>But in a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"
>That is, "how can we raise the switching costs of our products so that users who are angry at us keep using our products?"
I keep telling myself that the reason interoperability disappeared is because software updates and platforms are just fast-moving targets, and we don't have the relative stability computers had 25 years ago. But I know that's not true, and it's really the other way around.
Doctorow is gesturing at something significant, but he's still stuck in the '90s era copyright wars. I agree that the DMCA is awful, but it's irrelevant to the problem.
Today's tech corps don't need to sic the cops on you if you use their products outside their prescribed boundaries. They can just ban you, and that's punishment enough. We're already hearing Kafkaesque stories of people accidentally tripping automated abuse-detection and getting locked out of their GooFaceTwit accounts with no recourse. If you're considering actually violating the TOS... well who'd want to risk that? Better to just stay in line like a good little drone.
I summarize this behaviour as "hating your customers" and it seems to be a growing trend. I think it's a corruption of just being opinionated and looking for people who are on board with your product vision (common advice that I agree with), that comes with too much market power, or consumers that are so used to being treated like shit they don't even notice anymore. But you see it now in most corporate interactions, how much they hate their customers
We programmers are among the worst when it comes to this. The natural reaction so many of us have when getting a bug report, is anger and blaming the messenger. (The user)
Perhaps now in 2022, the most successful app purveyors have gotten so good at network effects, while treating their users as the product, the economics/game theory has started to breed contempt for users?
>Cuecats were cool. The people who made them were assholes.
Thanks @doctorow
Look, we created it because barcodes had URLs below them on packaged goods that were generic. Google had a fresh “links in” algorithm that they were figuring out. We had the first concept of location or demographic based results for media and products.
Your :CC ID was used to see who the best distribution channels were. The software ID held your profile and zip code so someone swiping a Coke can in Dallas would see a Six Flags promotion, someone in Atlanta would get SeaWorld + Coke offers.
The light DMCA approved ROT 64 output scrambling was to prevent OS or browsers from natively decoding the scans, as we wanted to run the ONS (object naming service) and provide truly valuable links. How many QR codes go to 404 links today? Our magic from 1997 was dynamic in multiple ways.
Alas, the USB and portable devices shipped as the dot-bomb era encroached and our open plug-in framework gets forgotten by the researchers.
I’m proud of what the 300+ team built over those handful of formative commercial Internet years, and happy to see our creation in the Computer History Museum. Under oddity input devices.
Perception is a hell of a drug. You were a "trailblazer" in one of the nastiest, evilest segments of modern tech. I was glad to see the Cuecat crumble as a product, I remember being a tiny, tiny mirror of the information to hack the product, and I also remember (as a 17-year old) getting a nasty email from your legal team that taught me an early lesson in "might makes right, and corporations own the world". Your team was one of the ones that set the stage for the dismal state of online rights. Thanks for that /s
Even though I never used it for anything, I was proud to disable the serial number of my old Cuecat on principle
I wish we could see the votes on this thread just to see the ratio your post is likely getting.
You're proud about harassing uses of the cuecat hardware with legal threats? You're proud of the security vulnerabilities on your site that leaked the PII of users that were foolish enough to use your software? -- because these are also thing the team at Digital Convergence did.
You spied on people.
You leaked their private data.
When people tried to not get spied on, you threatened to sue them and forced them to take their drivers down.
These are the things that got you called an asshole.
If you're going to post here today saying that you were proud and not even "some mistakes were made" -- then I think the asshole label was well justified.
It sounds like you’re making Doctorow’s point. You talk about your business model and selling personalized ads and how you tried to use legal means (“light DMCA”) to prevent other operating systems and browsers from reading the data — even though you were giving away the device to anyone.
This strategy failed in 1999 but, as Doctorow explains, it has evolved and is much more successful today with “Felony Contempt of Business Model” deeply integrated into the platforms we can’t avoid.
Every cue cat came with a pets.com hand puppet. Don't you remember?
Hahahaha, look at that business model limping along.
Hahaha, so funny!
