Picture the file system directory spread out across 3d space -- volume of the blob represents file size, color represents file type/contents, etc. Want to find out which runaway process just consumed your/users partition? Watch that blue blob growing real time.
Now, if I can just convince managment that it's the same price as a 17" monitor...
"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. "We have an intended use for it."
But that's not how the law works. Nor should the law be made to work the way Mr. Davis wants it.
How do we inform Mr. Davis of this fact? What possible means could we use to drive this point home with him? People have tried hacking, but they get cease-and-infringe letters. Obviously (to me anyway), sending hate mail is not a useful answer. And people have sent him many, many letters threatening his company under postal statutes; made loud noises about outing their idiocy to their shareholders; and other such thumb-their-nose letters.
Does reasoned mail work? Has anyone actually sent him a letter that reads, "Sorry, Mr. Davis, but the law doesn't work your way?" I'd be curious to find out if he's replied to anything but postings of drivers on the web.
...and don't forget about eFixing, the abhorrent practice of prefixing normal words with a lower case "e" in hopes of making your product sound more hip than it can ever hope to be...
Electronic circuitry contains lead and cadmium, both of which can leach out of landfills and contaminate groundwater. Recycle your:Cue:Cats or dispose of them at your community's "HazMat Dispozal Daze" or whatever. Please, do not throw heavy metals in the trash!
What if the authors of Open Source Books were to release them in eBook format? Yes, I realize that dead trees are still here to stay, but for many studens the appeal of a no-cost copy of the book may swing the deal?
It won't solve the "can't merge Word docs with Pagemaker docs" sort of problems (unless the authors agree up front to always write in RTF.)
Before I respond to your letter, I have to say that I agree with you to some extent. We, the/. community, have been extremely harsh in our treatment of Digital Convergence, and yes, we're biting the hand that gives us free treats.
That said, Digital Convergence didn't find any "little loopholes" in any law. What happened is that Digital Convergence reacted to the initial hacking of their device with vague, legal-sounding threats. The/. community responded the same way hackers have always responded to any legal sounding threat: mirrors, freedom rants, and of course, more code.
For their part, I've heard NOTHING more from Digital Convergence since the "Victory over Evil Hackers" speech. I suspect this speech was made strictly for the investors' benefit. I think they tired of our hacker rants long before we did.
So, is Digital Convergence evil? No, they're trying to make a buck. Are they being ethical about it? They're not very up-front with their data collection intentions. (They are never mentioned in the paper documentation that comes with the CueCat, nor in the Radio Shack advertising or signage. It's certainly the darker side of ethics as we define them here on Slashdot.) But evil? They're just a corporation, driven solely by profit.
You are absolutely right. The "cease-and-desist" letters were a knee-jerk first reaction, and very poorly thought out. I think they were sent based on their misunderstanding of the various intellectual property laws. But we on Slashdot are being way too harsh on them by calling for lawsuits, filing frivolous fraud complaints, predicting the demise of the company, etc. We do ourselves a disservice by making ourselves into the pitchfork-waving-mob. We should let this drop, ignore the threats, and get back to coding Linux drivers for CueCats.
In this case, the legalistic letters prompted the mob reaction. Hopefully, the next company with a cheap hardware model will keep these lessons in mind before angering the peasants again.
This little tempest-in-a-teapot keeps drawing our attention because it's like a "Made-for-Slashdot TV special". It has all the components that draw everyone in: free toys, legal chest-thumping, hardware hacking, rogue coding, poor encryption, snoopware, and an excuse to go to Radio Shack. Basically, it covers every major Slashdot catagory except Natalie Portman.:-) And once/. attention has been drawn to something, the rants (of course) fly. It's how things are always done around here.
I think they can call whatever they want a copyrighted work. Perhaps they consider the screen displayed "after" the registration code to be copyrighted material, something someone who circumvented their encryption had no right to see. Whatever it is, hacking the signature key from their program could be construed as defeating an "access control mechanism." Perhaps they'll have a This web page Copyright 2000 by Digital Convergence tag at the bottom of each page distributed by their web site. Circumventing their secret signature key is the only way you could have gotten there.
