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"Cloudy Future" For CueCat
Edgester writes "There is an article at Security Focus about Digital Convergence and the CueCat Barcode Scanner. DC thinks that those Cease and Desist letters completely stopped the hacker community from hacking the CueCat scanners." Oh - and we should just point that in the continuing example of Digital Convergence's wonderful security their site was cracked and all user info was captured.
We love loss leaders. They give us cheap hardware to play with.
Loss leaders don't love us, though! And we definitely don't like the way many of them treat us.
This is obvious damage control on DC's part; not news that slashdot should be spreading. (Except on slashdot it means that hundreds will now go set up mirrors...)
Sad to say I've never heard of DC, and after reading this piece, the linked pieces, and their web site, I don't think I want to know them.
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
A couple years ago Tandy spun off its leather shops and crafts stores into Tandycrafts, Inc. So, while it once was the same company, it is no longer the same company.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
And if Peguins'R'US has licenced "One-Click-Shopping" you can have the cute fuzzy guys delivered right to your door with out leaving the couch
Anyone who "owns" a house knows how little they really own it. My gas meter is inside my garage, connected to pipes I own, but if I do anything to the meter, they start by cutting off my service, and then make me pay for damage to their property. A similar situation exsts for my cable box. Not to mention what would happen if I stopped paying my property taxes...
imagine what would have happened if 40, 50, 60 years ago, Henry Ford declared the engines of automobiles off limits.
"Warranty void if seal removed."
Not everyone deserves to be in business. It's called the market. People who have a viable model and execute it well, of course, are performing a service and should - and often do - reap rewards. People who follow up a flawed model with peevish tantrums are not benefitting the economy, and we don't need them.
There's a lot of similarity between this and the DeCSS case: A company (or group of companies) wants to control private consumer behavior through a mechanism other than appealing to consumer economic self-interest. That's not how things have worked in the past, and it's scary to think that it might change. The only reason I participate in the capitalist economy is because I think it's better for me. If I wanted other people to tell me how to live, I'd go to Sweden or somewhere, where at least they have my interests at heart.
You didn't want one in your Pentium III. You didn't want them in your Microsoft Word documents. But you've got one in your CueCat. No big deal, DC just wants to track everything that you do on the Web.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
I can't imagine how a company could send you something UNSOLICITED (Wired sold their mailing list) and then hold you accountable for misusing it. They may have a better case against folks who purposefully went to Radio Shack to get one, but what about the poor saps who had one handed to them UNSOLICITED?
I probably should take WIRED MAGAZINE to court for getting me mixed up with this!
--- Speaking only for myself,
I think the going figure among /. folks back when this all first came out was that the hardware is pry about $3.00/unit (US) Including develpment costs factored in to some degree. IOW, they're cheap. We dissected one and there isn't miuch to it. A board, a couple pretty lights....
This link, http://www.securityfocus.com/news/89, led to no fewer than fourteen URLs:
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/ad.html?group= secnews? &_ref=19861971m l?id=89&_ref=19861971e f=19861971m l?&_ref=19861971l ?&_ref=19861971m l?&_ref=19861971m l?&_ref=19861971m l?&_ref=19861971s =home&_ref=19861971t ml?&_ref=19861971m l?&_ref=19861971= home&_ref=19861971t ml?&_ref=19861971
http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/home/menu.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.ht
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/logo.html?&_r
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/upper_left.ht
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/left_edge.htm
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/lower_left.ht
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/right_edge.ht
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/upper_edge.ht
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/top.html?focu
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/upper_right.h
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/lower_edge.ht
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/ad.html?group
http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/lower_right.h
Someone tell these guys to read some basic web design docs. (You can't even link to a printable text-only version!)
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
You mean
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Oh, but AOL CDs have many more interesting alternative uses. For example, have you ever thought of making windchimes out of them?
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I've already scanned in my books and CDs, so I can tell you before you start that it's not as easy as it sounds.
For one thing, if your book collection is anything like mine, you'll have a good number of books that don't have ISBN's (crummy British paperbacks from the 60's), let alone bar codes. Then there are a bunch where there's some stupid sticker, or a bend in the book cover, etc. to make it unreadable. Then, once you've got the barcode, at least a third of them don't successfully get a title and author from Amazon. I even hacked up a CGI-Z39 gateway to look up the ISBNs in Melvyl (Univ. of Cal's catalog), and got about the same hit rate there (though better data when it did hit).
CD's are roughly the same: a third of mine (mostly old stuff and punk) didn't have UPCs on them, so didn't match. I pointed them at barpoint.com, and got a hit rate of roughly 75% on the ones that did have barcodes.
I also did a lot of mucking around with the various different drivers, and wound up recoding some of it in Perl (the UPC->ISBN stuff was in Python), so I spent a lot of time before I even got started messing around with the drivers and stuff.
My $0.02, anyway.
--
-Esme
How bored do you have to be to type in multiple messages about not doing something, about how bored you would be doing it, after specifically reading messages from other people about doing what it is you'd have to be really bored to even think about doing?
Man.
You are bored.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Clueless does not even begin to explain this attitude. Here we have a product, shipped to me without my asking, for the purpose of providing to them tracking data about me (through it serial number).
If I understand their position they would like to claim that the information, collected about me and my surfing/buying habits is theirs? Further, I do not have the right to this information which, realistically, could contain everything from bank account numbers to my address book. (How would I know, I am not allowed to look)
Worse than what these guys are smoking, is they are starting to share it with the goverment. It appears they are betting we will sit around and complain. But who cares if geeks complain?
Folks, if you have not helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) in the past, now is the time. Stop sitting on the sidelines and whining. START DOING.
Support your rights with EFF
I (or my father) was on their mailing list, and I recall receiving a catalogue advertising a hard-disk (probably called a Winchester in them days) for some TRS80 machine. At the time I'd no idea what one was, and for the amount of money that they wanted, I wondered who could afford one.
Then there were all the components. Resistors, diodes, switches and so on. Few other places sold them.
Now the local Tandy has become a telephone store. Other shops still exist, but have cut down badly on geekish things. Couldn't even buy a box of floppies (I needed some to install Debian) last time I visited one. And I couldn't find a fuse for my PSU, either. Not a geek hangout any more. We do have Maplin stores, though. The local one is huge.
...(although I hear PBS is going to use it)...
Oh, great. So, in theory, our local PBS stations could one day make our computers go to their pledge drive donation web page, and not let us close the browser window or do anything else on them until we cough up some "support by viewers like you."
I would love to be watching a Discovery channel show about say, penguins, and be linked to a site that has more in depth information about penguins.
Now, that, on the other hand, is a good idea. Anything would improve that annoying animation/sound effect cue that Discovery uses currently. What would be cool would be a new standard button on remotes that would light up or something when you could press it for more info about what was on the screen. There has to be some sort of user control over what cues would load up a site on that user's computer.
Point is, there were a lot of better ways to implement this CueCat idea, and I've been able to think of about three now since the debate over it began here.
Two days ago I was mailed a CC. I did not order it I did not ask for one. Based on what I remember about how the USPS works on things like this it is mine no strings attached. The CD was already in an "open" package that read by opening this you agree ...
My question is do you think I am bound by any of DC's requirements provided I do not install the software on the CD and Agree to the License.
TKrabec Pahh
none of the stores are linked to a central database of customers...even within the same town.
How can you be so sure? I am almost certain that those 'catalogues' I get are because of me giving my name and address - even though they say that they won't add me to a mailing list.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You are missing part of their business model, they are not only selling the bar code to the web site (so that when you swipe the bar code on the Ben&Jerry's you go to their web site.) But they are also selling the demographic information about your swiping habits.
Since each Cue Cat has a unique serial number, they can be keeping track of each item you swipe. Don't you think that Ben&Jerry would like to know that you also swiped a Gaviscon bar code, or a Britney Spears CD.
Since they seem to be so concerned with people disassembling their device and disabling their EEPROM, it seems that losing their profiling data is their real fear.
Such companies deserve to be held up to general aprobation so that others don't think that these tactics are a good idea. What I would love to see is that someone would write a filter that scrambles the id randomly on each use. Why we could call it "Screw Cat".
really, you must be some interesting fella.
..
Why do you need to catalogue your books if you already own them ?Why would you want to do the same for your CD's ? I play mine.
I'm not interested in a barcode scanner. It's rubbish. I have better things to do with my time.
.
> This guy appears a textbook example of a clueless suit in charge of a tech company. No fscking idea of
> what is going on in the real world.
It appears to be a general trait at DC. Just saw the CC infomercial this morning. Nearly ruptured my spleen. D'ya know that they think that little kitty is worth 50 bucks, but if you run over to ratshack right now they'll give it away for free!(Man, if I was a clueless insomniac, I know I would rush right over...)
My favorite bits were how Cats and (soon to be developed) other DC gadgets will become the basis for our entire lives, home/school/work.
I heard that in AU some guy had a local (regional?) chain of hamburger joints named "Burger King" - completely legal (in AU), but boy did the bruhaha start when the "real" BK decided to establish "down under" - in the end, BK (US) called themselves something else in AU (though I never heard what name they did choose - anyone know?)...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
DC needs complete control.
Hey! Hackers! Leave DC alone!
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
They should have forgone the serial number part(I don't need a serial number on mine. if it gets stolen, I'll buy a new one. I mean come on! heh), and sold it for $10 a piece, and made a ton on software bundling. Home inventory(CDs), quickie hardware identification(run the cuecat on your video card, and it'll find the drivers for you!), and such. Forget about the Rat Shack stuff, that's peanuts compared to selling a piece of hardware cheap, and doing bundling with it.
Maybe because not enough people write to their representatives to let them know how they feel about intellectual property issues. However, I think it would take a *lot* of mail from constituents to conteract the messages they seem to be receiving that allow things such as UCITA and DMCA to pass votes.
:-)
What type of laws do you thing would benefit us consumers? Should the government pass a law stating that all systems must be totally secure? How would this be enforced? How would anyone know whether their systems are completely secure? I don't believe it is possible to prove a complex computer system as being secure. It can only be proven insecure. As such, prosecutors could only go after companies whose servers have been cracked. Maybe crackers could then become employees of various law enforcement agencies.
Anyway, civil recourse against breaches of privacy seems to be the only sane route. Companies should be liable for gross negligence about security, but then how gross is gross?
As far as "the police/military/sceret services[sic]" just sitting back, I would rather have that than Carnivore/BadEvilGuyFinder watching everything. The system just needs time to settle into equilibrium.
end of line
Well... let me think
- Inventory of books/cds/anything
- Using it to look up books on amazon
- using it to start programs with the swipe of a barcode
- Practically anything
I have a friend who was going to make a sheet of playlists for XMMS in barcode format, then just scan them to have it start playing that playlist.I was also thinking that it would be kind of cool to put the decoder into barcode format using 128 encoding (only 7 lines of code now). Anyone done this yet? You can get a free barcode printer for linux... I cant remember what it's called right now, but it is there. Basically you can do a lot more than you think of at first. The possibilities are endless.
oh how the mighty have fallen!
