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Man Finds $1,000 Prize in EULA 446

Posted by samzenpus from the read-the-fine-print dept.
bhtooefr writes "When Doug Heckman was installing a PC Pitstop program, he actually read the EULA. In it, he found a clause stating that he could get financial compensation if he e-mailed PC Pitstop. The result: a $1,000 check, and proof that people don't read EULAs (3,000 people before him didn't notice it). The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
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Man Finds $1,000 Prize in EULA More

Man Finds $1,000 Prize in EULA

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  • No Kidding (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:10PM (#11761086) Homepage
    One of our developers buried some easter eggs in a web-based game, and nobody has claimed them yet after several months.

    And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post :)

    So I gather some of the 3000 users may have read the EULA but dismissed the possibility of real cash prize., just like not everybody entered suparmarket prize draw thinking that they won't be so lucky.

    • Re:No Kidding (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ayaress ( 662020 )
      I read EULAs. Usually not when I'm installing something, unless I suspect it may have spyware. I've never found any good easter eggs, just things like being required to upgrade to a new version after n months, being required to grant physical access to my computer on request, and some weird things like not being able to uninstall third party applications on the same partition.

      • Re:No Kidding (Score:5, Funny)

        by jacquesm ( 154384 ) <j AT ww DOT com> on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:27PM (#11761223) Homepage
        Hehe, that reminds me, a long long time ago in a country far far away from the present one I was a game writer, and one of the games I worked on (the code bit) was a game called 'FlightDeck'.


        Now, flightdeck was the most boring game you could imagine, and one night after a hard days work a couple of guys sat in the place where we worked and decided to liven things up a bit. Every so many thousand games one of the elevators in the carrier would go down, a guy would stand on it, the elevator would go up again, he'd strip on the deck and jump off the ship...


        This lead to the most baffling support calls of people that really could literally not believe that they'd just seen what they'd seen, and of course we never let the support guys in on the joke...


        to give you an idea of how long ago this was, the atari ST was the best machine you could get for little $, 68 K assembler was the way to go for fast games and the Dire Straits had just released "Brothers in Arms" :)

        • Can you provide a video?

          That sounds a lot like the FS oral sex scene.

        • Re:No Kidding (Score:3, Interesting)

          by spywarearcata.com ( 841806 ) *
          On the original Macintosh rom, Don Dxxxxx put an easter egg of a little stick guy running across the screen on the bottom. The kicker was that it only did this randomly only every 1 out of 35635 seconds or something... hard to duplicate what someone saw from the corner of their eye.

          Alas it was taken out of the release ROM.

          This was right after Lisa and Apple /// so Apple management weren't quite as playful as they had been.

        • Re:No Kidding (Score:3, Interesting)

          by johannesg ( 664142 )
          You worked on Flightdeck? Cool! I didn't think it was so boring, keeping a bunch of planes in the air at the same time was pretty difficult.

          You don't suppose a modernized 3D version is possible, do you? ;-)

    • Hmmm...

      I wonder what kind of Easter Eggs can be hidden in Rock Paper Scissors game (in your sig)...

      An hidden 'TNT' option that beats everything maybe? :)
    • And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post :)

      An easter egg is a fair amount different than a prize offering burried deep in an EULA. People generally will find easter eggs 1 of 3 ways:
      1) by searching specifically for an easter egg because they think there is one there for some reason
      2) completely by accident
      3) after being told exactly how to find it by someone

    • Re:No Kidding (Score:5, Funny)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:55PM (#11761426) Homepage Journal
      "One of our developers buried some easter eggs in a web-based game, and nobody has claimed them yet after several months."

      Heh. I buried something like that in an essay I wrote in English Class. I had a teacher that just piled and piled and piled work on us. I was CERTAIN she didn't read through everything. "If you read this far, I owe ya a soda." I don't know which was worse: Being wrong about my teacher not reading my work, or being out 50 cents.