Whether or not the law actually applies is hardly necessary to bring charges up against someone. Look at the Wen Ho Lee (sp?) case. 59 counts of various crap (including espionage) were thrown at the guy. One count of "mishandling data" stuck. It's how the system works these days. The Justice Department is not interested in justice. They're interested in making sure that somebody who gets charged with something serves some time. Hackers are especially vulnerable these days (see Kevin Mitnik's or Bernie S.'s stories at 2600 magazine for more examples.)
I'm just saying that the details of the law are determined in a courtroom. And most of us can't afford to start out in that courtroom, much less see a case like that to completion. Color us "chilled".
Please, please do NOT acquire CueCats for the express purpose of disposing of them. They contain lead and probably contain cadmium, neither of which should be casually added to the waste stream. If you must dispose of them, make the effort to get them into a recyclery. The landfills (and the bays!) don't need the extra lead.
Reduce, reuse, recycle, and all that green stuff, y'know.
I don't think so. There are no external markings of any kind on the package containing the CueCat that contain a serial number. There's not even a barcoded sticker glued to the bottom. It's internal and invisible.
They really don't need to. Their "infallible" registration software collects all that anyway.
The difference here is that the Neilsons are "anonymized" before being handed over to the networks.
This software has the capability to specifically state: "Mr. Bush, Mr. Herman Munster (addresslookup="1313 Mockingbird Lane") (partylookup="Republican, registered") was watching your speech at 7:05PM but did not have the audio on when we tweedled the audience at 7:09. As a matter of fact, we discovered that he switched to the Gore broadcast on CBS at 7:14PM. At 7:19, our call center tried his house but got his answering machine, so we've scheduled the door-to-door people to stop by his house on Wednesday evening. According to his scanner report, he has scanned Winston cigarettes (productcategory=POLITICAL, product=WINSTON CARTON), so we'll hit him with Gore's zero-smoking-tolerance plans for national parks. Don't worry, sir, we'll have him voting Republican by Friday."
It's just information flow, really. Do you want to see it happen this way?
I think Digital Convergence may soon change the rules.
For the moment, let's assume D.C. is not totally without clue, and that they are capable of reading the many Slashdot postings, and have been following many of the hacking pages. (No extra jokes about the size of this assumption -- as they say on Wall Street, "past performance is no guarantee of future performance.") They're obviously concerned, if they haven't yet thrown in the hacker towel.
The question is: What should they do about all of this rogue analysis?
I see a couple alternatives for them:
Do nothing. By doing nothing, they acknowledge that "unregistered users may use their database." They still capture some demographic info: product scanned & IP address, notably. It won't be tied to a specific user as well as the scanner ID, and it won't give them the name / gender / zipcode stuff they might want, but it's still valuable data as to "how much" is their scanner being used.
Block access to invalid serial numbers. It sounds like their desktop software is already complaining if it receives a "bad" serial number from a modified scanner. Their server could also perform such a check. Their server optionally could lookup the scanner number on a table, making sure that it's in a range of devices actually produced and not something like zero.
Block access to invalid activation codes. Their server could be modified to reject requests from activation codes that are not found on the database. This might have performance implications on their end, as well as denying themselves their free (as in beer) demographics.
Before D.C. runs off to implement 2 and 3 above, I would like to point out that both of these denial methods will be circumvented by hackers within an hour of being implemented.
A cursory glance at the serial numbers in a couple of units (as well as data gleaned from the web) shows that the serial number does not seem to incorporate any kind of checksum, so any random number passed by a browser would probably work today. However, their client software could be set up to reject scanner input coming from a modified scanner. Why do this? Mostly to annoy the people who went out and cut the trace to the ID chip. Of course, these people will simply go to Radio Shack and pick up another scanner, costing D.C. more money, but they could. At least they could claim their software won't be party to any hardware hacking.
The activation code would be the tough one for a hacker to derive. First, they could use something like a doubly-signed MD5 signed activation code. Take the activation code (aaa...a) and sign it with a key they'd be willing to hide in their Windows client software (SSSS). Then, sign the whole aaa...aSSSS with a secretly held key (kkkk) known only to their servers.
key format: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaSSSSkkkk
The client application can check the value SSSS to see if the activation code being entered was created by D.C. (or forged by someone who disassembled their code.) This would stop the casual AOL user from typing in all zeros for the activation code. The server, however, would be the ultimate arbiter of who gets served, and could be set to only honor requests from Officially Signed activation codes..