That damn magazine is turning into Technology Vogue. Sixty-three fscking pages of ads before the first bit of actual content! I stopped reading it a couple of months ago, and I don't miss it at all.
The whole magazine's become a parody of itself, and unfortunately, not a good one. Say goodbye to one subscriber.
To paraphrase a certain filmmaker, "We liked your issues, especially the earlier, funnier ones."
I hate this CueCat thing as much as the next geek (I got mine - free and clear, no trace), as well as all the bull that went on with the iOpener, etc.
Seriously, why don't we build our own open-source bar-code scanning solution? True, one can get laser and wand scanners that output to serial ASCII pretty cheap and all, but even for those one must surf the used market. Doing it ourselves though is the way we work - we are geeks, right? A soldering iron and some simple parts never hurt anyone (outside of a burn here or there, right?)...
These devices are simple! Something could be built quite easily with a handful of parts (heck, most or all could be found in a busted remote control). Find something to stuff it all in, and a scanner can be built.
What isn't so obvious is the software to decode the barcode - plenty to normalize the scanning speed, direction of scan, and probably a million other things that I don't know of would need to be coded, but come on! Open Source enthusiasts have managed to put together amazing packages of complexity - a bar-code decoding package shouldn't be too difficult, I would think. What is stopping us?
I would think that we could come up with a true open design for a wand style reader, made from a few parts (I would imagine on the low end the scanner would consist of a high brightness red LED, a phototransistor, and a low val resistor, like 470 ohm - vcc (5 volts) would be run through the resistor (to drop current and voltage a bit), then split to drive the collector of the phototran, and the LED. The emitter of the phototran (I am thinking a NPN phototran here) could drive a pin on a parallel port. Throw all of this into a nifty case - like a BIC pen). Once the code is done (GPL'd, of course), distribute it with schematics for the reader, maybe a few pictures of a completed sample device, and construction hints...
We have an itch to scratch - let's scratch it!
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"Good will" and "charity" are concepts that simply don't exist in the business world.
--
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Audio-interactivity with a computer.... How do you spell Teddy Ruxspin? And two dozen other interactive toys?
And while we're at it, what about the French VideoTex (or whatever the hell they called it...)
I find nothing all that cool about it. It's like Access Software advertising on their first Tex Murphy game (what was that damn thing called? Something about Mars, IIRC) was the first game with "digitized voice" that didn't need a sound card.
Me, I wondered how they got away with that claim after listening to Big Five's Defense Command for many years on my TRS-80 Model I. Don't bitch to me about bloatware... My first machine had 4K RAM, 4K ROM, and some damn good games....
There's an optical assembly, two LEDs and a pinhole sensor.
There's a CPU (a 8051 workalike) and a serial EPROM, a crystal, and a power supply to regulate the keyboard power. About 15 passive components are on the board, too.
And then there's the cable and connectors and custom case
I'd be very surprised if these only cost $3.00 apiece. I'd estimate it, minimum, around $7 or $8 just for parts and assembly.
--- Speaking only for myself,
Quite right. With todays communcations technologies, once the first person figures something out, everyone can know it.
Companies (particularly fancy new e-conomy i-companies) really need to keep this in mind. It's just a fact of life in the internet age. (I get this picture of Danny Devito talking about buggy whips in "OPM")
Here's another ferinstance for ya: "evil linux hackers" inspect the DC Cue mechanism and realize what a enormous invasion of privacy it could be. Geeks loudly proclaim same to the world, NY times takes notice and says "tsk tsk". (Ok, so maybe the NYT wouldn't give a damn about personal rights vs corporate kudzu, but maybe someone outside the geek ghetto would notice the brouhaha). Anyhow DC ends up looking stupid, evil and greedy. How embarassing.
#include "old adages.h"
#define security_through_obscurity "no security at all"
Face it. The world's changing. Adapt or die.
A couple of facts of life in the i-age:
- The lightning speed with which knowledge can spread, even if it's not information you'd what the public to know, or even disinformation.
- A certain small percentage of people will examine your service/product and see what use they can put it to, which may not neccessarily be the same at the use you intended.
Given fact 1) above, you should take fact 2) under advisement and examine your service/product without rose-colored glasses.They should have forgone the serial number part ...
Uhh, no. Near as I can tell, their revenue model involves keeping track of the items scanned by each doodad. Then they can correlate this with the registration data to match serial number to a "real" person. Then they sell the list of items scanned for marketing.
This kind of marketing data is *very* valuable nowdays.
Personally, I think that they should stick with charging companies to be listed in their database. After all, a naked barcode, by itself, is pretty useless.
That, and hiring people with some vestige of a clue.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
I don't mean this as a flame, but I want to point out that big business and the government have been controlling what you do with your hardware (home, car, etc) for years. Can you roll the odometer back on your car (legally)? If you want to build an addition onto your house can you just put up some plywood and duct tape it together (legally)? There have always been laws (odometer fraud, building regulations, etc) in place to control our lives and control our posessions "for own own good" (said tounge-in-cheek style).
I'm not arguing these are GOOD laws, as I do agree that NO ONE should be able to control a piece of hardware once I pay my hard-earned money for it. It's just a case of the gubment saving us citizens from ourselves.
BTW, I think a better car analogy would be if Ford had designed his cars to run on FordFuel and sold them for $1000, but expected you to pay $10/gallon for his FordFuel then attacked you with lawyers if you modified your car to run on normal gas. As has been stated over and over again, it's a flawed business plan.
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
Are there any places out there that let you search for CDs via the bar-code number the same way that Amazon lets you use the ISBN?
I'd like to see someone take that hack that directs CueCat scans to an Amazon page another step further...
I'd like to be able to scan the bar-code on the back of a CD and have a CDDB (or MusicBrainz, etc.) record be returned.
Obviously, you first would have to find a place to search the bar-code against and then filter those results and plug them into a CDDB query...
Well, I can dream anyway...
"Do no unnatural thing today." - Captain Flak
The new version of FooCat BarCode (0.1.3) returns author, title, url and image url (cover shot) for books, CDs and DVDs in tab-delimited format. Check the CueCat Project page later today.
n 6ChfX.
N zc3Nxe3B7dXJzcnNx.FhMC.c3pwdXF3dXN6cHFx. 0 http://www.warnerbros.com/pages/music/index.jsp?fr omtout=home_menu_music_item1 WARNER BROS. RECORDS, INC.
s earch.d2w/Details?code=093624609322&medi aType=Music&searchType=ISBNUPC&prodID= Return Of The Rentals Rentals (The) /web_images/products/00/15/26/c/15262574_c.gif
Here's an example:
^[[21~.C3nZC3nZC3nXE3b7DxjZCNnX.fHmc.C3PWDxf3Dx
DATA 000000002838610102 UPA 093624609322 9362460932
CUE 9362460932 http://t.dcnv.com/CRQ/1..ACTIVATIONCODE.04.c3Nzc3
BN 093624609322 http://search.borders.com/fcgi-bin/db2www/search/
tab delimited fields, one record per line.
---- ----
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Well, I'm not, actually, but...
Digital Convergence's biggest sin was picking a blindingly stupid way to make money. I don't know -- I suppose the existence of the DMCA is proof otherwise, but I thought the point of protective laws was to protect you from getting hurt by others (e.g. the FDA and similar agencies) and not from shooting yourself in the foot (e.g. the entertainment industry pushing DMCA because they don't have to get off their duffs and rewrite the rules that don't work anymore). And now they're trying to sue their way out because they can't get hacker heat off of them?
This isn't even an IP issue, IMHO. DC has come out with an incredibly useful gadget with precisely one intended purpose and is throwing a hissy fit because people stubbornly refuse to read the directions because obviously if it's not supported it doesn't work that way, right? The best thing they can do is fall back on the DMCA and make a slapdash argument to the effect that this is an IP violation and the fact that the open-sourcers (I will cease using the loaded word "hackers" here because in a discussion like this it becomes somewhat tainted) should have known that there was a legal barrier because they slapped a very weak encrypt on it.
Of course, they won't acknowledge the "reverse-engineering for interoperability" clause, nor the hole it creates once the reverse-engineered data leaks out into the public domain.
(breathe; continue rant)
The fact is, I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on as far as the "licensed hardware" thing goes to begin with -- I go into RadioShack to get a CueCat, I walk out of there with an actual piece of hardware. DC does not know I have this and is in no position to take it away from me if I use it as I please. (does anyone know how to do ASCII art for an extended middle finger?) I think at this point a properly thinking judge is supposed to look at the case, tell DC "poor baby", and shoosh them out the door.
Besides, if they wanted to do the hardware giveaway thing it should be on Tandy's tab, not theirs! I had first assumed that Tandy was paying them a per-unit for each CueCat and intended to recoup the cost using catalog sales -- that would be the smart way of doing it. DC wins because they're covered coming and going, Tandy wins because they get more business from the convenience factor, and everyone else wins because they get a cool toy for free. That's why I thought the whole idea of DC claiming IP violations would be moot -- if they were doing everything correctly, it would be a non-issue because they already had theirs. (Isn't that how the whole free-computer-with-ISP-signup thing is supposed to work?)
Obviously, this is not how DC sees it. That being the case, it's no wonder they're crapping bricks -- they've been shown to be as dense as humanly possible, and are sending in the lawyers to cover their asses rather than do it correctly. Hey, I'd defy them on general principle myself, if I had much of a use for a CueCat (which, to be honest, I don't...).
/Brian
I totally agree with you on the merits of alternative uses of the device.
I've got a PalmPilot and a keyboard interface from the folks that brought us the "Happy Hacker's" keyboard; I could use that as a portable bar code collector.
Velcro the components to my belt, and I could run around my apartment, barcoding all my books into a notepad, and then decode en masse to put together a library listing.
Note the use of the PalmPilot; the reader is a whopping lot more useful if there is some way of collecting a bunch of bar codes as you walk around.
The other piece of the puzzle is to be able to PRINT your own bar code stickers to attach to things. That then means that there is no "fixed" interpretation; you have to create your own framework in which to interpret the code.
As with putting a bar code on each CD you burn, so that you can do an inventory in ten minutes of 100 CDs...
There's lots and lots of cool stuff to do with this; hopefully we'll get past the idiocy of the present situation.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
How many realized that DigitalConvergence was founded by the same Jo-vain that hosted NetTalk live. You remember the show that seemed to be saying "Are you as stupid as I am?". He took an idea that has been around at least as long as I have been on the net, and added a marketing flair to it. None of this is new. If they think that they stopped the hacker community, they didn't even slow us down. Well actually they did. Just long enough to write about their lame attempts to stop us. To read my take on this go to www.hangemhi.com
All Windows problems are hardware problems. Don't load it on hardware, no problems.
