I setup a yahoo account years ago and only used it to send a test message to myself. Recently I started monitoring that account. It now gets easily 60 spam messages a week.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
I setup a yahoo account years ago and only used it to send a test message to myself. Recently I started monitoring that account. It now gets easily 60 spam messages a week.
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.