CueCat-Scam.com

December 31, 2020 11:29 AM

In the run-up to the Georgia run-off election for the Senate, one man has stepped forward as a self-proclaimed "pattern recognition expert", claiming to be on "approximately about 12 billion devices globally", and erstwhile "full-blown treasure hunter" (dig it--the Ark of the Covenant is on Oak Island!), and most notoriously, the inventor of the :CueCat. Brace yourselves, America, here comes Jovan Hutton Pulitzer--again.

He's testified at a Georgia Senate Subcommittee hearing, and you can find it on YouTube if you're so inclined (I'm hesitant to directly link to the type of channel that posts it), and also got his picture with Rudy Giuliani. More info if you can stand it:

His website

His Twitter account (JovanHuttonPulitzer ™ #JovanHuttonPulitzer)

:CueCat previously on the blue

posted by Halloween Jack (37 comments total)

I'm not sure why I didn't clearly indicate this in the post itself, but his whole thing (this time) is that he claims to be able to detect fake ballots by closely examining the ballots in question. I may have been distracted by the follow-up Oak Island video showing the drill sinking into the ground because it's been dug up too often by previous treasure hunters.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:33 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

he claims to be able to detect fake ballots by closely examining swiping a cat across the ballots in question

(honestly the :CueCat was dumb but also sort of ahead of its time; ever scan a QR code to open a website?)
posted by uncleozzy at 11:47 AM on December 31, 2020 [6 favorites]

one man has stepped forward as a self-proclaimed "pattern recognition expert"

So this is viral marketing for a new Tom Hanks Dan Brown movie?


he claims to be able to detect fake ballots by closely examining the ballots in question.

The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is you don't know you're in Dunning-Kruger Club have never heard of Dunning-Kruger Club.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:47 AM on December 31, 2020 [16 favorites]

ever scan a QR code to open a website

I type in my URLs like I handwrite my apologies, one letter at a time.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:57 AM on December 31, 2020 [12 favorites]

the best fucking people....
posted by photoslob at 12:02 PM on December 31, 2020 [2 favorites]

> ever scan a QR code to open a website?

... no?
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:18 PM on December 31, 2020 [15 favorites]

I'm old enough to have owned and at least once used a Cuecat and tell you what: it was not like scanning a QR code with your phone, because you had to have it plugged into a computer and bring what you were trying to scan over there, where you also had a keyboard that you could use to easily type in a URL.

There was a weird meme in some tech circles around that time that URLs were just going to get unmanageably long - which to be fair, there were not that many TLDs that people were actually using at the time and URL shorteners weren't really a thing yet, so sites like Geocities did actually use goofy-long URLs. But the idea that the solution to that was "dedicated visual code scanner so you don't have to type these long URLs" rather than "figure out ways to make URLs shorter" was pretty backwards.

Anyway: the Cuecat was not ahead of its time. It had almost none of the strengths of QR codes that actually make them a reasonable option. What this guy did do well was market the crap out of the thing. I mean it seemed like overnight every damn major publication in the country had Cuecat codes to scan. I got mine free in the mail. They must have spent a fortune.
posted by potrzebie at 12:38 PM on December 31, 2020 [10 favorites]

PicturesOfPeopleScanningQRCodes.Tumblr.Com
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 12:40 PM on December 31, 2020 [11 favorites]

librarything still supports and sells them.
posted by Clowder of bats at 12:42 PM on December 31, 2020 [7 favorites]

For people like me wondering about the Q/Cue thing: QR was invented in 1994, CueCat was released in 2000. This guy may not be a great mind.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 12:44 PM on December 31, 2020 [5 favorites]

My favorite thing about end-user experience for URLs is that companies train their employees to always check that the domain they’re visiting is genuine and not a cunning fraud, and then ask them to find out more by clicking on a shortened URL located under the top-level domain for Libya
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 12:52 PM on December 31, 2020 [34 favorites]

I remember Radio Shack getting behind this dildo-shaped scanner in a big way. Which might partially explain Radio Shack's subsequent fate.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:30 PM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm old enough to have owned and at least once used a Cuecat and tell you what: it was not like scanning a QR code with your phone, because you had to have it plugged into a computer and bring what you were trying to scan over there, where you also had a keyboard that you could use to easily type in a URL.

Yep.

Also: The CueCat came out after Google had already demonstrated its absolutely mind-boggling (at the time) search capability, universally and permanently eliminating quite a lot of URL reading / learning / bookmarking / typing for exactly the kind of users who might otherwise find the CueCat useful.