Most of the people responding here missed my point. In an ideal world this would be used for knowledge and easy access. I pointed out that i knew that this would b used for commercial purposes and that that was really sad.
I could care less about the damn barcode reader, it was a stupid little toy to play with. I'm talking about their end result... Linking traditional media to web accessible information.
That's what I would love. Not commercials, not ads. Real information. We all know that it won't be used for that. I remember when the net was good for that also.
If you have the book in your hand at home, why would you want to call up a web page about it? OK, maybe it's a friends book, or even a book from the library and you decide you just have to have it. No disrespect to Mr. Rothwell, but I have to wonder about the cloudy world of Mathews.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I predict the hacker contingency will play with them for a few months, then something else will be the sparkly object that distracts them. Then the hacker's scanners will join the majority of idle scanners, forgotten for months at a time until someone needs to go to Radio Shack for something, and the little tickle in their hindbrain reminds them that they have a CueCat that's fallen behind their computer desk.
Except that they didn't install the software, and won't do it, because they don't want to be bound by the obnoxious license "agreement", so using the cuecat isn't really possible for those hackers, who, ironically, are probably in the top 5% of people who might actually want to buy something at Radio Shack!
This is where DC is hurting themselves.
The ironic part is, I would consider myself to be a typical RS shopper (heck, I used to be an employee!), buying replacement batteries, 74xx series digital IC's, regulators, capacitors, you name it. Tho, I would never buy a computer from them (unless the price was REALLY right-it rarely is) and their software displays are all 'doze apps.
It seems as if the folks at RatShack have forgotten their raison d'etre. RADIO SHACK! The name almost spells it out -- a place for radio (and other) electronic enthusiasts to gather, exchange ideas, info, and purchase otherwise hard to buy stuff. When was the last time you saw 1N34A's, 2N3055's, and TIP120's at WalMart? Or at your convenience store?
Now, RS wants to alienate this customer base to piss in an already over-crowded marketspace? How many other places can you buy telephones, computers, TV's, and VCR's?
I reckon that if Tandy were alive today, some people would be in the throttling position...
--
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
-Possum Lodge Motto
(They have other reasons, of course -- service reasons -- but I think it's pretty obvbious that they raised the prices because their initial business plan was a piece of shit, they realized it, and now they want to, uh, 'reposition' [as the suits love to say] themselves in the market.) "Excuse me sir, but you might want to reposition yourself in the market; you appear to have your head around the U-bend and the toilet brush protruding from your arse at the moment... we would have advised a place on the sofa" :-)
I watched a story on the news this morning (on CNN) that the games in Sydney are suffering from a bit of controversy. Why? Well, Coke is one of the sponsors, and if you are caught drinking a Pepsi, you are 'banned' from entering until you get rid of it.
This sort of BS even got into the competition (and don't even get me started on the rules about what the athletes can wear on the medal stand)...
It seems that one of the Aussie gymnasts wanted to use "Australia is still my home" (I may have the title wrong) as the music for her floor exercise. Now, this song is from a QANTAS commercial. Unfortunately, QANTAS is NOT an official Olympic sponsor, some other airline is. And they bitched. At least in that case, sanity prevailed, and the girl was allowed to use her choice of music...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
So are you lugging your laptop around the grocery store scanning everything? Does the store not notice/care? Wouldn't this be a lot easier with a barcode scanner and a Palm/Visor?
I do not have a signature
They don't want their intellectual property to be reverse engineered. Of course there's no legal backing of this desire of theirs, but can't you show minimal respect for the mentally challenged (taking into account actual amount of intellect involved)?
--
I went down and got one after reading the article on Slashdot. Then I proceeded to to over to Freshmeat and find the Linux driver and a Perl module... Oh yea... those letters really stopped me from using a CueCat on my Linux box...
try using the Library of Congress ISBN lookup - there's a lot less HTML to parse and because its gov it probably won't change very much and the URL looks fairly static
= local&PAGE=cbSearch
http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB
In the search enter KISN to locate a book. For example, the Delphi 4 Developers Guild
KISN 0672312840
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
--
EFF Member #11254
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Why is it that the gov and the courts and everyone else that has been put into power to protect 'us' the people against the evil things in this world never seem to do anything about companies like DC who issue ceast and desist orders at the drop of a hat and will then leave there servers open to attack so that other evil people can get our personal info. I some times think that the police/military/sceret services just sit back and let things happen, and don't do anything until we say something! Just my 0.02c
Anyone maintaining a mirror list? I will put up a site, since they apparently aren't answering requests for explanations of the C&D letters...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Well, I've been looking for a cheap barcode scanner for a while. I've been meaning to create a database of grocery stores/food prices for a while, and it would be a lot easier for me to scan my grocery prices in with a barcode scanner then by just typing the UPC labels.
But that's about the only good reason for a scanner -- scanning items that you scan repeatedly and that you consume regularly. The applications would all have to center around groceries. How about an automated grocery list?
Ralph
Does anyone have any electronics projects for building their own bar-code scanner from scratch?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Since the C&D letters, the CueCat
Linux Driver has steadily progressed
from 0.0.8 to 0.1.3, and has gotten a
lot better. Pierre Coupard and other
folks have done a lot with the device.
Since the C&D letters, the driver has
added support for multiple CueCats, we've
put together 2 different models of serial
port converters for the CueCat (think Palm)...
and added support for using the CueCat on
a serial port, keyboard port, or mouse port.
The driver is now a loadable module, and even
supports the USB CueCat which isn't even
officially RELEASED yet!! We've also been able
to test the CueCat with all kinds of different
barcodes and figure out many of the CueCat
codes for them.. On a hardware level, we've
figured out how to wipe or even reprogram
the ID code... I don't know about you folks
or about Kevin Poulsen for that matter,
but I see this as a successful project so far..
For the 1 week after the C&D letters, people
were a bit worried and the development went
more private, but that's only 1 week! That's
a reasonable amount of lag time to allow lawyers
to digest the problem. After 1 week without
response from Digital Convergence, we all just
started breathing again and went back to work.
PS... Happy RSA Freedom day..
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
As I see it, they have a flawed business model. They want to give away the hardware that gives access to their service, but then they want to make sure that the hardware only responds to their service. That's all well and good, but I don't see how they can prevent anyone else from using it for their own purposes. They may have a case against someone who decided to set up a rival service, but I'm not sure how the law would treat that.
They probably would have been better off selling the CueCat Reader for a small fee (maybe at cost) and then providing some sort of special service (beyond simple linking) with their software. That way they don't lose any money if the hobbyist wants to disect their CueCat and they give your average joe a reason to purchase it.
-Jennifer
...is because the :cat really isn't that useful. People have had the ability to type in the ISBNs and barcode numbers for years, which can be done almost as fast as you can scan them (maybe faster). Why hasn't everyone been cataloging their books and CDs for years? Very few people are so compulsive that they need an electronic copy of their library.
I've scanned many barcodes with a couple different copies of their device now, and I've found that it consistently reads UPC/EAN, 3 of 9, Code 128 and all these other symbologies really well. I try to scan the Cues in the catalog -- maybe a 33% first time scan rate. Appalling. I've tried varying my scan speeds, the angle with which I hold the scanner, the distance from the page, starting and stopping within the white space near the ends of the code, but nothing seems to help.
I don't know if it's because the barcodes in the catalog are too dense or if they were printed poorly. I imagine the 22.5 offset angle probably made for some uneven aliasing during the catalog printing process.
Has anybody else noticed this problem?
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
I think this question is one of the key points of Internet usage, privacy, etc., in the coming years--should there be penalties beyond the loss of customers for companies that either intentionally or accidentally let customer information out? I really hate to see legislation in this area, since I think the clueless lawmakers (in the US, at least) would take at least 3 or 4 tries and several years to get anything close to "right" enacted. But I'm increasingly convinced we need a law that establishes a principle of "IP malpractice" to cover this type of release of financial or other private information.
"An Internet company that's given away one million cat-shaped barcode scanners to magazine subscribers and Radio Shack shoppers is claiming victory in a skirmish with hackers over how the feline freebies can be used."
PR 101: Manage expectations. When you have completely lost, declare unconditional victory.
"We had to make a bold statement up front that we didn't authorize you to do this, we encrypted our cat data, and you're not allowed to take over that output," says David Mathews, vice president of new technology at Dallas-based Digital Convergence.
Bold statement (n.) - Impotent claim that is ignored by everyone. See political speech, press release.
"Digital Convergence was aghast. "If people take over our cat and start using their own databases, the world becomes cloudy," says Mathews. "Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online."
Oh the horrors! The world will become cloudy if we don't stop using our own databases! Why, we might even get access to our own information and then where would we be? I mean, think it through people! Is a free world the kind of world you want for your children?
"By way of example, Mathews points to one hack, created by network engineer Michael Rothwell, that allows users to scan the ISBN number on the back of a book with the CueCat. "You could swipe a code, and it would serve up a page on Amazon.com. But what if [the publisher] doesn't want it to go to Amazon.com, they want it to go to web site under their control..."
Think of the implications! We might wind up at a web site that is not under their control!
"By the Linux community taking over and redirecting where these swipes go to, they were circumventing our software."
Oh the shame of it all...
________________
________________
Private Essayist
I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this one in the article:
"You could swipe a code, and it would serve up a page on Amazon.com. But what if [the publisher] doesn't want it to go to Amazon.com, they want it to go to web site under their control... "
Umm...tough shit what the publisher wanted. What right does the publisher have to force me to a certain web page? None whatsoever. Yet another example of a clueless corporation trying to control every little detail and getting pissed when normal citizens won't play along.
This scare DC to death. Not joe hacker playing with the device. Not Joe sucker getting a dozen of them. But having a dozen of competitors that uses the output of the device to emulate the part of their Business Plan where they intended to make money.
Ahh, but what scares them even more IS joe hacker. Because if joe hacker beats thei competitors to creating a killer app for their hardware then no one makes money off of them, and with no one making money there's no one to sue.
If another company were to start endorsing the use of the 'Cat with their software...and I don't know...maybe... hyping that it dosen't do the serial# lookup suddenly they've got a target they can hit. I'm scared for Readerware because of this (http://www.readerware.com). And the new AzaleaQTools package for creating Cue style bar codes.
But oh, woulden't it just burn them up worse than anything if someone was to beat them all to finding the target for their product...and gave it away. And already the OS community is so close.
I've seen sites that have everything you need to catalog books with your cuecat for free. UPC lookups for free. And I'm sure there's a way to use PeaPod or Homegrocer or someone to lookup food UPC items. And there are already sample apps which pull this together. All we need is one of them to tie everything together and let the user make it what they want.