No offense to you, ggdm. It was a unique item that defined an Era, even if it's now considered a joke. Thank you for your contribution to this thread, it's appreciated. It was a moment in history.
What was notable about CueCat is evident by the fact we're all here able to talk about it twenty years later: they sent those things to everyone. There haven't been too many modern iterations of this idea on such a grand scale, but there have been some, like the original Square card reader. They gave that away for free (later $20) and it could piggyback on any phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
> They gave that away for free (later $20) and it could piggyback on any phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The fact that we had such a robust, simple, and universal interface which was taken away from us, effectively increasing the cost of the equivalent peripherals by 2 or 3X, while decreasing their potential usefulness and lifespan by a similar factor is yet more evidence of a new technocratic corporate disdain for users.
Big companies would rather control their users through marketing, branding, and technological lock in, than genuinely benefiting their users at the deepest level.
Its almost kind of a quirk of history that it worked though. Magstrips were essentially already waveforms in near-audible space when passed through a magnetic pickup. There were already plenty of software libraries around based around reading that kind of data from an audio stream.
It wouldn't make sense to use the headphone jack to transmit data otherwise. It's extremely low bitrate, subject to lots of noise and other issues.
When they switched to Bluetooth for chip/tap card readers they didn't avoid the headphone jack because nobody had it, they avoided it because a bluetooth serial connection makes a ton more sense.
The CueCat read normal barcodes. It read them better than it read the weird slanted ones that were associated with it.
Like all cheap 1-d barcode readers it did a terrible job of reading either kind of barcode.
What's really remarkable about QR codes is that they read reliably with a cheap camera, which just isn't true about UPC barcodes either using a camera or using a wedge reader. You need a really expensive reader with a laser and a spinning mirror if you want reading UPC bar codes to be less than several times slower than typing in the numbers.
> The CueCat read normal barcodes. It read them better than it read the weird slanted ones that were associated with it.
My recollection (and I may still have one of those things in the basement somewhere) was that you plugged it in inline with your PS2 keyboard and when you scanned a normal barcode it just spit it out as if you had typed the number on your keyboard. Like if you were typing a term paper in MSWord and your annoying roommate snuck in and started scanning things, you'd have a whole lot of random pieces of barcodes in between words. A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was concerned.
No software needed, no firmware updates, nothing. No need to do anything at all with the provided CD. And that was the problem, as people who wanted a barcode scanner could just go grab a free one from Radio Shack. Some people were visiting every single Radio Shack within driving distance grabbing as many as the hapless employees were willing to give them.
>A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was concerned.
That's how every USB barcode reader I've used worked too.
While the approach is certainly very compatible, it left configuration of the device's behavior to be very esoteric. If I wanted to change the key sequence that followed, I had to scan these special programming barcodes[1] to alter its behavior... which is something I never got to work.
I have one that can be configured to either pretend to be a keyboard or pretend to be a serial device. In terms of reading barcodes though it is absolute rubbish.
I didn't send the number. It sent a (base64, IIRC) encoded version of the barcode, along with a serial number for tracking purposes. It was fairly quickly reverse engineered, but never quite as simple as some of the contemporary barcode scanners that just entered raw numbers.
Yeah, exactly. I was puzzled about the talk of Windows-only and hacked software. I soldered on a jumper wire (with a slide switch to easily revert back if needed) and used it as a barcode reader in FreeBSD.
> when you scanned a normal barcode it just spit it out as if you had typed the number on your keyboard.
Many barcode readers work like that, it's called something along "keyboard emulation". Back in the day I wrote a Clipper program for a bookstore whose #1 need was to be able to scan ISBN barcodes of books being bought and sold as quick as possible during that short period before or after summer when they sell new school books editions, and customers wait in long lines outside. The clerk couldn't waste a single second pushing this or that button to tell the software "this comes from the keyboard" or "this from the reader", so I programmed the reader to precede any code being read by a non printable sequence that couldn't have been written on the keyboard but the software would recognize as "what follows must be a barcode". By doing so, adding or removing books to/from the inventory was just a matter of scanning the book code, which would trigger a search function on the database, and pressing the relevant function key (add, remove, sell, order, etc).
