CueHack For CueCat Released

uqbar writes: "The corporate culture jammers at ®TMark have released Cuehack which takes the CueCat and finds out dirt on the company whose barcode you scanned." It's a Windows app, so I'm not able to run it. Neither do I have a CueCat -- but apps like this make me smile.

Re:Why? Is there a point?

Personally I don't care if Campbell's Soup is being sued or has lousy profits, I just want to eat my can of soup and go on with life.

That's the problem with most of the public nowadays. They are consumers rather than citizens. They don't care whether their gizmos/food come from, they just want to enjoy it, without regards to their social/health/ecological impacts, at home or abroad.

--

Better hack..

This [air-soldier.com] by far is the best hack. It removes all encryption and allows you to scan in items and it shows their REAL barcode's.

I'm trying to take this, query boarders.com and dump the info back into a database to catalog my 3k cd collection. I need help on parsing a url like: http://search.borders.com/fcgi-bin/db2www/search/s earch.d2w/Details?mediaType=Music&searchType=ISBNU PC&code=601215309928 into id, performer, title, style, track_name, type, publisher, date, producer, engineer, guest, cost using perl. Some of them wont be there for every record so that needs to be taken into account. There will be 1 record like that for every track, so if a cd has 12 tracks there will be 12 entries with only the track_names changing. Cost will be divided by the # of tracks so when added back together it equals the original cost (i wanna know how much this is worth :).

If you can help great, I know most of you need something better to do with your time :)

against Googles TOS?

This is from the CueHack webpage:

Then it does a Google web search for somecompany and a randomly chosen topic of potential interest

But
http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html [google.com] shows:

The Google Search Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Search Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site, or send automated queries to Google's system without express permission from Google. If you want to make commercial use of the Google Search Services you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so. Please contact [e-mail] for more information.

Unfortunatly (?) I don't have a "Clue"Cat so I'm not sure of the output from CueHack. Can anyone comment on this?

The only reason I bring it up is that I've seen other sites shut down because of fun uses of Google search results due to the TOS.

Re:It's not as if this is illegal or anything, but

Digital Convergence happens to be the one who gave away, unsolicited, the CueCats. Seeing that people are not using it as intended, they proceeded to claim copyright and IP ownership of the CurCat, when there was actually very little that is new in their BarCode scanner. Their trivial encoded was called "encryption" and they threatened people posting code to decode it with legal action.

For these reasons, I think they are actually asking for punishment. If they did none of these, I would agree with you. But they did, so I don't.

Java Drivers

There are some open source Java drivers for CueCat at:

http://www.popbeads.org/Software/CCScan [popbeads.org]

Oh boy

I'm afraid to scan my food packaging's bar codes.

Digital Convergence running wild

Every now and then I like to get the latest news [digitalconvergence.com] about how CueCat is taking over the world. For example, recent Digital Convergence press releases reveal the following juicy tidbits:

• Adoption of CueCat technology in the catalog for ClassOne Orthodontics of Lubbock, Texas, maker of the world's widest range of ceramic dental brackets.
• "New Jersey Bride will be the first bridal publication to include :CRQ print-to-Web technology" That's what I call a major business coup right there.
• "With its January/February edition, Connecticut Traveler magazine became the first consumer travel magazine to include :CRQ print-to-Web technology" I'm sure we'll all be anxiously checking our mailboxes for the next issue of Connecticut Traveler!

(Follow the link above if you think I made these up.)

Good to see that $100 million [zdnet.com] in startup funding for Digital Convergence is paying off in spades!

Re:Why? Is there a point?

There is a point to all of this. The "culture jamming" movement is about getting the other side of the story to people. That is, rather than a person ("consumer") just getting the "Campbell's soup is good for you, American, homemade, grandma" message, you also get the "Campbell's beats monkeys to force them to craft Rat Organ Soup", or somesuch.

Yes, you can get a lot of this information other places, like searching the net, or hitting Consumer Reports. Some of it's actually fairly difficult to get (and this CueHack won't get it). The idea is most people only see the big billboards and TV ads, because that's what corporations pay for (of course). We, as non-corporations, don't have multimillion dollar marketing budgets-- how do we make our voices heard? This is one more creative way of getting the other side of the story heard.

Does it work? Sometimes. You're reading this, anyway. Maybe a few people will see the article on /., run the program, and find out a few new things about the products they own. Maybe a few people will go check out Consumer Reports. Is it as effective as $50million? Unfortunately not.

Re:against Googles TOS?

"That is, if you ignore the very first sentence in the TOS:"

A person who does not agree to the terms of service is perfectly free to ignore the first sentence of the terms of service, since no sentence in the terms of service is binding on a person who does not agree to the terms of service.

Furthermore, Google does not even ask you to agree to the terms of service as a condition of using their service. I just visited www.google.com and did a search and did not see anything asking me to agree to anything or even a link to their terms of service or other legal information.

So why would you think that a sentence written somewhere is binding upon somebody who perhaps never saw it, never agreed to it, and was never asked to agree to it? What is the rule you are using -- 'Anything a big company writes is law'?

Purchasing Behaviors(?)

Consumers are expected to happily scan products, ads, etc. - thus reinforcing purchasing behavior. When they do, they will be shown only the carefully-packaged image the company wants them to see. The dangers of choice that interactivity brings have been closed off, and though consumers feel like they are doing something (scanning is fun!) they are in fact as much passive viewers as if they were watching television commercials - it's a one-way, closed system.

Why does this sound like rat in the maze sort of psychiatric mind control thought experiment? As a business plan for the marketing types?

CueHack "hacks" (opens up) this closed system by using it another way. It allows you, the consumer, to experience the same wholesome scanning pleasure as you do with the normal CueCat software, but displays other kinds of information about the companies - information that you would likely have run across if you had done a web search about the company, but that the company might prefer that you, the consumer, not see. This could be information about corporate abuse, boycotts against the company., even how much money the company is making, their corporate image as presented to shareholders, etc.

Freedom, now that is a dangerous option for the consumer. Looks like marketing is trying harder and harder to take it away from the rats in the cage.

Heck we even have folks promoting the model of life as "We are Mice in a Maze" (not the real title, but the book referanced is reviewed here [usatoday.com], webpage here [usatoday.com], parodied here [cutcheese.com].)

That's a nice little mouse. Enjoy your life in the maze. Nothing outside the maze is important. Learn to love the maze. The maze is your friend. Here, have some cheese.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

Scanned...

!|!||!|||!|!!|!

Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA, Earth, Sol System - All your space are belong to us

--

Cuehack is not an original name. I made it

http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/cuehack/ [freshmeat.net]
http://cyberkni.peon.net/software.html [peon.net]
http://cyberkni.hypermart.net/software.html [hypermart.net] *mirror*
I used that name about a year ago. I think the author of this application needs to learn to check to see if a name is in use before he goes and tries to take it. Anyone have any suggestions? Maybe it should be called YAC yet another cuehack.
Dan V.

Why? Is there a point?

This is the same kind of stuff that we could just punch into Google if we really wanted.

Personally I don't care if Campbell's Soup is being sued or has lousy profits, I just want to eat my can of soup and go on with life.

It's kind of interesting how they mention the debocle with Digital Convergence threatening people that wrote Linux drivers for the Cat, and then only have a Windows version of the software. With no source available. Jumping on the ol' "let's make money with this Linux thing" bandwagon? If the Linux version was so easy, why didn't they make one... and where's the source?