Could be a damn powerfull system for home inventory and media collections.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Tandy Center? Are you sure they didn't lose all their data when they got whacked by that tornado? :-P
The thing that really made me laugh though was this SciFi channel commercial - 30 minutes long, you know the type. The setting was in Heaven, where Bob the Angel (can't remember the name) visits Heaven's R&D department, and the top-of-the-line item that Heaven's R&D department has come up with is - no, not an Aston Martin with flamethrowers and ejector seat, but THE CUECAT!!!
Then they described it as the biggest technological breakthrough ever. Seriously, that's *exactly* what they said.
The word arrogance doesn't even come close.
You're probably right about the lawyers, but offering a similar service under not such an obvious name might be a good idea. Maybe some jobbing hardware hacker can design the same thing but for the COM port - and while she's at it, make it accept data from remote controls too, so I can operate my DVD drive from my bed ;)
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
If we can distribute software for the CueCat, in a way that suits our needs without going through DC - What's to stop Staples or OfficeMax from offering their own software that reads barcodes printed in their catalogs without going through DC?
They're seeing the big picture now... so I think. They screwed up and now they're going to have to fight for their life or go out of business having provided all of North America with free bar code readers.
Those who ask why they're bothering with a few geeks aren't seeing the bigger picture of them allowing "rogue" software to proliferate.
While I agree entirely that we have every right to use the device as we see fit, (I've downloaded various decoders alrready) they ain't going to just let this one go.
Perhaps their TV tech will be the real "killer" app of for them and ordinary bar code reading won't matter a great deal, but I figure them for toast.
QUESTION:
Anyone think of some sort of action to "teach" them a lesson?
-- While normally I would consider the following very unethical, given this companies willingness to use scare tactics against honest legal hackers, I suggest the following:
Every time you see a Radio Shack, stop in and pick up another CueCat. Collect them, discard them, whatever, every geek here that picks one up and doesn't use it (in their intended manner) makes a nick in their bottom line. If we all do it that becomes a major dent.
Hopefully they take note and apologize.
--Aaron Greenberg
im just being curious... how do you make an IR port read a bar code? i thought they just detected IR light. I'm really not trying to be rude, i just want to know.
Hmmm.. This must be the buy button on my TV that I've been hearing about for years. Does that nationaly broadcast "go to this site" barcode message sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
just think of what we could do.. cuecats on the tree.. cuecats on the house.. even cuecats hanging on the grille of your car! the possibilites are endless!#@$ and when they fall and break you can run down to ratshack and get a free replacement! WOOHOO!!
----
That's funny that RS is called Tandy in the UK, because in the 70s Tandy Leather shops used to exist here in the US. The truly funny thing is they were owned by the same company as RS. Strange indeed.
Lowmag.net
Consider how much of the popularity of the automobile (in the general public) is due to hacks on engines, etc and auto races.
I care about a CueCat.
Why? Because I'm an Ubergeek and I like barcodes, shiny red lights, and coming up with neat things to do with free hardware. Hell, I even like the thing when it's just sitting on my desk shining the LED light on my wall.
I have been using it on my Windows machine as it was designed, scanning things and bumping my profile value for them up a few pennies... but soon I plan to attach it to a little 486 computer on top my fridge.
Why? Because then I can scan things as I throw empty containers out. And then post that to my own private house 'intranet'. And then at the market, browse my shopping list from my WAP phone. Eventually, I might even automatically have certain things ordered via internet once I've built a buying profile on myself.
After that, I might even get bored and start cataloging my CD's & Books (several 1000 items in each collection) for insurance purposes. I figure that might work better than photographing everything.
See, that's what being a Geek is about. Have stuff. Open the hood. Hook stuff together and make it do stuff it probably shouldn't. For fun.
In the end, my advice to DC would be to embrace the hacking community. The value they 'lose' on hackers not providing profile data could be recouped in cultivating a community to help generate new ideas for their product. Hell, establish projects for bounty using the CueCat. Sell the CueCat for up to US$20 for hackers who aren't going to use it as designed for marketing money.
Spread good will in the hacking community, let me do my projects, hire me to polish them up and let you sell them... (I mean, I don't have the business sense or money to produce the hardware) and my mom will still use it to scan things and see the neat home pages. And eventually you (DC) might even be able to sell my fridge idea.
Were did you get that idea!!! I have two Radio Shacks in my area and when I bought something from the one I made a mistake in my address the other I did right and I get mailers for both address... I talked with someone once about it and they said that the take the list and merge them for dups then send out. Robert
Kind of reminds me about the Catholic joke--touring Heaven, but be quiet going past the Catholic Church 'cause "they think they're the only ones here."
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
How much use can a barcode scanner really be to you at home ?
What I would love to see is a home UPC scanner and a database of companies with iffy corporate responsiblity (chinese prison labor, tropical deforestation, operation rescue, seal clubbing) so I could instantly tell if the products I buy are advancing causes I disagree with.
Y'know, kinda like CDDB, only for UPCs, instead of CDs.
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
Maybe you should look into rechargable batteries, then. Or just plug stuff in to the wall sockets.
Indeed. I remember the little circuit project books they used to distribute ofr next to nothing. Nothing else was like it.
Speaking of unusual aching, you might want to read Christ that aches with Johnathan Frakes. For all you ST:TNG fans out there. Off topic, I know, but now that the Karma cap is in place, I'm a crazy man.
Hey, great idea, posting the cuecat decoding routine on Slashdot. Now, someone point DC to /., wait for DC's lawyer letter, and we'll have Andover/VA/whoeverthehellownsthisplacenow be able to show DC just how far removed from reality they truly are...
I mean, what good is corporate sponsorship if they can't fight a few of your battles for you? I mean, they didn't back down to M$ over the whole Kerberos extension fiasco (at least, not that I've heard - anyone able to confirm that?), so they should be able to put DC in their place...
________________________
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
Oh the Tandy stores still exist. When I lived in the Boston area, the local RS was next door to the Tandy store. Guess it was easier for them that way.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's as if DC had set up a toll booth in the middle of an open field, then started screaming bloody murder when people simply walked around their toll booth.
Yes, they have a cloudy future.
Can we PLEASE move on? I'm sick of hearing about what an evil company this is because they're trying to make a buck off of some free hardware. ;-)
The issues at stake are deeper than you think. Companies like DC are using a nebulous law to threaten the "hackers'" freedom to innovate and experiment (and I don't mean this in the M$ sense).
Computers, Internet(TM), etc. are where they are today because kids all across this nation (and the world) dared to experiment and try new things. DC is just trying to kill that spirit to protect an inherently flawed business model.
And oh, BTW, "loss leaders" are welcomed with open arms (and open tool boxes
These CueCats sound really cool for their unintended purpose, and it sounds like the AOL CDs have a competitor, the amount they're giving out. Anyone willing to mail one to the UK for me? I'll pay shipping, of course :)[my email address is on the front of my website]
Does my bum look big in this?
I can honestly say that I'm not impressed with the Cue:Cat. Mine showed up a week ago, and so far it's only been able to read about one in ten barcodes. Maybe mine is just defective, but if this is common then DC has a serious problem on their hands. Either the product doesn't work as well as advertised, or they have quality control issues with the ones they are sending out.
Oh, their "Convergence Cable" is nothing to write home about either (except to tell your family to avoid it). Now, I can't get my TV audio to stop going through the speakers on the computer every time I reboot. Also, the only time a show used an audio que (NBC Olympics), the web browser errored trying to find the supposedly passed link.
I'm a big fan of these mixed media tools (computer/TV/print integration), but if this is an example of what we can expect, you had better watch out.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Because receiving the threat of a lawsuit from a company is a scary thing. J. Random Hacker does not have a legal budget, let a lone an entire legal department. We've already seen that corporations use litigation as a stalling tactic, and try to drag the case out until the defendant has to give up due to lack of resources. Aside from the massive amount of money you could lose (without even losing the trial, just on legal fees), this is something that will dominate your life for an indefinite amount of time - if you're spending all you time in court or preparing for court, how do you work?
Litigation, or threat of it, is unfortunately a very effective tactic from a corporate point of view. It's a rare kind of person that can push crappy laws like the DMCA to the limit and still have the time and desire to go to court to obtain their rights for the rest of the country.
says Mathews. "Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online." Tough shit - we're supposed to keep your revenue model in mind? Heh.
The rant applies to any company that pulls this same type of crap. the fact that its a free product is irrelevant. The rant is aimed towards any of the situations where a company tries to flex its muscle on the normal consumers. check your ego at the door please
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Nobody asked DC to support open source. It would just be nice not to receive legal harrassment for taking a bit of interest in a freebie, handed out with no strings attached.
Yes they HAVE!!!! :D Go check there and search for "CueCat" (if it's not on their front page anymore)
And now, flyingbuttmonkeys has their code back up.
What a hoot!
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
Regardless of the relavence to the situation, this guy is right. A lot of people (I am not one of them) bitch and moan about say a pizzaria making its crust too thin and yet they still buy from them because they are the only place that delivers. For God sake, go get dejorno's or eat a taco. I you don't boycott and try to get others to do the same, companies will not only shrug off your pathetic moans, but they are probably laughing at you in their board rooms. Many people think that one less person buying crap doesn't make a difference, but it does. You may even bring the CEO's paycheck by .03 cents. If you do, you just gave him less money and you win, he looses. He may not care about .03, but if 10,000 people do the same, that crust is going to be as thick as the table it's served on.
"Do or do not, there is no try."
Why do you need to catalogue your books if you already own them ?
Inventory for homeowner's insurance policy.
Didn't these people do their homework?
:-)
This is not the first time that barcodes were put in magazines. They want people to leave them alone. I'm sure they'll be quite pleased.
As a Mac owner I don't even have a choice. First: no effin drivers. Second: the CluelessCat USB cabling sucks! Its a standard, DC. A standard! A simple connector. Stick your parallel and keyboard cable kludge where it'll hurt.]
I predict an overwhelming yawn from the public. The Linux hackers are probably the ONLY people who will have installed and played with this stupid looking piece of plastic.
This is about an idea as D.A.T. in an age of CD-ROM burners.
The DeCSS decision (under appeal) has zero effect on this. I have the DeCSS code on a t-shirt I bought here. I wear it with pride.
The RIAA, MPAA and other bullies of this world who try to restrict technology by force of will are sitting on beach chairs telling the tide to stop. I pity them, but not much.
Changes in distribution and payment technologies will sweep away the useless and leave us all with more money in our pockets.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I don't agree at all. You make it sound like iOpener built their equipment to be of any interest to geeks.
They built them to be of interest to people who basically wanted a better WebTV, i.e. something which came with a high resolution screen and would work with a wider variety of internet sites.
That segment of society isn't at all interested in making it run something else, they just want easy to use.