Also: In the 90s, URLs printed on paper had a pretty fair chance of changing before the magazine / catalog / newspaper made it into your hands.

I think this is what happened at the office I was working in at the time; we hooked one up, scanned the barcode in some Wired ad, and the company had already disappeared. We started tossing CueCats into a bag somewhere.
posted by Western Infidels at 1:46 PM on December 31, 2020 [2 favorites]

I got two of them from Radio Shack.

I was in an aisle looking for something when the clerk came up behind me and asked if I had a computer. He then handed me two CueCat's and said they were the "next big thing".

I think I even have the audio adapter. Because the next big thing was also hooking your computer up to the audio from your television so advertisements could push urls that would automatically open webpages.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:50 PM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

My FB feed blew up with people I will respectfully refer to as "slack jawed yokels" proclaiming that America's foremost expert on technology had proven that the Georgia election was hacked. I knew that must've been wrong, but this is nonetheless impressive. CueCats. JFC.
posted by 1adam12 at 2:31 PM on December 31, 2020 [8 favorites]

>he claims to be able to detect fake ballots by closely examining the ballots in question.

You fuckin' liberals pretend to be believers in science and evidence, yet you reject the irrefutable conclusions of Ballot Dowsing.

I bet a whole bunch of Republicans could ask a ouija board who won the election, and you guys STILL wouldn't be happy.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 2:37 PM on December 31, 2020 [8 favorites]

I'd say the CueCat business model was obviously bad, but the device actually got a lot of use since it was a free barcode reader that a lot of us had. I used it to catalog various things (CDs and such) and a lot of hobbyist tools took advantage of it.

It's not that barcode readers are hard to build, but when someone gives you one for free that's handy.
posted by thefoxgod at 2:46 PM on December 31, 2020 [8 favorites]

I still have a CueCat, unopened in its original shipping box with WIRED branding all over it! I figure it will be worth a laugh to someone someday.
posted by achrise at 3:12 PM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

You fuckin' liberals pretend to be believers in science and evidence, yet you reject the irrefutable conclusions of Ballot Dowsing.

I thought that said Ballet Dowsing and, I won't lie, I'd pay to watch that.
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:56 PM on December 31, 2020 [6 favorites]

Is ballet dowsing ballet dancers trying to find something? Or is it dowsers trying to find ballet dancers? Sorry, I think we may be getting off-track.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:53 PM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

The CueCat was awesome for cataloging our thousands of books. At the time, zipping the head over the bar code on the back and instantly getting the title, author, and book jacket was pretty damn cool. I wonder what I ever did with that catalog...
posted by chortly at 9:27 PM on December 31, 2020 [3 favorites]

I remember when this came out, it took maybe two or three days before the open-source geeks had figured out how to use the device without the custom driver, extract the actual bar code and remove the hidden user tracking ID (of course it had a tracking ID) and published the relevant software and specs on the Internet. Of course, they immediately received a vague and inexpert cease-and-desist from CueCat which they posted on the site and which a friend of mine gleefully read to me. The blustery legal(ish) language kept naming the website hosting the files and that website was FlyingButtMonkeys.com.

So yeah, this guy being a Cheetoist is pretty on-brand to me.

(Also: I initially remembered the website as being Rainbow Butt Monkeys, but they're a band from my hometown.)
posted by suetanvil at 10:16 PM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

I remember Radio Shack getting behind this dildo-shaped scanner in a big way. Which might partially explain Radio Shack's subsequent fate.

Strangely, if they'd kept up selling phallic (and more!) merchandise, that may have saved the chain. As long as they'd ditched the pushy sales force routine, of course.
posted by IronLizard at 10:27 PM on December 31, 2020

Also, the CueCat make a certain amount of sense if you realize that had it worked, it would have solved a really difficult problem that a lot of very large piles of money wanted solved.

Specifically, there was no good way to measure the success of print advertising. The idea behind the CueCat was they would embed an ID into each barcode that would also identify the precise version of the ad (i.e. which magazine, which issue, which page). From this, they could get the equivalent of click-through counts but for paper. This meant, basically, that magazines would be able to charge more for ads.

So while it doesn't speak well for the people who invested nearly $200 million on this idiocy, it's pretty clear that the former J. Jovan Philyaw had no trouble finding people with money who wanted to believe that this would work.