This one actually has an interesting side effect that could be a 'benefit' for D.C. -- if they consistently received an unissued activation code that was signed, but the server signature is not valid, they might use that as evidence that the code is coming from someone who has circumvented their program's activation code, violating the DMCA in the process. "Lookee here Miz Reno, we caught us a hacker!" The truly insidious part of this plot is that they could institute it immediately (as soon as the software is ready.) I am assuming that a company that avoids enough ethics to inform their users of the marketing purposes behind their "free" (as in beer) scanner would already have their software set up to perform automatic "upgrades" to itself. They download new software, generate new doubly signed activation codes, and wait for the flies to be drawn to their website.
So, the hackers will be reduced to using other peoples' activation codes. Not the end of the world for them, as long as they're not personally being tracked, kind of like using your mom's Grocery Shopper Saver barcoded keytag. Someone will eventually post a couple to the web, the "hackers" will pounce on them, and D.C. will shut them down until the next round is posted.
The final analysis? Going down the "denial" path means a never ending circle of hacker harrassment that NEVER ADDS A DIME TO D.C.'s BOTTOM LINE. I emphasize that because any countermeasures taken by D.C. can't actually gain them any more revenue or extra users, but only serve to embroil them in expensive lawsuits that some high-school kid will never pay in his lifetime anyway. Allowing the hacked units to continue to use their database gives them MOST of the demographic data they originally intended to collect. (Privacy wonks can still use the anonymizer to get their data if they're really paranoid, but most hackers using dialups are fine letting sites like this see their temporary IP address. It's effectively anonymous enough.)
I hope D.C. doesn't feel the need to wage war upon its "extra" customers. They already can't "win" it if they choose to fight, but they can certainly "lose" it.
I LOVE the Proxomitron, and I don't have a problem at SecurityFocus. But, I've got all my configs tweedled up. Bring up the log window and see why it's complaining. Hint: Lots of sites want a real referrer these days...
When you're trying to make money to keep the Venture Capitalists happy, the only thing that counts are the numbers.
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!"
Because it adds a certain amount of uncertainty to their future.
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.
Has anybody else noticed that the most difficult barcodes to successfully read are the Cues that are printed in the Radio Shack catalog?
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.
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"?
I bet the pirates are already licking their chops
on
No Streams for You!
·
· Score: 1
There are probably Australians setting up web feeders right now, preparing to sell live feeds quietly to us 'murricans who want our sports. The quiet ones will probably make a couple thousand bucks, the fools who advertise will get shut down by every three-letter-agency who wants to be "tough on web 'crime'".
<SARCASM>We can already hear the public outrage around here: "We paid fer them damn 'lympics and can't even watch 'em on TV?!?"</SARCASM>
Hmm. Maybe the h4x0rs can splice the pirate video feeds into doubleclick's animated.GIF banners?:-)
John
<SARCASM> tagged for your protection. Don't write me telling me the true history of the financing of the Olympics, I really don't care.
If you want "fun", let them duke it out with Core Wars. In the mid 80s, Scientific American published an article describing a game called Core Wars. Two opposing programs written in the special language REDCODE would enter a "playing field" called MARS and try to destroy their opponents.
See King of the Hill for the current state of the game and details. They have a "MARS" engine available for download.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if I can just convince managment that it's the same price as a 17" monitor...
John
John
But that's not how the law works. Nor should the law be made to work the way Mr. Davis wants it.
How do we inform Mr. Davis of this fact? What possible means could we use to drive this point home with him? People have tried hacking, but they get cease-and-infringe letters. Obviously (to me anyway), sending hate mail is not a useful answer. And people have sent him many, many letters threatening his company under postal statutes; made loud noises about outing their idiocy to their shareholders; and other such thumb-their-nose letters.
Does reasoned mail work? Has anyone actually sent him a letter that reads, "Sorry, Mr. Davis, but the law doesn't work your way?" I'd be curious to find out if he's replied to anything but postings of drivers on the web.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
I mean if you can be busted for writing Melissa, (which behaves in an identical manner) why not for this?
