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Digital Convergence Likes Hackers (?)
sconeu writes "Wired News has this article wherein they claim that they like hackers, and that the whole thing is overblown. It says that 'Doug Davis, Digital Convergence's CTO, said he applauds the hackers' ingenuity and 'chuckles' at some of the ideas they have dreamed up.'
" Meanwhile, driver sites remain offline and software writers
continue to be threatened. That's how much they like it. C'mon, guys.
"Just because I give you the Cat scanner, it does not immediately give you the right to go into business against me with my own technology," (Digital Convergence CTO Doug) Davis said.
Yes it does. What the hell is the meaning of the word "give". The cuecat you sent me is mine, and I'll do whatever the hell I please with it, including going into business against you. If you didn't want me to be able to do that, you shouldn't have given me the damn thing.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a stick.
Doug Davis went on to say that, "the initial difficulties between DC and the hacker community was due to DC's lawyers being set on the default setting of 'evil'. The problem was not discovered until they had sent several C&D letters out."
Davis noted that, "due to slight oversight many companies forget about default settings in products and only notice the problem once it is exploited."
- sounds reasonable. Even /. is not immune to it.
Gee, Doug, if you're so sure that there's no such "right", why not get your fancy New York lawyers to actually sue somebody? Why not let a court decide whether handing 10 million people a piece of hardware and telling them that it's a free gift doesn't give them the right to do whatever they damn well please with the things? Why not see if you can get a court to overturn the myriad rulings supporting the right to reverse engineer products for purposes of interoperation? Hell, with all the partners listed on that letterhead, those Kenyon boys ought be able to deal with any defense those filthy hackers could dream up!
If you're really protecting the valuable intellectual property of your company, then what's all this pussyfooting around? Clearly your "gentle" lawyer letters aren't working, as plenty of mirror sites are available with all the software anybody could want. If I were one of your board members, I'd be pissed. The "any publicity is good publicity" line is gonna start wearing thin pretty soon here. I want action, dammit!
Chicken.
http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/useofthingsyouown isnowillegal/cue-decrypt/
:CueCat can function as a regular barcode reader-- no serial number, no "type identifier", no descrambling needed. Just a plain keyboard wedge barcode scanner. Pretty cool.
The
You'll need a soldering iron and a little patience. But it should work (I accidentally stepped on mine, so I'm off to Radio Shack to get a new one before I can give it a go, sadly-- do this at your own risk).
Of course, it also includes instructions on how to disable the serial number (if you'd rather go through the whole decoding process anyway, I guess). But that was even covered on Slashdot-- an anonymous poster placed a series of four or five steps to cut the trace to the PROM containing the serial number. I wonder why Slashdot hasn't been sued...
Yes it does, unless you've patented your technology. Otherwise, there's things called "free market" and "competition" which assume that there exists interchangable products so they can be incrementally optimized by companies trying to gain market share.
And anyway, no one is going into business, nor are the efforts competing with DC's products very much. Most linux hackers want to scan stuff they already have, DC's use is for things that people want to buy.
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"Are Earthlings white or dark meat?" "Cincinnati, racial epithets are a violation of FCC regulations."
Yep, that encryption certainly has proven to be very secure. I feel safer already.
There's no way to shut the lights off, short of installing a switch. Pierre's kernel driver lets you hook up any number of cuecats (as many as you have amperage for), to the mouse, serial and usb ports all at once.
Because the userspace decoders all actually depend on the keyboard handler, they cannot play nice with a cuecat on the mouse port.
Of course, you can also just disable the 'encryption' and use the thing like a regular keyboard wedge.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Those cute chimes by CmdrTaco et all are usually bad enough, but they're nothing compared to this gem from Wired:
"The CueCat is a cheapo bar-code scanner that looks like a marital aid and plugs into a computer's keyboard socket."
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RumorsDaily
"Just because I give you the Cat scanner, it does not immediately give you the right to go into business against me with my own technology," Davis said.
Um...Mr. Davis... everyone already had the right to go into business against you. The fact that you gave them the means to do it doesn't mean you gain any rights or your compeitors lose any.
Why? Their business model is brain dead. Any business model built on the concept of giving away a "loss leader" is at best a risky gamble. Investing money in developing a product designed to be used with some other service, which is then utilized to acquire a profit is, in short, usually a pretty dumb idea.
For example, let's consider the I-opener (sp?) that's been discussed here before. Say the company producing these spends $250,000 planning the device, $750,000 gearing up for manufacturing, and then spends $500 per unit to produce them, and then sells them for $200 a piece, expecting the end user to use their service at $25 a month. (All numbers are made up by me here . . .)
Now, if they go through with the production, initially produce 1,000 boxen, and nobody buys one, they've lost $1.5 million and have nothing to show for it but a bunch of crippled boxen. In this case, they could sell 'em off to somebody else who might use them, in an effort to recover their expenses. If they sell all 1,000 boxen, and nobody uses the service for more than a month (they decide they want a PC or a Mac and AOL, they decide that net access is useless to them, etc), then they've spent $1.5 million and taken in $225,000. They're still $1,275,000 in the hole, and they have no boxen to sell off to regain expenses. At best, all 1,000 users will need to utilize their service for one year before the company ever breaks even. From that point on, they pull $25 a month from every user that is profit for them, but in the real world, they still have to worry about manufacturing new machines for new customers, warranty service, paying their staff, maintaining capital, etc. Sure, it's possible to make a profit with a model like this, but it's also possible to make a fortune in Las Vegas from the slot machines -- but it's not likely. It's risky business.
Digital Covergence's model is even worse than the above, because they invest money to develop and manufacture their barcode readers, develop their software, press their CDs, pay their staff, pay for marketing (all those infomercials), maintain captital, etc. Then, once folk get these barcode readers, even if they all use them, they still don't turn a profit. They still have to market and sell their demographic data.
Iin order for them to really acquire any sort of really useful demographic data, the folks with the barcode scanners have to really think that they are the the "biggest computer innovation since the mouse" and find them conveinent to use. Problem is, they ain't. They don't work well (sometimes it takes me 3-4 times to get a barcode to scan), they're annoying, it's a pain in the butt to answer all the questions you have to answer to get to install their software (Yes, I installed it, just to see how it works. No, I really don't care that they have all sorts of demographic data on me. It's not like I really have much privacy on the net, anyway. If I really wanted privacy, I'd lock myself in a closet with a box of Cheerios and keep the light off). If 90% of the folk who get these scanners hook them up, use them 3 or 4 times and then stick them in a drawer to collect dust (and I believe that's what will happen), then they're not going to get the sort of demographic data they're trying to market, and they're going to go belly up.
So, if they are outta business in two years, the Slashdot community won't be the one that puts them there, nor will it be the Linux community, or any other group of folk on the face of the earth or elsewhere. They might speed DC on their merry way to e-biz oblivion, where they will join the ranks of hundreds of other companies with equally flawed business models, but make no mistake about it, Digital Convergence's course was more or less set before the first barcode scanners made their way off of the assembly line.
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"A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind."