This rather meanspirited article traces the history of the CueCat, a barcode scanner that accounted for hundreds of millions in investment dollars without amounting to much. The weird thing is that the article doesn’t pay any due to the legion of CueCat hackers who reverse-engineered their devices and made themselves free barcode scanners and had a good deal of good fun with it, and the company’s braindamaged legal response to all this. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)