:CueCat Fun And Games Misc.9/18/2000; 9:47:04 PM An interesting article at Slashdot about the :CueCat that Joel was recently mercilessly mocking. It seems the company is playing IP games after being pissed about their plan to give stuff away free and sneak a trojan horse in their drivers that report ever bar code scanned back to Digital Convergance, the creaters of the :CueCat, where they can make money selling detailed profiles. What has attracted my attention enough to warrent a post on this site is their apparent attempt to hold people to licenses by using hardware, after people created drivers for Linux which meant that you didn't need their software to use the hardware.Plus... all private data the site was collecting from the users of the Windows software was available in plain text on the webserver (according to message 147). And postal regulatoins apparently say that those who received the item unsolicted completely own it, says message 33. Installing their software may bind you to a EULA, but it seems their attempt to control how people use them are inevitably doomed to failure. Oops.It's an interesting story, that's for sure. There's a lot of annoyed people who are complaining loudly about what amounts to being notified that you are bound to a contract for using an unsolicited gift.