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
It's a touch limited at this point, but you're free to add any bar codes you encounter.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
Electronic circuitry contains lead and cadmium, both of which can leach out of landfills and contaminate groundwater. Recycle your :Cue:Cats or dispose of them at your community's "HazMat Dispozal Daze" or whatever. Please, do not throw heavy metals in the trash!
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
It won't solve the "can't merge Word docs with Pagemaker docs" sort of problems (unless the authors agree up front to always write in RTF.)
John
That said, Digital Convergence didn't find any "little loopholes" in any law. What happened is that Digital Convergence reacted to the initial hacking of their device with vague, legal-sounding threats. The /. community responded the same way hackers have always responded to any legal sounding threat: mirrors, freedom rants, and of course, more code.
For their part, I've heard NOTHING more from Digital Convergence since the "Victory over Evil Hackers" speech. I suspect this speech was made strictly for the investors' benefit. I think they tired of our hacker rants long before we did.
So, is Digital Convergence evil? No, they're trying to make a buck. Are they being ethical about it? They're not very up-front with their data collection intentions. (They are never mentioned in the paper documentation that comes with the CueCat, nor in the Radio Shack advertising or signage. It's certainly the darker side of ethics as we define them here on Slashdot.) But evil? They're just a corporation, driven solely by profit.
You are absolutely right. The "cease-and-desist" letters were a knee-jerk first reaction, and very poorly thought out. I think they were sent based on their misunderstanding of the various intellectual property laws. But we on Slashdot are being way too harsh on them by calling for lawsuits, filing frivolous fraud complaints, predicting the demise of the company, etc. We do ourselves a disservice by making ourselves into the pitchfork-waving-mob. We should let this drop, ignore the threats, and get back to coding Linux drivers for CueCats.
In this case, the legalistic letters prompted the mob reaction. Hopefully, the next company with a cheap hardware model will keep these lessons in mind before angering the peasants again.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
Yeah, but in a little while you can hook up a CueCat! :-)
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
Whether or not the law actually applies is hardly necessary to bring charges up against someone. Look at the Wen Ho Lee (sp?) case. 59 counts of various crap (including espionage) were thrown at the guy. One count of "mishandling data" stuck. It's how the system works these days. The Justice Department is not interested in justice. They're interested in making sure that somebody who gets charged with something serves some time. Hackers are especially vulnerable these days (see Kevin Mitnik's or Bernie S.'s stories at 2600 magazine for more examples.)
I'm just saying that the details of the law are determined in a courtroom. And most of us can't afford to start out in that courtroom, much less see a case like that to completion. Color us "chilled".
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
Reduce, reuse, recycle, and all that green stuff, y'know.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
They really don't need to. Their "infallible" registration software collects all that anyway.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
This software has the capability to specifically state: "Mr. Bush, Mr. Herman Munster (addresslookup="1313 Mockingbird Lane") (partylookup="Republican, registered") was watching your speech at 7:05PM but did not have the audio on when we tweedled the audience at 7:09. As a matter of fact, we discovered that he switched to the Gore broadcast on CBS at 7:14PM. At 7:19, our call center tried his house but got his answering machine, so we've scheduled the door-to-door people to stop by his house on Wednesday evening. According to his scanner report, he has scanned Winston cigarettes (productcategory=POLITICAL, product=WINSTON CARTON), so we'll hit him with Gore's zero-smoking-tolerance plans for national parks. Don't worry, sir, we'll have him voting Republican by Friday."
It's just information flow, really. Do you want to see it happen this way?
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
For the moment, let's assume D.C. is not totally without clue, and that they are capable of reading the many Slashdot postings, and have been following many of the hacking pages. (No extra jokes about the size of this assumption -- as they say on Wall Street, "past performance is no guarantee of future performance.") They're obviously concerned, if they haven't yet thrown in the hacker towel.
The question is: What should they do about all of this rogue analysis?
I see a couple alternatives for them:
- Do nothing. By doing nothing, they acknowledge that "unregistered users may use their database." They still capture some demographic info: product scanned & IP address, notably. It won't be tied to a specific user as well as the scanner ID, and it won't give them the name / gender / zipcode stuff they might want, but it's still valuable data as to "how much" is their scanner being used.
