You may have found your way to this site because www.qcat.com
is linked here. Here's the story:
The company Digital: Convergence recently (as of September, 2000) started distributing a product called the CueCat, which has been the source of a lot of controversy involving invasion of personal privacy. It's a barcode scanner which is set up to communicate with a centralized server with the information that you scan. Additionally, it is set up to always communicate a unique identification of the person who registered the particular scanner. According to many reports, the company does not make it clear that they are tracking your scanning habits (and hence, e.g., know what you read). If the allegations are true, then they are certainly engaged in morally questionable activities.
Additionally, they have sometimes sent these devices in the mail
unsolicited, and do not declare them to be gifts (rather, it seems, that
they assert that they retain ownership of the devices). This is in fact
against U.S. law (thanks to net127.com for the
reference):
Title 39, Sec. 3009 of the United States Code, from the Legal Information Institute at Cornell.
(a) Except for (1) free samples clearly and conspicuously marked as such, and (2) merchandise mailed by a charitable organization soliciting contributions, the mailing of unordered merchandise or of communications prohibited by subsection (c) of this section constitutes an unfair method of competition and an unfair trade practice in violation of section 45(a)(1) of title 15.
(b) Any merchandise mailed in violation of subsection (a) of this section, or within the exceptions contained therein, may be treated as a gift by the recipient, who shall have the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation whatsoever to the sender. All such merchandise shall have attached to it a clear and conspicuous statement informing the recipient that he may treat the merchandise as a gift to him and has the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation whatsoever to the sender.
(c) No mailer of any merchandise mailed in violation of subsection (a) of this section, or within the exceptions contained therein, shall mail to any recipient of such merchandise a bill for such merchandise or any dunning communications.
(d) For the purposes of this section, "unordered merchandise" means merchandise mailed without the prior expressed request or consent of the recipient.
But the worst thing of all is that the Digital: Convergence folks have been threatening and suing people who post software that allows one to use a CueCat without revealing private information to the company. They apparently claim that this somehow infringes on a trade secret or is misuse of their property.
Anyway, as a bit of a joke and tweak-of-the-nose to evil people
everywhere, my friend Rusty, who runs a web
hosting and domain speculation business, took the domain
qcat.com, which he's had since before CueCat existed, but
which he hadn't really done much with, and redirected it to my barcode
server page.
There you have it.