The reason why these became appealing to geeks was only because nobody else has been selling a reasonably priced small computer with a LCD display like this. It's the only one available, therefore people want to find out how to make it work for them.
Was it iOpener's fault that they hadn't realized the appeal to other people? Perhaps.
But I don't think that makes their business plan invalid. If this is true, then WebTV's business plan is bad as well despite 4 million+ users.
Now maybe they should have realized the opportunities they would have to sell this hardware outside the framework of their ISP service.
For instance, if they had formulated a contract, sort of like the internet appliance from Compaq whereby the cost of hardware is $500, but if you sign up for 3 years of their internet service you get a $400 rebate, they would have been in a better position and we'd likely have seen fewer complaints.
I don't get what this device is so great for, although I think I'm going to go to RS near me and continue to play dumb until they hand one to me and I can take it home and play with it. It scans barcodes and creates a poorly scrambled stream of characters, which were intended to be sent to DC's web site so I could look at an online version of the catalog I had just scanned the barcode from? What a frippin' waste. Why wouldn't I just do my shopping the old-fashioned way, with a long coat and a crowded store? Or more conveniently, a hacked CC db and a few online stores? Is this device's whole stated purpose to help me, the luser, not have to type in something as complex as a URL from a print source?
Now, on the other hand, if they sold a household inventory application and I could subscribe to an online DB of UPC codes (like CDDB, but with UPC instead of embedded CD IDs), that would be a sensible application of this technology, and might justify giving out the device as a hook for the software/DB subscription. That way I could inventory my books, CDs, tapes, LPs, electronics purchases, etc etc for insurance/warranty/budget purposes. That would be very useful.
But they don't do that, so if I want to use this to do anything useful, I've got to run Linux and use hacked together drivers?
I do not have a signature
I can see a private catalogue. I have a few thousand books. Sometimes it hard to remember whether I already own the 7th Lensman book or if I just read it from the library.
Due, in part, to the hub-bub surrounding this barcode reader I decided to order one.[1] Also want to code a grocery/CD/DVD/Book database. If they think I will be installing the CRQ software they have got another think coming.
I found two interesting things on their web site. One, there is no mention of a EULA or any other contractual commitment you must make when you place the order. Two, they are going to sell some kind of service that lets you have barcodes on you company business cards. For the small fee of about $400 (I don't remember the exact price) per year they will redirect traffic to your web site.
1. Don't think RS in Canada has these things. Besides what is this mall place? Oh yeah, that evil crowded place I go once a year to buy Christmas gifts.
-- Spammers: My E-mail server is in California. Consider yourself warned.
If you guys really want a bar code reader then you could always buy one. The cheapest I could find at Microwarehouse was around $140 (USD), you could probably find someone selling one for less. Now as to whether the guys will write you a letter if you add Linux support is another matter.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Maybe you should look into rechargable batteries, then. Or just plug stuff in to the wall sockets.
If you sign up for their Battery Club, the batteries are free. IIRC, you used to be able to get a free 9V or small blister pack of RS brand batteries every month. It's one way of getting people into the store and having them actually buy something else. Grocery stores do it all the time. They advertise products with prices that are below cost and hope that you buy something else once you are in the store. When I picked up a RS catalog + CueCat, I bought a few other things. Wal-Mart is a master at this. I don't know how many times I've gone into a WM to get a package of diapers or something else for the kids and end up buying $50 of other stuff. My wife say's it is due to a chemical they put in the Sam's brand drinks and food that makes one addicted to shopping at Wal-Mart. Along with floride, it's a standard additive in the tap water in Bentonville, Ark. =)
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
DC have actually got a really, really good business plan. It goes like this: give people free barcode scanners, get them to scan their stuff in, then they go to our website (via our software) and we redirect them to the company that "owns" the barcode.
So Digital Convergence's real money-spinner is not the cuecat at all, it's SELLING SPACE TO ADVERTISERS. You think Coke aren't going to be paying to have CueCat link to their site from their barcode? You think Pepsi won't pay Cuecat more to have the Coke barcode take people to the Pepsi site?
All DC need is a huge database of barcodes and URLs, and a large market share - currently, they have the only market share. They want to be the VideoPlus of URLs.
Since that's their main asset, then, I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND why they care about people reversing their hardware. It's a lousy design anyway - people need to use a keyboard to surf the web (esp. to "reorder pharmaceuticals" - an advertised use of CueCat - so they can enter their Visa/MC number). It should go in through COM2.
The only thing they should be worried about is if another company made a better database than them. But that's simple free-market competition. I guess they're trying to lock down the cuecat to make it harder for such competitors, but they're not going to succeed, so why don't they invest their time and money in making their product the best so that the competition can't out flank them?
Maybe because they know their actual service is a shoddy pile of crap? I don't know - I haven't used it. But since it's just a 1-table SQL database with an ASCII string as the primary key and an ASCII string as the only other column, how bad could it be?
I say that the OS movement should make a rival site - www.qcat.com - and write software to send people there from *every* OS. Everytime anyone sees a DC barcode they should scan it, note the URL, and put it onto the qcat database. It'd be like CDDB. Then we can offer the exact same service, but with privacy, and cheaper for businesses to subscribe to, and drive the fsckers out of business. We could use the proceeds to fund Open Source projects. Then DC would be a *good* memory - "Hey, remember that company that gave us all free barcode scanners before going out of business? They were cool." ;)
Any takers?
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
yes, right, send the guy to http://www.linuxmall.com
Do you remember when going into business was risky?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Doubtful, since the a) they haven't had much (any?) good said about them in the mainstream press and b)the geekerati aren't using thier software anyway. Me thinks that their database isn't being populated very quickly. No data, no money. No money, no laughing.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
You actually had to search Freshmeat? I went there and the second headline, on the front page, no scrolling required, was some CueCat software. ROTFL.
And then note that
If the DC folk fail to respond to the not unreasonable expectation that they actually indicate what "intellectual property" is being infringed on, then it seems to be, as you say, "totally fair game" to continue tinkering.
After all, if they can't or won't document the nature of the infringement, is it infringing?
I'm not surprised that:
It appears that they think that simply using the :Cue:Cat represents their "intellectual property," which seems pretty nonsensical.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Hmm, the guy at my local radio shack told me he wanted my address precisely so they could send me a catalog. He looked like he just started, i guess he hadn't gotten his corporate conspiracy training yet.
Okay... I'm sorry but this is getting rediculous. They are treating this damn bar code scanner like it's the holy grail of cool things. It's not... It's a cheap little barcode scanner that doesn't even really do that good of a job.
They do have some work and some intersting things in their C.R.Q. software. I never used it (I'm really glad now), but what it does actually probably took 5 years to develop.
In case no one looked at it. You hook up and audio source (T.V. or Radio) to your sound card. There are specially encoded audio codes that the C.R.Q. software will recognize and open a browser to the appropriate page. Basically barcodes over tv/radio audio.
That's kinda cool. It would be cooler if it wasn't mainly used for advertising (although I hear PBS is going to use it). I am also fairly certain that there is quite a bit of skill, talent and hard work in that.... there is however NOT in a cheap little barcode reader.
DC sells software and a service, they make their money from companies being able to use their barcode and audio codes. I wish that they would realise this... let the crap with the cue cat drop and focus on making their real products useful.
I would love to be watching a Discovery channel show about say, penguins, and be linked to a site that has more in depth information about penguins.
Will this battle ever stop? Companies give away free hardware and then expect some sort of loyalty from the people getting the hardware. Giving things away for free used to be a marketing ploy and a _risk_, not a contract. Unfortunately, the government and the people of the US too easily sign away their rights for free hardware. You've to say one good thing about AOL, however, they never complained about people copying over their free disks or using their CD-ROMS as frisbees/coasters.
1. It's a dumb idea to scan barcodes just to go to a web page.
2. The thing is really really hard to get to install.
3. It doesn't even work right when installed.
Yep, mine is still in the box and staying there.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
This is a perfect example of why companies are scared as hell of open source and the Linux-type crowd. It's not because of changing business models or a lack of willingness to explore new technology. It's because a significant segment the Slashdot-type of crowd is volatile and misguided. Cracking a web site and stealing user info because you don't like a EULA? Look, just because you don't agree with them isn't any reason to become a vigilante. If you don't agree with their business practices, then don't use the product. (Note: That doesn't mean "start a crusade against them.")
Because it adds a certain amount of uncertainty to their future. Businesses fail all the time due to blunders and unforseen events, especially on the internet. The RIAA thought that CD copying was difficult enough that it would be kept to a dull roar, but they were wrong and they wish they could go back and do things differently. The internet gives consumers the power to use a little crack in the door to open it all the way. DigitalConvergence doesn't want to be pried open unexpectdly by an organized revolt or consumer greed or anything else.
--
It'd be infringement if it was doing anything particularly unique. I worked with bar code scanners years ago that would scan pretty much any bar code format and give you output in an open format. The only real uniqueness of the CueCat is that it's nonergonomically feline shaped.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I one-upped you. I got mine free with a subscription to Wired. Not that it's very useful since my home computer's a Mac.
This could be potentially very bad for DC - putting them out of business. That's not very funny.
That was my point. The percentage of uncertainty that comes from the hacker camp had better be beneath their threshold for failure. If their business model didn't take into account that some (most?) of their scanners will sit idly next to most computers, then DC is extremely naïve, and their Venture Capitalists were extremely stupid with their money if they didn't see a hole this size.
I predict the hacker contingency will play with them for a few months, then something else will be the sparkly object that distracts them. Then the hacker's scanners will join the majority of idle scanners, forgotten for months at a time until someone needs to go to Radio Shack for something, and the little tickle in their hindbrain reminds them that they have a CueCat that's fallen behind their computer desk. The hackers' 5% of the forgotten scanners are still equally forgotten.
It's just not worth pumping money into lawyers and annoying the hacker community, when the alternative of ignoring the hackers works out so much better (see the TiVo hackers for an excellent counterexample.) Right or wrong, the hackers have a long history and a strong tradition of pushing back against legalistic threats.
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
Standard IANAL disclaimer.
You own the hardware AND the software copy that was mailed to you, per laws that apply to the US Postal Service.
Besides, I have yet to see one case in the US where a judge found that click-through licenses are legally binding. Just to be on the safe side, get your 12 year-old sister to fill in the form: contracts signed by minors are invalid.
Here in Quebec, about 90% of these agreements are against consumer protection laws, unenforcable and illegal. Furthermore, a judge clearly found that since you had no way of proving you were really the one pressing the "I agree" button, there is no way it could be considered legally binding. Besides, contracts signed under pressure are also invalid, and in most cases the software you bought is not refundable (since most stores won't take back an open CD, you could have made a copy of it..), in which case, to get something for your money, you are forced to accept the terms without possible negociation.
