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Man Finds $1,000 Prize in EULA
bhtooefr writes "When Doug Heckman was installing a PC Pitstop program, he actually read the EULA. In it, he found a clause stating that he could get financial compensation if he e-mailed PC Pitstop. The result: a $1,000 check, and proof that people don't read EULAs (3,000 people before him didn't notice it). The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
One of our developers buried some easter eggs in a web-based game, and nobody has claimed them yet after several months.
:)
And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post
So I gather some of the 3000 users may have read the EULA but dismissed the possibility of real cash prize., just like not everybody entered suparmarket prize draw thinking that they won't be so lucky.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
That's not going to make people read EULAs...all that will make people do is say, "wow, I wish I had been that guy, what a break!"
True.
However a good rule of thumb is that if you cant understand the EULA, dont agree to it. I mean would you sign somthing you didn't understand?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I think you are missing the point. The point they are making here us that even a cursory overview of the EULA will tell you if an application is spyware or not. Or if you will be rendered legally sterilizeable if you install this software.
Think of Rumplestiltskin, without the princess even knowing what her end of the deal is.
You say you want a revolution....
So this is the latest variant of the old fable (big boulder in the middle of the road, everyone walks around it, the chap who finally pushes it aside finds the treasure underneath). But really - nice as the story is, is it going to make any change to how people treat an EULA? I think not.
People will still not read an EULA because
(a) They know thay not every EULA has a $1000 check buried in it
(b) They still won't understand the real point to reading the EULA - which is understanding exactly what the software claims it will do on your computer.
Unless they get (b), there really is no reason to read an EULA.
I think the point they're making is that people don't read EULA's and in terms of research, the $1K prize was worth it for the PC Pitstop people to demonstrate that they could pretty much do anything they liked and have the user agreeing to all conditions as a precondition to use. The only real outs for the end user are 1) proving the eventual end user agreed (rather than it was all pre-installed stuff) 2) that EULA's hold any real legal weight, which some haven't.
Think of Rumplestiltskin, without the princess even knowing what her end of the deal is.
And yet the princess was pretty venal, expecting to take advantage of the little dude. Ain't no saints in that story.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'd just like to point out something about the claim in spyware EULA's which says that you are agreeing for them to capture "non-personally identifiable information" -- while it may be true that the captured web history and form input logs don't literally have your name in them, it's a simple matter for the customer of the spyware marketing service to match up a given capture log with your known identity on one of their web sites, by matching page sequences and/or time stamps, and then from that starting point they then can tell what you *individually* were looking at, searching for, and entering into web forms on every other site you visit, forever.
Imagine if you follow somebody around for months and watch every move they make -- you can learn anything needed to advance whatever agenda you have in mind.
And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post :)
An easter egg is a fair amount different than a prize offering burried deep in an EULA. People generally will find easter eggs 1 of 3 ways:
1) by searching specifically for an easter egg because they think there is one there for some reason
2) completely by accident
3) after being told exactly how to find it by someone else who found it through methods 1, 2 or
Finding a prize in an EULA is a little easier since people really should be reading legal contracts before signing them with the next button. Not very many people are just going to randomly search for easter eggs in software, since that's just a waste of time, and equally few people will investigate bugs fully enough to find an easter egg by mistake.
The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs
This is not a goal I want to be moving towards.
I mean, I can go to home depot and buy a nail gun and a welding torch without having to read, parse, and agree to any complex and lengthy legal agreement. Why should I have to do this to buy and use software?
why can't we have standard comercial agreements?
Right, and those are called laws. Most of an EULA is already codified in various laws, and everything else is asking you to give up your rights.
If I buy a telephone at WalMart I don't have to sign an EULA. If I buy a softphone at WalMart they expect me to agree to an EULA. What's the difference?
If I buy a car, it comes with software in it, but they don't expect me to sign an EULA.
As far as I can tell, an EULA is saying that Chewbacca lives on Endor.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sounds like a great marketing idea.
1. Get a friend of yours to say they got $1000 from your software
2. Advertise the event on your website
3. Include a fair share of advertisements on page
4. Submit miracle story of how great EULA's are to slashdot
5. People flock to your website to see what it's all about
6. Profit
Even underpants gnomes can figure this one out. Until somebody does an indepth report on the story I'll consider it a ploy and move on.
I don't know why people are complaining that there are too many open source software licenses. I typically only see a handful of them. And if the software says it's GPL'ed, I don't have to read the damn thing, because I read it already back in 1991. I know what it says.
But these commercial licenses - Jesus Christ they are long, they are complicated, they are in fine print, they are badly written, and they are all unique. It's like a fricking zork maze. Someone needs to figure out how much time it takes to read software licenses and add that to the "cost of ownership" that they report.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Yep. That Steve Mann is a witty guy. According to wikipedia: The term "Ouija" is derived from the French "oui" (for "yes") and the German "ja" (for "yes"). I don't know if that does anything for ya.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
Of the things I want to do the LEAST in my life, reading EULAs ranks pretty high among things which do not cause physical pain or summering to my loved ones.
Fuck reading it. I am more likely to look a prog up on CNET. If it had a lot of thumbs-down, I read those and see what people complain about. People always complain about spyware if its there (and sometimes even if its not)
Doing a google or deja search for name of the program and spyware always brings up some discussion of that topic, which lets me know conclusively (well, as far as something can be conclusive on an internet thread) what the answer is.
Reading the actual EULA? If I am a billion dollar company about to bind something with my product, yea I'll read it. But for something I am installing at home, behind a firewall which will prevent it from phoning home, FUCK IT! Who cares what they wrote?
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
If I have to read the EULA, or am legally expected to have done so, I need to know the length of it before purchase.
If I'm buying a new mousemat and it has a 20 page EULA, I'll decline the purchase, as the reading time outweighs the value of the product.
This means all products need the full EULA text printed on the outside of the packaging.
EULAs are bullshit that keep lawyers in sports cars, one reason my games don't have them.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
It seems to me that even if you attempt to read the EULA of a lot of the spyware out there you can't tell that it's spyware.
It's not as if they say somewhere in the text "This is Spyware".
You can't reasonably expect every 10 year old, grandmother, or even your boss at work to actually understand any of the technical mumbo jumbo that Spyware/Adware uses to describe itself. Most people do not understand what spyware/adware is, that it may be bad or how it would be described in a EULA.