February 2005

It's probably that most computer users have come across an End User Licence Agreement (EULA) at some stage. It's also probable that most of those people just blindly clicked on `I agree', in order to dive into their new software as quickly as possible.

Many people see the EULA as a useless bunch of legalese that isn't ever likely to be of any real relevance to them and, for the most part, this is highly likely to be a reasonable assumption. However, sometimes you're likely to miss a gem of a paragraph in plain English. For example, this is an extract for the notorious GATOR eWallet:

"In exchange for offering you free software products, we collect anonymous usage information from your computer that we and our partners may use to select and display pop-up and other kinds of ads to you and to perform and publish research about how people use the Internet."

In other words: we are expressly telling you that our product is spyware and adware and if you're not going to bother to read the licence, that's your own fault.

In an effort to ascertain whether *anybody* reads EULAs, PC Pitstop included the following clause in one of its EULAs (email address obfuscation is mine):

"A special consideration which may include financial compensation will be awarded to a limited number of authorize licensee to read the section of the license agreement and contact PC Pitstop at consideration /at/ pcpitstop /dot/ com."

Translation: If you read this far and send us an email, we'll give you money.

After four months and 3,000 downloads, only one person contacted them for his reward. He received a cheque for US$1,000. Maybe it's worth reading the agreements after all.

It's hardly ground-breaking stuff but sharp-eyed visitors will have noticed that a couple of things have changed around here recently.

The Irish Breaking News section should be back up-and-running as before, now that an issue that was bothering the Skynet admins has been sorted out.

I've also finally, after threatening to do so for a while, ditched Moveable Type as my blogging tool of choice. The (until now) endless comment and trackback spamming and the disturbingly lengthy loading time have finally nagged me into doing something a little different.

As an alternative, I've done even more playing with WebMake to come up with a solution and, hopefully, the result is going to be ok. There's bound to be some problems with it but hopefully not too many. Bug reports on a postcard to the usual address.

Anyone using the old RSS feeds for live bookmarks will have to change to the new location. Link is at the bottom of the right-hand column. Firefox users can, of course, click on the nice handy Live Bookmark button at the bottom-right of their browser window. What could be easier?

Edit: For a start, the comments don't work for the moment. I'll get that whenever I get a chance.