Basic point: There are MANY legal problems with click-through agreements, which most companies would rather you not know about and they surely don't want them tested in court when they can avoid it.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
> Gave 4 aliases and paid cash.
Paid cash for what?
Anyways, the first store didn't even ask my name. He still had to ring it up ($0.00), but didn't bother with the name. I guess he didn't wanna type it in. Others asked, but generally conceded when I refused. One guy was a bit insistent, but said that I could give a business address or anything, but that they just needed *something*. I said Bill Clinton, 1600 Pennslyvania Ave. He sighed, but acquiesced.
I wonder how many catalogs Bill gets...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Yeah, that's another thing. How nice of Wired to completely ignore that not all of their readers have a Wintel PC lying around to use this on. I'd expect better of them, considering their colophon reads like the Macintosh Product Guide.
But getting back to the matter at hand, I think DC is a bunch of schmucks for doling out those C&Ds to the guys who are hacking the CueCrap. If my dentist gives me a free toothbrush, can I expect him to sue if he finds out I'm using it to scrub mildew off the tile grout in my shower stall? Bottom line is, there are always gonna be people who tinker with stuff whether it's meant to be tinkered with or not, and no damned lawyer will ever stop that from happening.
Does someone, anyone, have a filtering URL that I could point to that would allow me to read SecurityFocus? For some reason I can't get to any of the content on SF when using The Proxomitron. The page just loads forever, and there's nothing there when I hit cancel. This sort of dysfunction has not occured with any other site. And no, I'm not turning off The Proxomitron, thankyouverymuch.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Or is this merely something that the "spammeisters" are claiming to be true?
I can imagine such a situation occurring, but wouldn't expect it to persist.
Remember that as soon as such a scheme would start to appear viable, "your company" would be a nice, fat target for a class action suit by whatever class of folk the scheme has been ravaging.
Turnabout is quite fair play :-).
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Sheesh. Some idiot actually bid $9.99 for a Cue:Cat on ebay...
There's a CPU (a 8051 workalike) and (...)
No, I think it's more something like a pic, it costs a lot less, it's smaller, and it's way enough for what the cuecat does...
Pile 1: page with ads on both sides of the paper
Pile 2: page with ads on one side of the paper and an article on the other side
Pile 3: page with article on both sides.
The end result was so disappointing I decided to ignore Wired from that point on. Try it some time, and weep...
-John
Thanks for the advice!
Hmm. "Making SecurityFocus readable" sounds like an itch that needs scratching.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Actually, I do have a good use for it, though I haven't tried it...
Lego used to have a Technic set called the CodePilot. The controller was similar to the MicroScout that the Star Wars-themed Mindstorms sets use, and loaded its programs via barcodes (I think you can get bar-code generation software at lego's Technic site). So print out a CodePilot barcode, scan it in with a CueCat, and write a program that will drive a light to feed the MicroScout's light sensor.
That's one use, anyway; the MicroScout is a fairly simple controller and can't really do anything complicated, but it *is* programmable if you know what you're doing, and unlike DC Lego has been very cool about people hacking their hardware.
/Brian
Thanks, Mr. or Ms. Coward!
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Nice product?
For what? This is a remarkably useless product. Really lame too. They probably thing they can slap that bad-boy onto a WinCE "GameBoy" and
The IR port on my Handsprint Visor can be hacked to do the same thing. Big Deal. I cant' think of a single application where this would be worth doing.
Its been tried before for scanning in software and the magazines that tried it have disappeared.
This is NOT a good idea. Its just some idiocy spouted by some fast-talker who has managed to talk some dentists into investing their surplus disposable income into his "vision."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
My wife picked up one of these cuecat's for me after I saw an add in
...
the Parade Sunday Magazine. I had always wanted to play with a bar code
scanner, but could not come up with enough useful ideas to justify the
coast of one. I took one look at the keyboard connector and threw aside
the cd and docs and went to my Linux box and plugged it in and started
playing. It really never occurred to me that they had "encrypted" the
output, I just figured they were ensuring a data format that would work
on the web.
After staring down the road to decode the data, I thought to myself
someone has probably already done this. A quick google search later, and
I was looking at a serial number.barcode type.barcode and it was all
pretty clear. I thought to myself, "I bet they have a fancy registration
for these kitties to get all kinds of good demographic information" (a
daja search latter confirmed that this was not only true, but required
to "activate" the software").
Wow, what a marketing coup these people are pulling off (I
bet their internal name was coup cat). They are getting
sheeple^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople to tell them all about themselves and then
send them information about what they read, what products interest them,
what kind of soup they buy
You just know that Joe Consumer will plug this in and after finishing
with the Radio Shack catalog will grab every barcode in his house to see
what the software does.
At this point, I decided to take a look at the docs I had thrown aside,
maybe they had some sort of privacy statement. Nope, not only no privacy
statement, but what's this? They have a product that will hook up to
your TV and give you web content! Step aside Nielson Ratings, we are not
going to depend on a few people writing things down, we will get 1000s
of people's computers to tell us what they are doing in real time! Are
these guys good or what? All this in the name of "service".
I wonder what that kind of information is worth. Heck, the spamlords
alone would probably pay big bucks for a bit of that information. They
do have your email address and, as far as I can tell, no promise not to
sell it.
Now lets take another look at a couple of the questions people are
asking about DC's response to hackers.
Q: Why are they upset about someone expanding their market by providing
a driver for additional platforms (at no cost to them)?
A: If people can use their cuecat without registering (or even worse,
randomize their SN after registering) there goes their billion dollar
marketing database.
Q: Why such lame sounding complaints about someone being able to bring
up Amazon's web page instead of something the publisher wanted.
A: I'm sure they don't care one bit about what content you see, they
just want to make sure you tell them what you are looking at first.
What we have here is a company attempting to gather a huge valuable
marketing database without letting their marks know what they are up
to. Now that that plan is threatened, they are throwing a fit. It must
have cost them quite a bit to set all this up and now the returns will
not be quite so grand.
That's why I look up a book's web page.
--------
The funny thing to me about this (and other similar cases) is that in the software and hardware world we are just seeing the exact same thing as in the rest of the 'corporate world'.
I watched a story on the news this morning (on CNN) that the games in Sydney are suffering from a bit of controversy. Why? Well, Coke is one of the sponsors, and if you are caught drinking a Pepsi, you are 'banned' from entering until you get rid of it. McDonald's is another sponsor. There is a restaraunt near the Olympic stadium that serves breakfast sandwiches similar to an egg McMuffin. If one of the game officials (or a cop) sees you eating one of these sandwiches, they will take it from you, throw it away, and tell you to purchase from McDonald's next time. If you are wearing a Pepsi tee-shirt, you are not allowed in until you change into something else. If you wear or use anything produced by a company in direct competition to one of the sponsors, you are banned from entering any of the competitions (banned from watching I should say).
Of course, CNN (with all its corporate sponsors) was really willing to see both sides of this story. They interviewed three 'regular people' that all said, "These companies have invested a lot of money in the games and deserve to have some recognition for it." I would like to have seen them interview one of the people that had their breakfast ripped out of their hands and thrown away, or someone that had their Pepsi taken away from them, or someone that got told, "You can't wear that shirt here."
Frankly, the corporate controlled world is becoming the norm. And anybody that doesn't like it will soon be 'banned' from participating in anything in society. You say that wouldn't happen if the games were in America? Take a look at some of the ridiculous crap that goes on (and is covered on Slashdot) and think again. Also consider that most of the companies that are promoting the Olympics are American companies, and you'll start to see that it is just as much an American problem (probably moreso an American problem as we are the country with the stupidest IP laws in the world) than any other country.
Sorry for the slightly off-topic rant, but that news story just pissed me off and made me feel like boycotting Coke, and McDonalds for life. That won't be so hard, I'm not a big fan of either. But I wanted others to know, and felt it applied to the 'companies protecting their (supposed) intellectual property' conversation.
Bite my yammer.
I found that quite useful but haven't set mine up to do that yet. There were no details given, but my guess is he created shell scripts whose filenames match the scan result. Since the Cat sends CR after the scan, it would be the same as typing the command right at the console.
At least it's better than a guy I once knew who
taped them to wrapped up bricks.
How about so he can keep track of what he's loaned out to people, smart guy? Or even see how much he's spent on books or to use Amazon's "see what other people who bought this book bought" and summarize it with weighted averages?
Really, you should upgrade your brain soon or try to get out of the cardboard box you're confined to once in a while. You may not be interested a hack he thinks is cool, but don't go berating him for your lack of interest or imagination.
Given the talent available, they should have floated the idea here FIRST. Then they'd have got a much better implementation.
:-)
However, its still a lame-ass product. It won't fly any better than it has before (and it has been tried before...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I stopped reading it a couple of months ago, and I don't miss it at all.
did you not get? I have a couple of issues still in the shrink wrap, and chose to open the most recent one after getting the CueQat to see if there were more barcoded ads than articles... I've also looked at eCompany and Fast Company, and neither gives me enough reading material for the average crap time...
Some other major site tried that a few months back, and was embarassed into stopping. Now SecurityFocus is doing it.
Frankly I could care less about a bar code scanner myself, I don't have much use for it.
However, I don't like the idea of any peice of hardware being released (free or not) which tries to pretend it has the protection of the law preventing you from using it any damn way you please. The only protection this has is the ability of the company to file frivolous lawsuits against you to take your time and money (for a lawyer) to make it a pain to do something they don't approve of.
However this now seems to be becoming a trend in the consumer electronics market (iOpenr, Tivo) and I think its a trend that needs to be stopped. Hardware makers seem to have started thinking they should have the same type of lame licenses that software companies have on their products (ie. we'll sell you this but no you don't own it and can only use it how we want you to).
Thus I'm only interested in it because I don't like the idea of EULA's for hardware I buy or receive for free.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
> I'm wondering why people have stopped hacking the ::CueCat::
/usr/bin/perl -n
/\.([^.]+)/g;
You believe what DC said? Go to freshmeat and search for cuecat. As far as I can see, the *only* one who doesn't still have their code up is flyingbuttmonkeys. Online decoders like http://www.jounce.net/~maarken/decode.html are still up (never went down, as far as I know).
I wonder if DC really believes the hacking has stopped or if they see this as the only face-saving stance that they could take.
The only other reason I can think that there is any "less" hacking is that the decoding is 100% solved in 7 lines of perl:
#!
printf "%s %s %s\n",
map {
tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/;
$_ = unpack 'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_;
s/\0+$//;
$_ ^= "C" x length;
}
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The problem is that DC has, in hindsight at least, a lousy business model. It is not the courts' responsibility to defend DC's lousy business. [What if Disney gave away cars and maps and the map had a shrink wrapped license that only allowed you to drive the car to Disney World. Now, a couple Linux folks start giving away maps to allow users to drive the cars elsewhere... It doesn't even make sense to me that the Linux folks would be at fault somehow.]