Also: I'm told it makes an excellent and very cheap barcode reader for (e.g.) scanning the ISBN codes on your book collection.
posted by suetanvil at 10:29 PM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

"embed an ID into each barcode that would also identify the precise version of the ad (i.e. which magazine, which issue, which page). From this, they could get the equivalent of click-through counts but for paper"

The bastards invented tracking cookies. Tracking kitty treats, even. I totally bow to their genius whilst wishing to strangle them. Real consumer driven advertising isn't just creepy, it drove me insane. (Slight bit of hyperbole there.)

If only they'd caught on to the idea of making the barcodes fish shaped. We'd have never considered another shape for QR codes. (Ref. Catch-22, Yossarian's fish dream.)
posted by IronLizard at 10:39 PM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I speed listened through that, and... he seems to think the Georgia statutes would allow some random no-body to take possession of all the ballots in the general election for even a single jurisdiction. He is, of course, incorrect.

I tend to stick to reading court filings and opinions, so It was informative to see what their "reasoning" is in the court of public opinion. What's that thing they say, "He's what stupid people think smart people are like"?
posted by mikelieman at 2:24 AM on January 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

:CueAnon
posted by mbrubeck at 8:32 AM on January 1, 2021 [11 favorites]

I also used a hacked qcat as a barcode scanner until last year, when I got a wired one that works better for $12. I used that thing for 10 solid years.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:55 AM on January 1, 2021

Came here for CueCat nostalgia/geekery, was not disappointed.
posted by emjaybee at 10:09 AM on January 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Is there where I finally get to show off my burning of a cuecat in October 2000?
posted by dmd at 12:01 PM on January 1, 2021

Yeah, this guy is a dangerous tech-adjacent hack, in the same vein as Shiva "I invented email (three years after someone else did) and will sue anyone claiming otherwise" Ayyadurai. Unlike Shiva, though, his best-known invention was actually pretty cool. A friend and I were in high school when CueCats were suddenly everywhere, so we did what any god nascent nerds would do: opened 'em up, figured out how they worked, and immediately repurposed them to our own whims. My friend was more of a hardware nerd than I was, so he soldered a power button onto one because the always-on red laser was annoying. I figured out how it did its communicating with the machine it was plugged into, and wrote some code to hijack it and just make it act like a keyboard typing an ISBN. Then we wrote a nifty little Visual Basic app that went and looked up book data based on the scanned codes, and kept it in a database that anyone on the network could use. It was probably the most robust thing I programed in high school.

Yes QR codes predated these things. Yes it's insane to use a wired barcode scanner. But this thing was still amazing for its time.
posted by Mayor West at 3:20 PM on January 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

The CueCat probably seemed like a much better idea before Google became both ubiquitous and good enough to be used in place of typing in URLs for most people. It arrived just on the cusp of that, unfortunately for it.

I suspect they were quite a few people's introduction to hardware hacking, though. If you opened the CueCat up and clipped one solder trace, it disabled the thing's "encryption" (which wasn't much encryption at all) and it would act like a regular keyboard-emulating barcode scanner. Tons of homebrew projects started out with or used CueCats, and for a long time they were the cheapest way of reading barcodes you could find.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:11 PM on January 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Unlike Shiva, though, his best-known invention was actually pretty cool.

Calling the cuecat an invention is giving him a bit too much credit. Bar codes had existed for a while. Bar code scanners were not new. Nor was attaching one to a computer system.

What was new was offering a computer-connected bar code scanner as a consumer device, and they only really did that accidentally - they'd intended to offer an advertising tool, not a general-purpose bar code scanner.
posted by Dysk at 12:24 AM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

He come off as a rambling narcissist in this “interview,” which reads like the text of an infomercial.

He should fit right in with Tr*mps ever-shrinking cabal of losers.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:17 AM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yes QR codes predated these things. Yes it's insane to use a wired barcode scanner. But this thing was still amazing for its time.

So… I agree in a way, but I think it’s important to remember that scanner wands weren’t new; what was new was someone figuring out how to convince investors that it was a good idea to manufacture a kajillion of them and give them away to any kid who walked into a radio shack. The company’s business model imploded, investors lost their money… but a generation of young hardware hackers walked away with a legitimately cool bit of gear that spawned years of cool hacks.

The CueCat was amazingly influential but only because its creator failed.
posted by verb at 9:02 AM on January 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

Find me water...
Ballet Dancer...
posted by symbioid at 10:00 AM on January 3, 2021

He and the My Pillow guy should team up for some really cool invention.
posted by symbioid at 10:01 AM on January 3, 2021