amount of time, likely by a random contractor. The reason it took me so long? I've been messing around with electronics for all of three months, so yes, I'm not a professional - I also haven't gotten into DSP technology yet, which is all the cuecat is. As always, if someone could provide me with a basic circuit for reading the contents of the processor's memory out, I'd appreciate it!

Anyway, DigitalConvergence - I'm waiting for my cease and desist now."

Comments

Cue Cat Reality Check

[Monte]

I just walked into RS and asked for the "Cat thing that reads barcodes", bingo, a guy hands me a bag with the Cue Cat and a catalog (praise "Bob" they're not selling the things any more!), he says "Y'know, you can scan anything - soda pop, chewing gum, whatever!", I wave goodbye and I'm out of the store.

No name, nothing to tie me to an "ID" number.

You'd think that if there were some sort of attempt to track scans vs consumer they'd be a little more attentive about getting, like, my name, or something.

Then again, this is Radio Shack we're talking about.

Anybody else miss the free flashlights?

Re:Cue Cat Reality Check

[alhaz]

The ammount of corporate buyin among radioshack store managment varies quite a bit. Tandy has a long history of abusing them.

Mostly it goes back to the way they reeled in their privately owned franchises. The way it used to work, every year the franchise owner had to fill out a silly form and send it to Tandy, and every year Tandy would send back a form letter letting them know they're still a franchise.

Then one year, an aquaintences father, who owned a 'shack franchise, sends his form in, and gets back a letter saying something like "your franchise has not been renewed, here is a check for your original investment. While ownership of this store has been shifted back to Tandy corporation you will be allowed to keep your position as manager at a salary of $26,000 per year" - of course, that investment was made in the early 70's and no account was made for interest, increased value of the property, inflation, etc. 20 years and they basically told him to take his ball and go home.

So he contacts some other private franchise owners, finds out they all got the same letter and check. At this point, they figure they're screwed out of their businesses but not out of the actual value of their stores, and contact a lawyer to see if they can sue Tandy for the increased value of the stores.

The lawyer does some research, finds out this was nation wide. In one fell swoop, Tandy shut down every privately owned 'shack in the nation and gave every one of them the shaft. This becomes a class action lawsuit. Other greivances are brought up.

For instance, the franchise agreement stated that Tandy would aquire the merchandise and then sell it to the franchise at 10% over wholesale cost. Many franchise owners suspected over the years that they were not getting this deal, but hadn't rocked the boat. Some investigation was done, and several of Tandy's asian suppliers were identified. Many of these suppliers were contacted and told that a group of investors was considering starting a chain of electronics stores, and was seeking sample merchandise and quantity pricing for a list of items. The suppliers responded with an exaustive price list and sample merchandise.

The sample merchandise proved to be identical to radioshack merchandise, and the price list showed that the wholesale cost of the items was far below what Tandy had represented. Indeed, some popular items were being marked up as much as 600% before being sold to the franchises.

In the end, Tandy lost. Big. In excess of one million dollars per franchise.

It would be safe to say that i have no love for Tandy or the shack. It would also be safe to say that this is a corporation that doesn't engender much loyalty in their lower management.

What's more, two out of the three I've got were handed to me by teenagers, who obviously don't care. There are five shacks within 10 minutes of home and they keep separate customer databases.

Accurate CueCat information / internal pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

go to this site matrixpm.com/~haveblue/cuecat

An Everquest emulator is hardly a competitor

[vertical-limit]

While its legality could still be proved valid, to consider an EverQuest emulator a "competitor" to the legit EverQuest service is a joke. An EverQuest emulator is clearly a derived work -- you need the original data files to play the game, and the emulator's game world is still reliant on Origin for new material. To file a "leech" like the emulator in the same class as Meridian 59 or Ultima Online -- both of which are completely original programs -- is absurd, and no court would ever hold up and opinion like that.

That's not to say that an emulator isn't legal -- certainly, it's not in any danger of killing off the EverQuest craze^H^H^H^H^Hlicense to print money anytime soon. But it's certainly not competing with EverQuest; after all, if the actual EQ world went out of business, the emulator authors would be left without any new material! An emulator is a derived work and has been legally proven to be such.