- Block access to invalid serial numbers. It sounds like their desktop software is already complaining if it receives a "bad" serial number from a modified scanner. Their server could also perform such a check. Their server optionally could lookup the scanner number on a table, making sure that it's in a range of devices actually produced and not something like zero.
- Block access to invalid activation codes. Their server could be modified to reject requests from activation codes that are not found on the database. This might have performance implications on their end, as well as denying themselves their free (as in beer) demographics.
Before D.C. runs off to implement 2 and 3 above, I would like to point out that both of these denial methods will be circumvented by hackers within an hour of being implemented.A cursory glance at the serial numbers in a couple of units (as well as data gleaned from the web) shows that the serial number does not seem to incorporate any kind of checksum, so any random number passed by a browser would probably work today. However, their client software could be set up to reject scanner input coming from a modified scanner. Why do this? Mostly to annoy the people who went out and cut the trace to the ID chip. Of course, these people will simply go to Radio Shack and pick up another scanner, costing D.C. more money, but they could. At least they could claim their software won't be party to any hardware hacking.
The activation code would be the tough one for a hacker to derive. First, they could use something like a doubly-signed MD5 signed activation code. Take the activation code (aaa...a) and sign it with a key they'd be willing to hide in their Windows client software (SSSS). Then, sign the whole aaa...aSSSS with a secretly held key (kkkk) known only to their servers.
key format: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaSSSSkkkk
The client application can check the value SSSS to see if the activation code being entered was created by D.C. (or forged by someone who disassembled their code.) This would stop the casual AOL user from typing in all zeros for the activation code. The server, however, would be the ultimate arbiter of who gets served, and could be set to only honor requests from Officially Signed activation codes..
This one actually has an interesting side effect that could be a 'benefit' for D.C. -- if they consistently received an unissued activation code that was signed, but the server signature is not valid, they might use that as evidence that the code is coming from someone who has circumvented their program's activation code, violating the DMCA in the process. "Lookee here Miz Reno, we caught us a hacker!" The truly insidious part of this plot is that they could institute it immediately (as soon as the software is ready.) I am assuming that a company that avoids enough ethics to inform their users of the marketing purposes behind their "free" (as in beer) scanner would already have their software set up to perform automatic "upgrades" to itself. They download new software, generate new doubly signed activation codes, and wait for the flies to be drawn to their website.
So, the hackers will be reduced to using other peoples' activation codes. Not the end of the world for them, as long as they're not personally being tracked, kind of like using your mom's Grocery Shopper Saver barcoded keytag. Someone will eventually post a couple to the web, the "hackers" will pounce on them, and D.C. will shut them down until the next round is posted.
The final analysis? Going down the "denial" path means a never ending circle of hacker harrassment that NEVER ADDS A DIME TO D.C.'s BOTTOM LINE. I emphasize that because any countermeasures taken by D.C. can't actually gain them any more revenue or extra users, but only serve to embroil them in expensive lawsuits that some high-school kid will never pay in his lifetime anyway. Allowing the hacked units to continue to use their database gives them MOST of the demographic data they originally intended to collect. (Privacy wonks can still use the anonymizer to get their data if they're really paranoid, but most hackers using dialups are fine letting sites like this see their temporary IP address. It's effectively anonymous enough.)
I hope D.C. doesn't feel the need to wage war upon its "extra" customers. They already can't "win" it if they choose to fight, but they can certainly "lose" it.
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
China's not missing out. They got to make all of them (and probably for six bucks each)!
[ Sorry, I couldn't resist... :-) ]
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
John
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
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...
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...
Don't worry. If you use their service, I imagine you'll be taken to a site from which you can purchase penguins...
The Church of the SubGenius -- because somebody had to put all that slack in there...
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...
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...
<SARCASM>We can already hear the public outrage around here: "We paid fer them damn 'lympics and can't even watch 'em on TV?!?"</SARCASM>
Hmm. Maybe the h4x0rs can splice the pirate video feeds into doubleclick's animated .GIF banners? :-)
John
<SARCASM> tagged for your protection. Don't write me telling me the true history of the financing of the Olympics, I really don't care.
See King of the Hill for the current state of the game and details. They have a "MARS" engine available for download.
And may the best geek win!
John