      • Re:No Kidding (Score:5, Funny)

        by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @11:42PM (#11762522) Homepage Journal
        That was at school. Try doing that at work in an important document. I did. In my self evaluation, I wrote about how I saved the company CEO from drowning, performed CPR on the vice president, single handedly rallied the stock market around our product, etc. My boss cut and pasted my text into his formal review without ever reading it.

        At the point where he asked me to sign my formal review, I had to confess.

      • That reminds me of a prank.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Gadgetfreak ( 97865 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @11:50PM (#11762599)
        My buddies and I in college had an ongoing gag... anyone who got up and left the vicinity of their computer with a lab report/paper/presentation on the screen had the phrase "I poop too much" inserted somewhere at random.

        Unfortunately, an otherwise excellent paper that I got back had a red pen circle around a certain phrase on the 9th page, with the comment "proofread" written next to it.

  • GIVE ME MONEY (Score:3, Funny)

    by oliphaunt ( 124016 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:10PM (#11761087) Homepage
    where was that EULA link again?

    • Re:GIVE ME MONEY (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tekiegreg ( 674773 ) *
      Unfortunately for you, I noticed this clause:

      This offer can be withdrawn at any time

      Now if PcPitstop gave $1,000 to every user who Slashdots the site without a clause like this...their deficit would eclipse that of the United States Federal government in no time...so figure by now it's withrawn...

  • Reading every EULA? (Score:4, Funny)

    by BizidyDizidy ( 689383 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:11PM (#11761092)
    Don't know if it's worth 1,000.

  • Er... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Avyakata ( 825132 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:11PM (#11761100) Homepage Journal
    That's not going to make people read EULAs...all that will make people do is say, "wow, I wish I had been that guy, what a break!"

    • Re:Er... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by XorNand ( 517466 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @10:29PM (#11762073)
      Yes, but it's brillant marketing. The company only spent $1000. They've already gotten a link from the main page of Slashdot; what more press are they going to see now? The spyware removal business has gotten pretty competitive and now thousands more geeks know about their product. Kudos to the company for a neat, non-evil marketing idea.

  • Ctrl-F (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:12PM (#11761106)
    From now on, I'm at least doing Ctrl-F, 1,000

  • $1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:12PM (#11761110) Homepage Journal
    $1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs, looking for an Easter Egg?

    Mmmm. That's a tough one, but I'll have to pass on the $1,000.

    Too many look like that Gator one - pages and pages of gobbledy-gook and mumbo jumbo which ultimately translate to all your base are belong to us.

    • Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:14PM (#11761121)
      "Too many look like that Gator one - pages and pages of gobbledy-gook and mumbo jumbo which ultimately translate to all your base are belong to us."

      True.

      However a good rule of thumb is that if you cant understand the EULA, dont agree to it. I mean would you sign somthing you didn't understand?

      • Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:18PM (#11761153) Homepage Journal
        However a good rule of thumb is that if you cant understand the EULA, dont agree to it. I mean would you sign somthing you didn't understand?

        Like pretty much everyone else, if I took the time to read them all the way through and understand them then I wouldn't have time to use the product.

        The only long documents I make sure I read and understand are the ones doctors give me before performing some test, like MRI or such. Hate to think I may have a staple or something and have one of those things turn my guts to hamburger because I didn't take time to understand fully the procedure and it's risks. Besides, you usually have lots of extra time in a waiting room, assuming you didn't arrive via Emergency Entrance.

      • >I mean would you sign somthing you didn't understand?

        completely different - contracts have law behind them. EULA's don't convincingly have the law behind them. in fact, the only court case I know of was a company arguing they were meaningless since "no one reads them anyway", because one of their customers used it against them (search /. for the story if you like)
      • 'Nuff said.

      • Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by temojen ( 678985 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:37PM (#11761313) Journal
        I mean would you sign somthing you didn't understand?

        Interestingly, in 2002 the ER staff were shocked when I insisted on reading the consent for surgery form before signing it. Most people don't read things that are put in front of them that they're told is standard and must be signed.