"We" should not defend a lousy business. Ask Darwin. We should take atvantage of our oppurtunities and cooperate when it helps us achieve our goals.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
those Cease and Desist letters completely stopped the hacker community from hacking the CueCat scanners.
:)
I'm still considering trying to round up about 10-15 of em, daisy chain them, if possible, and have a bright colorful window decor for Xmas.
Who needs twinkle lights when you've got Cuecats?
She subscribes to Forbes, and gets a
How does this look any different to DC than the "evil linux hackers"?!!!
Not a sausage.
Joe hacker gets a
See, to DC, both scenarios look the same. They pay to send out a scanner, but get no consumer tracking information back. And I really don't see them busting down aunt Martha's door just because she didn't use their gizmo.
There are two situation a not insane person would try to avoid:
- One target influences other targets (who would normally use the device) to not use the device as intended
:Cue:Cat.
- Instead it taking one device to service one target, one target consumes many devices (and maybe uses none of them).
:Cue:Cats in the drawer. :Cue:Cat. :Cue:Cats, 2) Make RS either a) instate a "one per customer" policy or b) RS pays for the HW and it's RS's loss.
Having people laugh at you and mock you as an idiot isn't good business and should generally be avoided. (unless you're making a ton of money for it).ok, so this kinda gives them a reason to fear the spread of info on hacking the
For the same reason they could fear a bunch of luddites boycotting them.
So aunt Martha subscribes to Forbes and Wired. She tosses two
Joe hacker gets greedy and goes to every RS in town for a free
I could see how DC might want to avoid this situation too. So they could : 1) cross reference the subscriber lists before mailing out
DC's also alienating a potential market... while I'd agree that a good amount of their business would be from AOL'ers, there are a surprising number of hackers that shop Radio Shack. (Geez... how many times do I go there for batteries and walk out having spent $200?!!)
/., Freshmeat or an alternate Linux/open source community site as a thank you, extend the functionality, and re-release them back to the community (under GPL, of course). Make them simple to install, include some goodies, whatever. In otherwords, make a superior open source product.
Amateur radio hobbyists, especially those from the Linux community, end up sending part of their paychecks to places like RShack. I'm there at least once a week buying stuff. But how can I use the CueCat when the DC PHB's forgot to develop a Linux driver for it? Sorry boys, but the five boxes down in my shack don't have a single Microsoft product on them!
Instead of firing up the attorneys, why not pull the Microsoft "embrace and extend" trick. Grab those drivers, thank the community, contribute $10,000 to
Instead of boycotts, hacking and general disasterous public relations that is a serious abuse of their investor's bucks, you might find a bunch of new customers (who are usually the bigger spenders at RShack) who'd cost you only an occasional un-intercepted barcoding scan of their books in the home library.
*scoove*
"Poor sportsmanship: They just can't stand to see the other man win."
The number of hackers expressed as a percent of the computer-using population is maybe 5%-10%. Sure, the number who "shop the Shack" is certainly much higher, but they're still barely statistically significant. It's the AOLers of the world that will make them ALL of their money, regardless of hackers.
Hackers tend to understand cookies and privacy issues better than the general population, too. Most privacy-informed people wouldn't ever fire up the software that came with it, once they understood the tracking mechanisms beneath it. These people are already lost to Digital Convergence, whose stated goal is to build up a marketable database of info on their users.
So, given that hackers and privacy wonks will never use their software the way it was intended, D.C. should drop that market segment and focus on making sure that every AOLer gets to see Pepsi ads at $.025/eyeball. As Willie Sutton said about robbing banks "that's where they keep the money!"
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
Come on guys.....nowhere in that article did it say that CueCat has a 'Cloudy Future'. It said, "'If people take over our cat and start using their own databases, the world becomes cloudy,' says Mathews." TOTALLY different meaning. Talk about taking something out of context...jeez.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
You realize wrongly. This is whoring for (+1, Funny). See the sig.
--
There is surely a market for these (cataloging etc), so how much would these cost to actually produce. If the price was right, then I'm sure that some company with a bit more grey matter than DC could come up with a good product, and be successful.
Is there anyone reading with experience on how much something like this would cost to produce??
Did anyone else see the infomercial on cable for the CueCat? It was on last night, and I was ROTFLing. Here's a couple of quotes so you can get an idea of the stupidity of this infomercial...
"The Cat is where it's at"..
(I swear to God I will kill the first person that actually says that to me in a conversation).
"anything else is just a copycat."..
(Sounds like fear of competition to me =)
I don't remember much else other than the really stupid window of the future where the kids sit in classroom of 2100 and are compeled to hit a button that generates a tone before answering each question. I had to ask myself, in Digital Convergences world are the kids so passive and stupid that they must have an audible que before they speak? It was a truly a sad commentary on what the future could look like with too much corporate influence.
I think I'll start building a free barcode database =).
Sort of the definition of hacker, N'est ce pas?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Ever since the cease-and-desist letters came out, I've been working on aspects of the CueCat. That effort spawned a section of my Web site that worked to expose all aspects of the red-nosed pussy. On my pages, you will find the anatomy of the proprietary cue, a complete description of the output of the CueCat and how one would discover the base-64+XOR algorithm without disassembling or decompiling a single instruction of executable code. I've also put together a capabilities list of what the 'Cat can do (and that list is expanding as people report additional capabilities). I even publish a rationale for why I did all that work.
The only reason I'm slowing down is that I've done about all I can do. That included publishing source code to an interpreter that runs as a console app in both Linux and Windows.
Now, where do I draw the line? I draw the line at providing code without license that would infringe patents 5,933,829, 5,978,773, and 6,108,656...held by NeoMedia Technologies Inc. I stop at interpreting the barcode on stdout in order to bring the CueCat to the same level of functionality as other barcode readers.
Now, I'm looking at PaperClick...
I'm sure they would love to ENFORCE a "one swipe" patent on us all. Unconstitutional laws let them fine or jail readers who dared use un-conventional methods of research in thier quest.
Back down Jimmy-B, It's not too late to make right a wrong. I suggest you fire the sue-lawyers, hire the clue-lawyers, and spearhead a positive future for AMZN by following the www.OpenPatents.org initiave-->NOW!!!!
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
The only way "lawsuit-oriented" business works is if you plan to sue people that have millions of dollars that could actually pay you something.
Insurance companies are good targets; TI makes lots of its dollars charging companies for access to its patents; IBM's patent portfolio is useful against companies.
None of this is good for dealing with consumers.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I'm wondering why people have stopped hacking the ::CueCat:: simply because they received threatening letter from the company. I mean, these kind of empty lame-a** threats are certainly not new. Personally, I think that if a company creates and distributes a product (especially for free!) that is able to be "modified", then it's totally fair game for the OSS community to tinker with it. Any thoughts?
______________________________
Eric Krout
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
And here's how. In about 3 months, after Digital Convergence goes belly-up as their investors realize what a ridiculous implementation of the "marketing database" concept they've tried to expensively implement, nobody (nobody commercial, anyway) will support CueCat scanning anymore.
Once that's the case, the various individuals who received the CueCat for free will sell them at yard sales for $0.25 each. Since they didn't pay for it (or even ask for it, in many cases), they make $0.25 profit on each sale!
Maybe Digital Convergence should try the same thing now, to minimize their debts....
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
The truth about this is that the only devices that have been exploited have been loss-leader type electronics, and built on useful hardware, which often makes the best loss-leader (ie, it's a good product).
Things that haven't done so well, and haven't been hacked have been *extremely* proprietary devices like the Mailsite personal email box (man that'd make a sweet portable bash terminal).
So... useful things tend to get reused if they're given to us. The only way companies can avoid a situation like this is to make something damn near worthless if hacked (funky hardware, no ram, no hd, odd processors, etc)... The problem of course is that those types of things don't always make good products.
----
Yes, granted its a free product. But this is the mentality of many companies that do sell products to the general consumer. The point is still valid, granted, not in the context of the current conversation.
Perhaps this should of been posted as a seperate thread entirely. the argument still stands. Even still, this company does sell products for profit, and its apparent that they have this mindset....
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Just because they call it encryption and it looks like nonsense characters at first glance doesn't make it so. I could call the guy from DC a circus clown, but although he and a circus clown both wear funny suits, the circus clown's suit is supposed to look funny, and therefore is a circus clown. Mr DC exec, on the other hand, although looking pretty silly (in theory anyway), is not a circus clown, despite what i say.
how cares about CueCat ? How much use can a barcode scanner really be to you at home ?
..
I'd have to be really bored to even think about it.
.
"Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online."
In other words, they want to protect their bottom line. The truth is, they should have thought of this sort of thing happening, and taken steps to protect their interests before releasing their product. It's their own damn fault, and I have no sympathy.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Look, this may seem like a foreign concept...but if these bastards dont want to give us development information...fine!...lets move on. stop buying their products, and move on to something else. These people wont learn by us continuing to buy their products then bitching. No, money talks, bullshit walks. sorry. you dont want to give me product support? Ok, later...ill buy something else.
God, people, listen. Stop tripping on your ego with the 'No!!! uh, uh..they should support open source Lets keep bickering!!'. These bastards in their boardrooms driving to work every day in their lexus's dont give a crap about us or our convictions. Start pulling their buisness away from them, and then they pop up like a old guy on 20 tabs of viagra.
Sorry, but this is how the world works. they dont give a flying fuck about us, we take our hard earned money elseware. I dont know about any of you, but i bust my ass for my money, im going to spend it on good products with good support made by a company that gives a crap about their customer.
Customer support is a joke these days, and it aint going to get any better unless we hit them where it hurts.
END_OF_RANT
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Have the people in the CueCat database which was stolen sent the CueCat manufacturer a cease & desist letter?
When I first heard about the Cue Cat on Slashdot, I thought that Digital Convergence seem to have created an excellent product, but are a little short on the old grey matter.
It seems pretty obvious that here's a company who have read "New Economy 101" and decided that their tangible product should be free so they can create money on the spin-off merchandise (the software). Shame they didn't think one step further.
Now they seem to be *proving* their ignorance of the real world. I mean, how naive can these people be? Does their whole business plan smack of "pointy haired boss" or what? "Our revenue model is being the gate keeper between codes and their destinations online!
Sorry DC, but I think you'll find that your (Cue) Cat is out of the bag and no amount of bullsh*t is going to put it back again. Better rethink that business plan.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
" Thank you for helping us!
Please note: Once a Web site is suggested for a code, all assignments are audited to provide a safe and secure environment for our members and their families."
Damn! I entered the UPC for a box of Acco staples and told them that it was for a fluorescent blue double ended dildo. Oh well...