(This ran on two networked 486s that managed a 90k+ record database with multiple and composite indexes like a breeze. Good ol' times...)
The trouble with your analysis is I think few people wanted a barcode scanner back then and the ones that did wanted a reliable barcode scanner. A $40 barcode scanner you buy off ebay from a chinese manufacturer is not going to save you any time or hassle by scanning UPC codes although it might do OK with QR codes. A Cuecat was much worse.
Before smartphones it was the case that most non-PC devices had terrible price performance, for instance a router might have a USB port and run Linux and Samba to serve files off a USB stick but the file server was unspeakably slow. It was like the cost was 1/5 but the performance was like 1/500.
Since smartphones came out, now it is smartphone and PC that beat everything else. That’s why game consoles today are made from either PC or Smartphone parts.
QR codes are remarkable though because they were designed in 1994 to be read from robots moving at 30 mph so from a UX perspective QR codes are great because they scan fast. In my county there is a ‘reuse center’ that has a custom POS system that reads QR stickers with cheap readers that I think would struggle with UPC.
> What's really remarkable about QR codes is that they read reliably with a cheap camera
Highly dependent on lighting and reflectance. If its a QR sealed in plastic for easy cleaning in a table top ordering menu, its a hit-and-miss affair from strip lighting. Challenging environment, but its common.
Almost everything I print is on matte paper, even though I sometimes like photos and art reproductions on glossy. At the moment though the only glossy paper I have that fits the needs of my printing programme is really thin and curls excessively in the humidity of my house which makes borderless prints impossible.
So I am always printing on matte paper which helps with readability.
I print a lot of anaglyph stereograms these days and I am curious how they would come out on glossy paper though since the gloss is going to be at the paper surface but the rest of the image will be in front or behind of it.
It's so dependent on local lighting effects it's hard to say. If the shiny surface makes an image sufficiently clear of some reflected object then the eyes focal depth will adjust to find it I fear
This just reminded me, resently I wanted to plug some things into a smart switch (you plug the switch into the wall, you plug something into the switch, you can now turn the thing on/off from your phone etc...)
A year ago I bought a pack of 4 Meross smart switches. I was using one and had 4 left. The one had issues, about once every 2-3 months it would stop responding. I'd unplug it and plug in back in and it would work again.
Any, last week I wanted to plug something else in so I grabbed one of the remaining 3 switches. I could not get it to pair with the iPhone Home app (the same app I was using for the first switch). I tried moving closer to my WiFi (right next to it in fact). No luck. I tried all 3 switches. No luck. Ok, go online, Meross has an app that might let me do the pairing and/or apply upgrades? Download the app. You can't use the app unless you make an account. F that. I took all 4 switches that immediately threw them in the trash.
> 100% Privacy
> No Eve cloud, no registration and no tracking so your data won’t get exposed. Local intelligence and direct communication between Eve accessory and iPhone, iPad or home hub without bridge or cloud dependency.
They cost >2x the Meross ones. Got 2. They work so far. Crossing my fingers they're legit, though my guess is they won't last. Few consumers care AFAICT.
> They cost >2x the Meross ones. Got 2. They work so far. Crossing my fingers they're legit, though my guess is they won't last.
FYI - there are plenty of cheap Tuya devices[0] that can be flashed with alternative firmware[1] which works locally. More generically, there a lot of ESP32-based switches that work with Tasmota open-source firmware[2]. There breadth of devices is annoying because it makes configuration difficult since manufacturer wire up the relays differently, so it took me trial and error to figure out which device/"port" the firmware needs to toggle to turn the switch on or off
0. Any device that requires installation of a phone app named "Smart Life" or "Tuya Smart".
One day word came down that we had to destroy all remaining inventory. Those things were nearly indestructible. Ran one over with a car multiple times and it was fine. Eventually everyone interested just took them home.
From my perspective the real decline came from canceling of the catalog.
We had so many people coming in asking for it. Only to be told to use the kiosk in store or the website.