        • Are you sure they weren't shocked because while you were carefully reading the consent there was a two-foot-high geyser of blood spouting from your belly button?

        • Interestingly, in 2002 the ER staff were shocked when I insisted on reading the consent for surgery form before signing it. Most people don't read things that are put in front of them that they're told is standard and must be signed.

          In my ER, the staff would be more surprised that you were even educated enough to read the consent for surgery.

          Anyway, the other reply was correct in that they all pretty much say the same thing--basically that you've been informed about the risks (which pretty much always

        • Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @10:17PM (#11762021) Journal
          IANAL, but from what various law classes have taught me...

          When it's generally accepted that what is being put in front of you is for a specific purpose (i.e. consent for surgery or permission to run a credit check), all you need to ask for is if there's anything in the contract that you need to know. If there's anything that would not be expected (e.g. 'if you die we get your organs'), then they will tell you, and if they don't, it's not enforcable.

          I imagine that if tested in court, EULAs would be considered in the same realm.

          • Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:4, Informative)

            by espo812 ( 261758 ) on Thursday February 24, 2005 @12:04AM (#11762732)
            all you need to ask for is if there's anything in the contract that you need to know.
            IANALE, this certainly isn't legal advice, but I would imagine the suits at any place that deals in contracts/releases like that should have educated the workforce that the proper response to "Is there anything I need to know?" is "Yes. Read the whole thing."
            I imagine that if tested in court, EULAs would be considered in the same realm.
            So you have to call up the software manufacturer and ask "Is there anything I need to know in this EULA?" Might as well read the damn thing while I'm on hold. And they should just say "Yes, read the whole thing."

    • Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fimbulvetr ( 598306 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:21PM (#11761177)
      That's just it, TFA points out how it's _not_ just a bunch of gobbledy-gook and mumbo jumbo. To demonstrate, it gives the first paragraph from GAIM's EULA, seen here:

      "GAIN Publishing offers some of the most popular software available on the Internet free of charge ("GAIN-Supported Software") in exchange for your agreement to also install GAIN AdServer software ("GAIN"), which will display Pop-Up, Pop-Under, and other types of ads on your computer based on the information we collect as stated in this Privacy Statement. We refer to consumers who have GAIN on their system as 'Subscribers.' "
      • To demonstrate, it gives the first paragraph from GAIM's EULA, seen here: "which will display Pop-Up, Pop-Under, and other types of ads on your computer based on the information we collect as stated in this Privacy Statement."

        Which is why, EULA's aside, I don't install anything I don't understand. I try to keep a minimum of apps on my computer, uninstall what I'm not using and limit my internet connection time. Also helpful is a firewall that watches for any traffic, so I may be aware that something i

      • To demonstrate, it gives the first paragraph from GAIM's EULA, seen here:

        Please, please, people, make an effort and reread your post before submitting it.

        My very first thought was: Gaim [sourceforge.net] has an EULA? Oh my god, how long did i sleep last night?

  • Cereal Port (Score:5, Funny)

    by tiktok ( 147569 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:14PM (#11761119) Homepage
    I'm still waiting for my scale model replica Herbie The Love Bug that I was supposed to receive after mailing in 15 Cheerios box tops in 1974.
  • The only thing this proves is that the world should not have to be burdened with crap like EULA's.

  • Chances are... (Score:3, Informative)

    by hot_Karls_bad_cavern ( 759797 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:16PM (#11761136) Journal
    ... we, the slashdotting community, will not be receiving an award for burning down their server. :(

    After discovering the nastiness of the kazaa family back in the day, i've been much more careful about reading the EULAs - plenty of "iffy" programs have not been installed on my Windows machines because of the trash found in so many EULAs that apparently no one reads anymore! (or did they ever?)

    'cept our newly enriched friend ... what's his name and email again? i'm his cousin ... and stuff.

