Keurig competitors crack company's DRM code(consumeraffairs.com) |
Keurig competitors crack company's DRM code(consumeraffairs.com) |
It won't be particularly satisfying, but in that dystopian near-future, it will be one of life's few remaining pleasures.
This is just a step away from e.g. toasters that won't toast anything but "authorised" bread (packaged in cartridges for "convenience", I'm sure...) A lot of this vendor lock-in has already been happening in the computing industry with things like printer cartridges, but as more and more appliances become "smarter" the incremental implementation costs of lock-in decrease so it becomes more widespread.
On the other hand the saying "when there's a will, there's a way" fortunately continues to apply, so we see "breakthroughs" like this. However, the frightening part is that this will no doubt be considered a "flaw" or "security breach" by some, so the systems gradually become more secure over time, and sadly this is security against the users. I could imagine this easily escalating into use of cryptography, which might then result in firmware hacking, countered by even stronger cryptography (e.g. signed firmware updates), leading to hardware hacking, stronger antitamper hardware, etc.
I don't see why they even bother trying to lock down their machines TBH as it can't be done well without significantly increasing the cost of the machine or cups (or inconveniencing existing customers).
I have a Keurig (non-DRM) and buy mostly Keurig branded cups anyway but if I had to buy one of these "2.0" machines with DRM, I'd just not buy a Keurig machine.
Ideally, you should always focus on being better than your competitors, which is difficult--but not impossible--in commodity products. Good examples are Dropbox or Starbucks. Cloud storage space or coffee are obviously not new or hard to deliver products, but it's how you deliver them that makes all the difference. I think this is a loosing battle for Keurig, and they should focus on providing some additional value (or perceived value, which can be just as good) to their customers. Maybe that's genuinely better tasting coffee, or maybe it's a slight (but acceptable) premium over generics (people like and trust brands).
That will show those pesky people wanting to use your rather expensive machine with slightly less expensive however still a ripe off single serving coffee pods.
Starbucks coffee -- $1.75 for an espresso shot that uses 0.25 oz of beans -- is $112/pound, so the k-cup is a bargain.
> It's still too early to tell, but the fact that Keurig's “DRM” can be cracked with such ease doesn't seem to bode well for the company.
> So that's one reason Keurig might be in trouble: because it bet everything on imposing a technological barrier which turned out to be ridiculously easy to get around.
Err, so easily crackable DRM will not survive legal challenges? (I seem to remember a story, which my Google-fu is insufficient to recover, of someone embarrassing Jack Palance during an interview by showing him the complete DeCSS source ….)
Is it so hard to put teaspoon of coffee in cup and pour hot water?
During summer my coffee drinking goes down and the ability to just make one cup is great. Cooler months and its time for the Bonavita, sometimes its good when friends want some but even then I have dropped back to the k-cup.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/San-Francisco-Bay-Coffee-Breakfast/dp/...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Grove-Square-Cappuccino-Vanilla-24-Cou...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Keurig-Original-Donut-K-Cup-Regular/dp...
An error occurred during a connection to www.consumeraffairs.com. SSL peer selected a cipher suite disallowed for the selected protocol version. (Error code: ssl_error_cipher_disallowed_for_version)
It's not a weak cipher. I get the same error, but the cipher the server selects is TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_128_SHA (0xc011). If I've got my SSL best-practices straight, that's not a bad choice.
The server, however, also selected SSL 3.0. My understanding is that you can't use that cipher with SSL 3.0 because it didn't exist. Firefox thus aborts the connection; note the error: "…cipher_disallowed_for_version" (of SSL).
I've seen this before on a server I had, and it had the same behavior. I'm nearly certain this is a bug on the server side, perhaps in OpenSSL. The server I had made some pretty nonsensical decisions in the server hello, such as the above with Firefox, and with Chrome, selecting TLS 1.0 even though that was disabled. I asked about it on SO[1], but never got a reply. (For me, it's no longer an issue; we enabled TLS on that server for hopefully obvious reasons.) Firefox and Chrome's client hellos are pretty similar, but not the same, and I never figured out the difference that caused the server to choose SSL or TLS over the other.
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25146651/why-is-nginx-sel...
It harkens back to having to call Microsoft because you've replaced your motherboard except now it's Keurig and even less pleasant because you can't have your coffee while you're on hold.