That catalog was basically our training manual. We got to know our inventory from it. People always walked in and showed us what they wanted. That all dried up.
Then we became just a phone shop. In my region I was the highest selling agent of parts , batteries and accessories. That stuff was pure profit. Yet, I was constantly in trouble for not selling enough phones.
They did not care one bit about anything else.
They had a glut of engineers after the dot com crash, wish is how I ended up their.
> "The saddest thing for me about modern tech’s long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer."
This is me. I used to be fascinated by new technology, to imagine the ways it could make life better for everyone. Today, I’m worried about how to limit its destructiveness. There’s no joy any more.
I know it’s not the technology itself but how we use it. In practical terms this doesn’t make a difference though.
The article is spot-on but does not go far enough.
The way to fight back is to decline to interact with, use, or especially pay for anything that actively works against your freedom. In other words, stop hurting yourself! (and paying for the privilege of doing so)
It's easy to spot many of them: they have "smart" in the name. Some of them even have euphemistic names like "Telephone" (which is supposed to be a passive instrument) when they are really deliberately-crippled computers.
> We didn't replace tech investors and leaders with worse people – we have the same kinds of people but we let them get away with more.
I disagree entirely. I think the generational change in core philosophies is exactly the problem.
I perceive three generations in the world of hackers.
The first generation were Engineers. Their outlook was academic; they wrote RFCs and built consensus. Their outlook was intellectual; they were mainly interested in solving hard mathematical and algorithmic problems like figuring out how compilers and encryption and decentralized network addressing should work. Their audience was other academics interested in computers for academic purposes, and sometimes corporations and governments. Their work was Important. They did the Cold War. They did the Space Race. They worked for the man and they believed in it; they believed that was how we would build great treasures to leave to mankind. They were idealists. They built infrastructure. They built wonders. They put a man on the moon.
The second generation were Revolutionaries. Computers became more accessible, and a thousand revolutions happened overnight. Some revolutionaries sought to break corporate power and give it to the people. Some saw a gold rush. Their outlook was explorational and competitive -- market dominance by outperforming, by seeking new horizons, by doing what had never been done before. Their outlook was revolutionary -- the cyberpunk ethos, the belief that information wants to be free, belong to this generation. They were mainly interested in changing the world. Their audience was hobbyists and the youth and the more technically inclined of the general public. They hated the man, and tried to bring him down. They tried to empower and enrich humanity. They built products and applications and tools.
The third generation are Barons. As it became obvious to everyone that computers could make you rich and powerful, people started getting into them for that reason. Their outlook was machiavellian, as described in this article. They are mainly interested in power and money, in building kingdoms. Their outlook is contemptuous. Their audience are the technically illiterate masses, which they perceive as theirs to exploit. They are trying to get rich. They intend to be the man, and they largely succeed. (And now that they have succeeded so well, they're finding that ruling the world is not as easy or fun as they had imagined.) They build Technological Ecosystems.
RMS stands at the cusp between the first and second generation, and was popular during the transition, and did a lot to give the second generation its voice. HN stands at the cusp between the second and third generation, and is very much a product of that time (and I mean that in the very best way -- it was a time when the corruption of the third generation was becoming obvious, and people hated it, and bless them they still thought they could outcompete it, because the excitement and idealism of the second generation hadn't died yet).
The Engineers built email. The Revolutionaries built PGP. The Barons built GMail. The Engineers built IP. The Revolutionaries built TOR. The Barons built Twitter. The Engineers made usenet for themselves. The Revolutionaries made PHPBB. The Barons made Reddit and StackOverflow. The Engineers made Unix. The Revolutionaries made Linux. The Barons made smartphones.
Nothing stops you from being an Engineer today. Or a Revolutionary. We still have some of them. But the dominant tools of this generation very much reflect the dominant philosophy of this generation, and complaining that it hurts you -- that it hurts everyone! -- will not do very much to fix it.
Laws are helpful, but are fundamentally not the problem. A law here and there helps a bit, but what matters is that things are built by people who aim to exploit. They will find a way. And even if they don't succeed on you, that is the sort of thing they are building because that is the sort of thing they think they are supposed to be building.