  • Yeah Right! (Score:5, Informative)

    by md17 ( 68506 ) <james.jamesward@org> on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:17PM (#11761146) Homepage

    so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA

    Because all spyware apps include a EULA with "THIS IS SPYWARE" in big bold letters? People don't read EULA's because they are legal fluff and mean nothing to the average reader. I personally would like to see a standard, simple format for EULA's like credit card companies do with rate disclosures. Otherwise most users have no idea what they have just agreed to.

    • Re:Yeah Right! (Score:4, Informative)

      by TTMuskrat ( 629320 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @11:57PM (#11762666)
      I personally would like to see a standard, simple format for EULA's like credit card companies do with rate disclosures.

      I wouldn't use credit cards as a good standard for disclosure. There was an episode of Frontline on PBS called "Secret History of the Credit Card" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cre dit/ [pbs.org]) and they pointed out the really fine print on those credit cards brochures - things like "a clause that allows the company to change your interest rate (APR) at any time, for any reason, as long as they give you 15 days' notice".

      I think credit card disclosures are just as bad as EULA agreements and that there are more than a few companies that don't want you reading either.
  • Now companies can bury advertisements for other products and use creative writing that makes it sound like there could be reward by reading the EULA.

  • A standard set of EULAs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by osewa77 ( 603622 ) <naijasms@gma i l .com> on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:18PM (#11761155) Homepage
    Nobody needs to read a GPL license more than once; why can't we have standard comercial agreements? What we need is a standard set of EULAs for different types of software with coded variations ("basic closed source EULA with XXX clause").
    • That's a good idea. But it's something that benefits the customer instead of the lawyers, so I don't think so.

      At least each company usually stay with one licence, so those who only use programs from one vendor would have less EULAs to read.

      AFD copyright [dietmar-knoll.de] does this for closed source freeware and shareware.

      Of course, in most jurisdictions the EULAs are meaningless drivel that neither add to or remove rights from the customer, since law regulates everything there. They really just would need a few lines say
    • Because it would be convinient for the customers?
    • Big companies have a staff of lawyers hired on full-time. Lawyers want to keep their job and prove they're useful. Thus, every time a new version of the product comes out, they must also generate a new version of the EULA.
    • For years no-one bothered to read the license on IP Filter because it looked just like a standard BSD-like license. Then Mr Reed actually stood up and said something like "hey! You can't distribute modified versions of my code!" and the shit hit the fan because people actually bothered to read the license and found out that he had indeed reserved that right to himself. Of course, the result of this debarcle was that IPF was pulled from OpenBSD and those lovely chaps wrote their own IP filter in two weeks
    • Nobody needs to read a GPL license more than once; why can't we have standard comercial agreements? What we need is a standard set of EULAs for different types of software with coded variations ("basic closed source EULA with XXX clause").

      I was thinking nearly the same thing. What I would like to see is instead of licence agreements, basically provide them with some flexibility in terms of what they can mandate by copyright law. So, for example, a company could say you are only allowed to have the progr

    • There ought to be a law (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @09:05PM (#11761492) Homepage Journal
      why can't we have standard comercial agreements?

      Right, and those are called laws. Most of an EULA is already codified in various laws, and everything else is asking you to give up your rights.

      If I buy a telephone at WalMart I don't have to sign an EULA. If I buy a softphone at WalMart they expect me to agree to an EULA. What's the difference?

      If I buy a car, it comes with software in it, but they don't expect me to sign an EULA.

      As far as I can tell, an EULA is saying that Chewbacca lives on Endor.

  • hmm... money? (Score:2, Funny)

    by qw0ntum ( 831414 )
    I'm reinstalling all the programs I own just so I can check their EULA's now.

  • Of all the bad luck ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by eck011219 ( 851729 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:19PM (#11761159)
    I read my Win2000 SP4 EULA and found out that I owe THEM $1000. Those jerks still haven't cashed my check, either.

    • Re:Of all the bad luck ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:28PM (#11761231)
      Don't worry, windows isn't the only one. I just reinstalled linux and while reading the agreement it turns out I owe some 3rd party $699.

    • Re:Of all the bad luck ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by swerk ( 675797 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2005 @08:40PM (#11761331) Journal
      My favorite