Using an app on your phone, you'll scan the coffee pod you want to use (your phone takes a picture of you via the front-facing camera as a security measure; much like ATMs have cameras); this connects to the central Coffee Server to generate a one-time passcode. Then your phone does a BREW via HTCPCP to the Keurig, providing an K-Authorization header. Having the encryption key for the one-time passwords be stored on the server avoids the mistakes problems Sony etc. have had where private keys inside devices are compromised.
Requiring a smartphone could present interesting branding opportunities, e.g. co-branding the Keurig 3.0 with iPhone 7, social network integration (click once to post the coffee you're drinking to Facebook), automatic reordering and possibly integration with health services as your coffee drinking data can be shared with your health care provider who can adjust your insurance accordingly.
Things that are printed have copyright. Copying them is not allowed. If the machine has a camera and can recognise the printed material on the cup, then it cannot (legally) be copied.
In order to prevent -replay- refill attacks, the machine has to destroy the cup too after use.
Depressing if my suggestions are true :(
I feel so bad suggesting this.
Step 1: Get some wheat, eggs, water, etc. Make bread. Step 2: Get some wood, coal, gas, some fuel. Step 3: Bake bread.
DRM PWNED. This walled garden is the kind of walled garden you build around cattle. If the cows move, you can't just build a fence around them.
[expression of cynicism detected]
[content override triggered]
[querying for user's linguistic analysis based on previous communication]
[synthesizing praise for walled garden using user's linguistic profile]
[deliver praise to recipient instead of ungood sentiment]
Seriously though, we're already filtering Facebook posts based on "relevance". We're a really, really thin line away from silencing posts based on the sentiments expressed within.
Now taste is another matter, but I'm not much of connoisseur, so I don't really pay too much attention. I mostly drink for the warmth and the caffeine =)
So per 12oz, coffee beans are going to cost $0.14-$0.22/cup. Since I didn't shop around for prices on the beans, I won't for the k-cups either: the cost per k-cup at Costco seems to be pretty close to ~$0.65/k-cup across the board.
That's at least a 195% increase in cost.
If you're just having the occasional cup of coffee, it's not worth worrying about. At 3 cups a day all year that would be around $500.
If you clear $25/hr after tax, that means you're spending 20 hours at work to pay for the difference. Even if we assume you brew each cup of traditional coffee individually at 2 minutes each to a 1 minute k-cup, you're saving 18.25 hours per year.
Whatever way you cut it, it's seems like it's a net loss to me. And the coffee tastes terrible.
Best leave it to the mods.
LV uses pure trademark law; it's not functional. That's why their protection stands.
Blatant lies: "Our coffee machines just can't support other companies' k-cups."
Empty promises: "Buy our new coffee machine and it'll enable us to make a lot of new and exciting flavors!" First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew.
I'm looking forward to the inevitable half-hearted apology, which will of course have still more empty promises. Not long after that they'll announce the v3 model, which will have an incompatible DRM to v2, forcing their customers to either upgrade or use off-brand companies' k-cups.
First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew.
It was... memorable.
Perhaps they should use the camera to look for some pattern they can copyright.
Of course, for Nintendo I don't think it prevented piracy...
[1] http://www.glitterberri.com/developer-interviews/how-the-fam...
And by definition imitates with the intent to mislead? Seems that ought be illegal?
The trick, however, is not to buy one and take it home (or to your hotel room), but to buy a ripe durian at a street vendor and let him open it. Eat straight away and keep a lot of napkins available.
While the taste is really amazing (in my opinion) there's no doubt that the stink is amazing too. And nearly impossible to air out of a closed room.
Most hotels in Singapore flat out forbid durian in your room.
No. But if I have fifty things to do every day, one of which is making coffee, and I can shave a minute or two off of each one, I've saved lots of time.
> what bothers me is the commoditization of every last thing in our consumer driven culture.
A guy picking coffee beans could say the same thing about your pre-roasted pre-ground holier-than-Kuerig choice.
Most of the coffee I drink is $5 a cup local artisan-roasted pour over. But I can't tell you how many times popping a pod in the Kuerig as I rushed out the door saved me - and gave me the time to smell other-than-coffee roses.
It's presumptuous to pick one thing you like taking the time to do and accuse those who choose to do other things slowly of not doing anything slowly.
For most people, Kuerigs aren't destroying mindfulness or presence, either by force or as one of a thousand cuts.
And the less time I have to spend preparing my coffee, the more time have to sit with my coffee and do just that.
Right, and the person getting upset at the very idea of a one-button coffee machine is the one worrying about coffee, not person who has already purchased and is happily using the one-button coffee machine.
It seems like people who do 50 things in a day are those most in need of mild stimulants.