They didn't make Wikipedia because a law compelled them to. Or Linux. They made those things because they were Revolutionaries, and that sort of thing was what you did at that time. People make startups now, and go on Shark Tank or whatever, because that is what you do. You can't law people into building like a revolutionary; you need an army of sincere revolutionaries for that.
Will the awfulness of this generation capture the imagination of the world and cause a backlash? I don't know. I'm squarely first-to-second generation myself, in philosophy and association if not by age, and I'm not holding my breath; just hoping the population of my little island is somewhat self-sustaining enough to make interesting things in its little niche.
It occurs to me that the evolving meaning of the term "hack" has tracked this generational change, going from zen mastery of the arcane arts, to underground destruction and subversion, to clever personal convenience. Perhaps we were never miseducated. Perhaps we were just honest.
I had a CueCat with the intent of installing the open-source driver, never got around to it.
There was a much-better device that came later, the Hiku. It wasn't free, but it was basically a WiFi-enabled battery-powered barcode scanner designed to manage your shopping. You'd scan the barcodes of items as you tossed them, and it would automatically add them to your shopping list. The hardware was way ahead of its time, even now something with those capabilities would cost something like $500 from Symbol. It even had a microphone so you could just record stuff to add to the list if it didn't have barcodes.
Even after the company folded and the backend was shut down, turning the reader into a doorstop, the app still worked for several more years, and I kept using it for shopping lists because it synced in real-time as my wife added items to the list while I was shopping and ticking them off.
when i was a kid one of my big ideas was to create a wattage normalized time/power coding scheme for microwave oven cook programs and to then equip them with barcode scanners for automatic programming based on codes that manufacturers would put on their frozen/heat and eat foods.
i think this was like 1992 or so, long before the cuecat.
The claims made in the article are developed into very exaggerated forms and thus make it really difficult to take seriously.
It would have been better if the author stuck strictly to tenable claims, since veering into amateur political agitation is usually the last resort of writers without substantial prospects elsewhere.
e.g.
>" The problem is when you can't choose someone else – when leaving a platform involves high switching costs, whether that's having to replace hardware, buy new media, or say goodbye to your friends, customers, community or family."
Here the author tries to turns a mundane observation, that switching costs are high when you put your entire life on a single platform, into an emotive and attention grabbing claim.
> "That's why plans to impose interoperability on tech giants are so exciting – because the problem with Facebook isn't "the people I want to speak to are all gathered in one convenient place," no more than the problem with app stores is "these companies generally have good judgment about which apps I want to use. The problem is that when those companies don't have your back, you have to pay a blisteringly high price to leave their walled gardens. That's where interop comes in. Think of how an interoperable Facebook could let you leave behind Zuckerberg's dominion without forswearing access to the people who matter to you"
Here the author alleges Zuck to be ruling a vast dominion of billions of Facebook users. And the fabled 'interop' shall grant users the magic key for passage through the most expedient gates into the land of unbounded freedom outside.
In reality Facebook usage is already declining in North America, and no magic keys are necessary for people to just leave and delete their accounts.
The idea of interop may be valuable yet this phrasing and casting of the folks at Facebook as arch-demons and feudal lords will more likely retard rather than promote the prospects of its integration.
The feudal lord metaphor is entirely accurate, but for the wrong reasons. While FAANG companies do talk a good game about "stickiness" and "switching costs", the reality is that most of the time, they aren't the ones holding users in. It's actually fairly difficult to do that. Users piled into FAANG because they had things the users wanted and were able to keep out the deluge of spam and malware that is the heat death of any global communications network.
i.e. anti-spam is difficult, but if we move our business over to Google Workspace, we get that for very cheap. Gmail now has a moat around it because the bar for proving you aren't a spammer gets worse every year - but everyone trusts Google's MX.
Likewise, Apple's App Store lockout was so they could brag to users that "iPhones don't get viruses", because users would rather wear a straitjacket if it keeps them from getting stabbed.