Re:ID

[AndyL]

"(which they always ask for when I buy resistors... they must really want to know which parts of town are buying the most resistors)"

Well, Big Brother always trys to keep track of The Resistance.

-Andy

Build your own scanner...

[1010011010]

The website h ere describes how to make your own RS232-output barcode scanner.



---- ----

My cat's breath smells like cat food....

[Rude Turnip]

This is only a little off-topic, but I've found a nifty application for the CueCat under BeOS. Using no special software other than an MP3 query tool, I can scan the barcode on the back of a jewel case and if I've got the album ripped onto my HD, the query tool (MP3 Flashlight) will seek out the songs, load them into my mp3 player (CL-Amp) and start playing.

All you have to do is store the scanner's output in the Comments attribute of the mp3 file (the Be filesystem allows indexable attributes to be associated with files). This can be done manually for albums you're already ripped, or automatically for albums you're about to rip (using a tool like RipENC).

If you have your jewel cases right next to you it's a cooler way of playing an album than simply double-clicking on a playlist.

After reading the thread topic about serial ID numbers in the CueCat's output, I decided to see it for myself.

Look at the scan outputs below. The top code is the output I got last night from doing a barcode scan of Motorhead's "1916" album. The bottom code was obtained just now from the same album, but using a different CueCat (I have 5, all from different stores).

.C3nZC3nZC3nYChPXDxzWCxnX.fHmc.C3r3DxD3DxT2E3f3.
** ***
.C3nZC3nZC3nYChTWD3D6CxnX.fHmc.C3r3DxD3DxT2E3f3.

The stars indicate differences in the scan outputs. Now, here is a comparison of the barcode output for Pulp's "Different Class" album using the same two scanners from above:

.C3nZC3nZC3nYChTWD3D6CxnX.fHmc.DhbYD3zXD3j1DNfZ.
** ***
.C3nZC3nZC3nYChPXDxzWCxnX.fHmc.DhbYD3zXD3j1DNfZ.

As you can see, the differences come up in the same 5 places each time. The last set of characters after the last dot seem to be unique to the album. So unless I go into the Comments attribute and delete out the part of the code where differences show up, I can only use one particular scanner to scan jewel cases and play albums. Worse yet, no one else who I share the mp3 with would be able to use their scanner if they happen to have the same jewel case.

Re:ID

[Rude Turnip]

I've been to 5 different Radio Shacks and the experience varied. I guess since some employees think it's a "free" item, they figure there is no need to collect name/address info. Whether or not they take your name, they are supposed to scan the item at the register because (as an employee explained to me) it is nonetheless an inventory item. When the inventory level reaches a certain number, more are ordered automatically.

At the first Radio Shack, I (stupidly) gave them my name and address and they scanned in the scanner and catalog. However, my fiance was with me and they just gave her a scanner no questions asked and nothing got scanned. The next two stores asked for name/address and I gave them fake info. At the fourth store, the guy said, let's just scan this using our "dummy" account. At the last store, the kid just scanned in the cat and catalog but didn't request my name/address.

When it's all said and done, YMMV.

Who cares? I mean who acutally installed the SW?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the reader built into a custom box bolted onto my monitor-less keyboard-less mouse-less Linux server. I have cards with bar codes printed on them which when swiped perform verious tasks. There's:

the reboot card
the system halt card
the cut the internet connection card
the kill all the print jobs card
the boot off all lusers card
and the FBI raid card (unmounts all encrypted filesystems)

Without the software, no serial number is being sent over the net.

Serial Number on My Forehead: Stolen!

[webword]

Someone forgot to tell me that my serial number was stolen and put into my glorious Raid E O Shaq scanning device. I woke up this morning and the Mark of the Beast was no longer on my forehead! They took it and actually put it in the device itself. They stole my identity. They own me. What is the world coming to? I mean, this is like we are back in 2053 when pure humans still existed. How am I going to buy food if they can't scan my head!? What's going to happen, the scanner is going to scan itself and then give me food? Help! We must revolt against Raid E O Shaq and get back our souls!!