Two things:
First, Lego's revenue model isn't tied to the software (with the possible exception of the Vision Command expansion pack) -- they make their money off of bricks, and don't lose a damn thing by letting people screw with the RCX as much as they damn please (except for losing money on the waste-of-time redundant CD-ROM that went with the Droid Developer Kit -- you'll notice there is no such beast for the Dark Side Developer kit...) Lego has as much to lose to people who use NQC and pbForth as the DVD player manufacturers do to those who hack their machines to ignore region codes or use DeCSS with their Linux boxes. TI is in the same boat -- not only did they not object when people started hacking their graphing calculators, they started documenting what needed to be done to get in there.
Second, Digital Convergence are a bunch of upstart idiots who are trying a very risky and poorly-thought-out business model and having hissyfits when they get bit. The reason they can't be cool about it is that they're having the rug yanked out from under them because of their own stupidity.
Tough fscking sh*t for them, I say. I'm going to get myself a CueCat now...
/Brian
http://s1066194.umsl.edu/cuecrap there you wil find all the software you need
If you go here, you can inform DC about products they haven't found yet. Tack a bogus UPC/ISBN onto the end of the URL and you're set. Not that I'd ever suggest looping this process infinitely, or anything...
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
When mindstorms came out, some lego executives were worried about people hacking the bricks, and wondered if they should stop it. However they decided if people have bought it they can do what they like with it! and this would only increase demand for it. They were correct and now lego mindstorms I believe is more than 50% of their revenue stream. GO LEGO! Shame DC did not have the forsight of looking at things that have already happen!
James
How does one know that their current actions (Cease & Decist) won't be that blunder that causes them to fail?
Well as someone who once worked for Radio Shack in Canada I can say that they definatly ask you for your name and address for thier lovely mailing address and the system dials out nightly to head office to update inventory and to send new member information to the central computer. I alway refuse to give them any information.
:o)
I had one sales guy tell me that I *had* to give my name and address. My reply was "well then I gues I don't have to purchace your product". The manager overheard and, of course, I bought my product and was entered as John Doe
Why would reverse-engineering a device and building a clone be illegal? It's not even patented! Copyrights don't even remotely apply! The only thing you couldn't do is call it the same thing.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
DC's aggressiveness seems more and more foolish, when one looks at who's being alienated (prospective customers, and their partner merchant organizations like RShack).
Usually, it's easy for companies like DC to disregard the negative feedback from the consumer public - just underestimate how many there are in your press releases and write them off as insignificant.
But lose a major vendor and watch the board start issuing pink slips to the CEO, CFO, etc. (Trust me on this one - DC's board is assuredly terrified right now that this could spin out of control and the investors would see their millions evaporate)
So here's a suggestion I just tried - call 1-800-THE-SHACK (1-800-843-7422) and try to order the free CueCat drivers for Linux. (Come on, you know they must be there. How else could they give out these free critters without supporting a significant part of the market)
After a few minutes of toll-free operator-assisted futility, ask them for the support number for the drivers. You've heard them mentioned on the Internet. If you're like me, you're not ordering all that stuff from RShack until you get them and try out this neat scanner!
Perhaps if RShack gets enough of these calls, they'll ask DC where this software is. Groveling, anybody? Major coup for open source over PHBs and their IP attorneys?
*scoove*
When you're creating an algorithm from scratch to translate a sequence of bits to something resembling the known input (the barcode), you have no way of knowing that there definitely is an encryption present. The public CueCat programs use XOR to produce barcode values, but we don't know that the CueCat is using XOR in its logic. The CueCat is a black box, and we can't see if there is a "no trespassing" component.
For that matter, we don't know that the public CueCat algorithm always works. There may be barcodes for which it fails. The correct algorithm has not been disclosed by the manufacturer, so we can only use what seems to work without knowing that it works.
For that matter, what seems to be a serial number at the beginning might actually be some interesting and useful data. We just don't know how to use it. Maybe if there were an authorized CueCat public driver with interesting uses, we would have more confidence in the device and have more uses for it.
http://www.cuecat.com/faq.html
The page is 125K long and seems to be a query run against their support database. There are about 12 differently worded verions of, "Will cuecat work with a mac?", all answered seperately". Ditto for Q's about the red light being on all the time, the safety of the red light, etc etc.
I just submitted a question about using it with Linux - let's see if it shows up :)
Before I bother installing the Linux driver for this critter, can anyone suggest any plausible uses for My Very Own Home Barcode Scanner?
So far, the best suggestion I've heard is to use it as a motion sensor. Any other bright ideas?
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Unfortunately, no. See ProCD. And it's a circuit court decision reversing a district court, too.
Hey, hey, this is great news! We have DC declaring vistory publicly and apparently stopping their legal harrassment.
Maybe they decided that it wasn't in their best interest to continue this campaign. They already demonstrated that they disapprove of the hacking, so maybe they'll just let the issue die. They save face by declaring victory and ignoring reality.
This means we can go back to using our CCs for whatever we want. God knows I wouldn't use it for what THEY wanted!
Ped Xing
(Or maybe I'm just optomistic)
Excuse me, but I was referring to Hemos's comments that amounted to a childish, "Look, DC sucks" when it'd already been posted.
I read Slashdot because in general the article quality is high, but this is just another opportunity for people to take a potshot at a company.
What do you mean tinker? I didn't tinker with the thing at all. All I did was to train my neural net here on the output of your device. Heck, how should I know what that frigging NN is doing??
Why give 4 aliases? Unless they've changed their computer systems in the last year or so, none of the stores are linked to a central database of customers...even within the same town.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
If they had any sense, they would focus on the other side of the transaction. That is, getting the Cue barcodes into everyone's catalog and advertisement for a fee. It wouldn't matter that the Linux people were using it for other things, they too might want product information, and only Cue's database would be able to resolve the link.
Of course, they would have to stop ripping off the valuable intellectual property of all those AOLers who don't know any better first.
Seems that DC have a real issue with things. Like coherent thought.
Now, if someone were to pull apart a cat, and build one and market it to emulate the original, yes, that'd be infringement.
However, their encryption isn't of their own devising, so, no real reverse engineering there. Just application of existing algorithms.
Data generated from the cat isn't Intellectual Property at all.. Merely generated statistics.
Ok, I understand their stance that it'll affect their revenue stream by hijacking the cat, and using it for things it was never intended.
Still, what percentage of their market will persue this track? If they've done their marketing correctly, an absolutely minimal amount. And some of those may still use it for it's intended purpose.
Basically, if someone doesn't want their device pulled apart, and reverse engineered, don't throw it mainly at the tinkerers market segment.
It's like putting your hand in a tank of hungry pirhanas, and expecting them to ignore it.
In just about every venture, there's the concept of 'acceptible losses'.
As DC don't seem to be tying the whole thing down, and chasing it carefully, I think they just hit the kneejerk 'Call in the legal vultures, and the world will conform', and ignored it.
Not the kind of behaviour of a company really worried about the release of this info.
Malk.
I think they're really barking up the wrong tree trying to shut down the hobbyists and the LINUX driver writers. Their true revenue stream lies with the AOLers of the world, and not with the bitheads that read Slashdot.
They should recognize that 5% of the people are going to hack their cats NO MATTER WHAT THEY WANT, and that the other 95% will be firing up AOL so they can quick scan the barcode on the front of the Radio Shack catalog.
Even if a Windoze version comes along (AOL compatible), over 75% of the users will still not circumvent their device. Mr. Matthews should chalk these up to "acceptable losses" and make sure that the content he provides to his "real" subscribers is good enough that the hacker substitutes don't compete in features.
When did "Cease and Desist" become an acceptable substitute for "Common Sense"?
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
The only reason for giving away the hardware is because you've made something that you don't understand.
They could have come here FIRST, got all the drivers they could ever need, come up with a whole lots more reasons to use this thing and sold them at 300% mark-up. They'd be making money now.
Instead, they though they'd slip this in as a Trojan horse between consumers and their vendors. This business plan was cobbled together by someone with zero imagination and a sneaky, theiving heart.
Their CluelessCat was already in the trash compactor (I own Macs.) After the stupid handling of the entire debacle, I'll do without a spy in my midst thank you. Don't bother sending me another one. Not even if it has a REAL USB connection.
NEXT!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why is it, that every time I get a new toy, some mother f***er says, "Don't f***in' play wit dat?"
Man... F*** THAT! I'm gonna hack dat s**t up and you gonna suck my d***!
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Other than that, it's free, why not get one just in case you find an application for it someday in the future.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
It has come to our attention that you have violated our EULA and we hereby order you to cease and dessist. You may only use the CueCat TM in conjunction with out freely available Junk Pusher food ware running on genuine Intel MS Win2000 in some other room than your kitchen.
If you are not happy with this, we recomend that you return your CueCat, unopened, to the nearest Radio Shack.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The guy in the article says they executed a very swift, quick shutdown. That's odd, since there've been two freshmeat updates this week.
And what was their cost? A couple of cease&desist letters that probably cost a couple of hundred bucks from their lawyers? Then, they let the hacker community provide acres of online coverage.
How many hackers, who otherwise never would have done so, have gone to Radio Shack to get one of these, just to spite DC?
As proof that this is a great marketing plan; just wait a couple of months. I guarantee that there will be several other examples. It just works too well to be ignored.
They're laughing all the way to the bank.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Designed for
Maximum
Control of
America
They send the info to a central repository in Ft. Worth at One Tandy Center. But, there's no mojo in the system that I know of that knows that they're getting duplicates (Nor, do I think they care they care- they're getting their money no matter what; they MADE the silly readers for DC!) as the system there doesn't care and the locally collected info isn't replicated to the other stores (think about that for a moment; they don't want that much data and couldn't manage that much locally!)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Despises? We love loss leaders, especially when then can be converted over to something useful. We don't like companies that tell use we can't play with the hardware we bought (or picked up a Radio Shack) because they want us to buy the expensive components as well. If you're selling hardware at reduced prices that can be used for something interesting, don't act all surprised when it is used for something interesting (running Linux, playing MP3s, etc...)
I read the internet for the articles.
still remember my ECO101 from UofT, talking about utility functions, indifference curves, perfect competition, monopolies, monopsonies etc.
The CueCat case is a problematic one. On one hand you can not deny obvious user benefits from the product, everybody seems to want one, so in a way the company has created a market for the product. On the other hand the company failed to realize that the consumers tend to minimize their costs, just like the eco classes teach them. Nobody wishes to pay more than is required by the law, and the law does not require making any payments to the CueCat, since CueCat did not bother to protect themselves. So what is CueCat to do in order to stay in business? I imagine the costs are already high for the CueCat. To save the situation they should think of some kind of user benefit they can offer to the customer to buy CueCat software, maybe they should offer an UPGRADE and SUPPORT for the CueCat hardware only to the customers that buy their software.
But, what would I know, I only took the first level of economics...
You can't handle the truth.
Chief Wiggum (to Ralph): "What IS your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?"
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