The underlying problem is that governments rarely actually fight cybercrime, so tech companies protected users by appointing themselves as judge, jury, and executioner. Ending the era of digital warlords is more than just repealing DMCA 1201[0] or incorporating EU DMA into local law. We need an actual government to take their place - because nobody actually wants to live in the wild west.
[0] Including the equivalent laws that the US forced into a large number of other countries
and DDOS attacks, to bring up a recent subject indirectly...
But I think it's both are true: Explicit anti-competitive lock-in behavior exists (including embrace-extent-extinguish, closed ecosystems/networks, data lockup, dumping (e.g. giving away expensive to provide services to on-board people)), patent intimidation as well as centralizing external forces (spam, malware, DDOS, and criminal user conduct getting treated as crimes by the operator for non-megacorp operators).
Which forces have a greater effect on your experience differs a lot from person to person.
the first: 'Chokepoint Capitalism: an audiobook Amazon won't sell'
where we are advised: 'an absolute must-read for anyone who senses that the predominant economic mythology is a lie'
He further touts: 'Chokepoint Capitalism is a book about the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use to capture creative labor markets, and how we can take them back and get artists paid.'
Interestingly, the second level of 'reward' offers the option of:
'Pledge US$ 10 or more
Pin
An enamel "Chokepoint Capitalism" pin - wear it in on your lapel, start a conversation, dismantle systems of unaccountable power.'
...
The second project being a second sequel to one of his speculative fiction books:
'ATTACK SURFACE: the long-awaited third Little Brother book
In 2008, I published Little Brother, a New York Times bestselling YA novel of resistance to authoritarianism. it's been published in dozens of languages and, translated and distributed to underground resistance movements in Myanmar and Iran. It's been repeatedly adapted for the stage and optioned for film.
In 2013, I published Homeland, the New York Times bestselling sequel, a book that Edward Snowden took with him when he went into exile when he fled Hong Kong.'
Since the book series apparently is already widely translated and published, why is a Kickstarter needed?
Even in the worst case that no English language publisher will take on his works anymore, it's odd that he doesn't have the means to self-publish this one.
....
In short, it seems like selling easily digestible rebellion fantasies, and I'm saying this as someone raised in Toronto like him who also likes sci-fi and is informed about the tech industry.
> Since the book series apparently is already widely translated and published, why is a Kickstarter needed?
Have you not heard of Brandon Sanderson
edit: seriously, your entire analysis of his current status as a professional writer, and your dismissal of this article, is because he's using Kickstarter?
> selling easily digestible rebellion fantasies,
That's been his entire shtick, he was a big Creative Commons-boosting, FSF-friendly, WIRED contributor type of blog pundit since the early 2000s. What you call "amateur political agitation" is Doctorow's bread and butter. It might not be for you (it certainly isn't for me), but it shows that you clearly don't know anything about the public figure you're attacking.
The value of interop is that every company will ask "Click here to allow us to access all your FB data".
Agree that the article is full of hyperbole that makes it hard to take serious
> Then there was the law: how could you impose license terms on a gift?
Sounds like most open source software. Seems like a gift but you hve to obey the license terms. I'm not saying anyone was obligated to follow Cuecat's terms. I'm only saying the sentence above is nonsense. Plenty of "gifts" require you to obey license terms.
> Anger turns attention into a narrow tunnel of brittle movements and thinking.
Um, Ok, so I guess there are zero effective activists? The large portion of them seem to be angry about something and channel that anger into action
> With Emotional Design, Norman argued that aesthetics were functional, because aesthetics primed users to fix the oversights and errors and blind spots of designers. It was a manifesto for competence and humility.
WAT? I'm not even sure what that paragraph is trying to say. The last sentence does not seem to follow from the first 2.
That's about the point I decided the entire thing had too much nonsense and stopped reading, even if I tend to be worried about some of the issue raised.
>But in a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"
>That is, "how can we raise the switching costs of our products so that users who are angry at us keep using our products?"
I keep telling myself that the reason interoperability disappeared is because software updates and platforms are just fast-moving targets, and we don't have the relative stability computers had 25 years ago. But I know that's not true, and it's really the other way around.