IDEA: “Pod Store” for third party roasters.
Any DRM system is going to be vulnerable to a hardware attack. If someone is willing to crack the thing open and replace the ROM chips or cut leads on the DRM stuff is going to be able to bypass it. Even fancy internet based DRM is vulnerable to someone patching the DRM check routine to say “A-OK” without actually doing the check.
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We were given one as a gift. As others have noted, they are good for providing a variety of coffee types to a bunch of people. I get a few variety packs of pods so that guests can pick their poison.
For the most part, I really don’t like the coffee that comes out of the pods, but there are now some third party pods that don’t have the plastic cup (so I need to store them in a canister) that seem to produce a better cup of joe for less $ – I assume that using their own cup design eliminates any Keurig licensing fees.
I also use my own grind in a refillable cup.
When I have the time, I use a good ol’ stove-top espresso pot, french press, or aeropress.
I assume that companies moving to their own pod design is part of what is motivating them to pursue DRM:
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Network effects are the usual killer (less so with coffee pods; but with operating systems, or IM networks, or the like…
With OSes, say, a given developer’s interest is going to wane, possibly quite quickly indeed, beyond their preferred platform. A port to #2, if the cash seems likely to be good enough, is reasonably likely; but #3 and beyond are getting into the ‘Blackberry begging for apps’ pitiful territory.
Just as an empirical matter, this typically means that you can choose whatever platform you like, so long as it’s one of the top 1-3, or you are a hermit and willing to go with some so-antique-as-to-be-fully-documented IC and write your own damn everything.
Potentially worse, from the perspective of coercion, and ‘choice to be closed’ vs. ‘forcing people to be open’ is that your options end up being tied, because of network effects, to the choices that other people make: some of those are voluntary as well, you can tell your friends that they won’t be seeing you on facebook; but some of them are less so: What OSes and software can you choose and still interact with your local government authorities? Any forms you can’t fill out, documents you can’t read? How about nominally ‘optional’; but nearly necessary stuff like a bank account or submitting a resume?
That is where things get troublesome, even if you take an optimistic view of human rationality and the position that ‘free choice’ is actually free in most cases where overt coercion isn’t involved. Do I begrudge you your preference for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007(or whatever, could be anything, from anyone)? Not at all. Unless you start emitting or demanding to receive data structures that I can only generate by buying-in to your choice of product. Unless interoperation is possible, your choice is the choice you apply(to greater or lesser degrees depending on your influence) to those around you.
Sometimes interoperation works just fine, then it doesn’t matter much. Other times there are few to no options, so if you throw in with Vendor X, you choose them for everyone who has to deal with you as well.
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Quite true, though some are easier and cheaper than others, and some are easier and cheaper to harden than others.
In this case, unless they’ve got a minor engineering miracle on their hands, the ‘buy some other company’s widget that pushes hot water through a pod’ attack is probably easier than modding any hardware.
My parents. 'Nuf said.
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Some people will try to mod the hardware just for the challenge.
Yep. My wife bought one because it’s easy if you only want one cup. Basically it’s a step up from instant coffee.
It’s great if I need a caffeine hit to keep me awake for a transatlantic conference call at some ungodly hour.
At the weekends when I have time I have a decent burr grinder and make coffee in my chemex or bialetti pots.
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I had people recommend I get one a while back because I am disabled. I didn’t take their asvice because I didn’t like the idea of the waste.
I use an aeropress now but I have recovered a bit since then.
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To me this is part of a larger problem: in so many cases, the “time saving” option really doesn’t save all that much time.
Prepackaged mixes to make bread, cake or pancakes are a great example: you still have to buy and mix in all the expensive wet ingredients like milk, oil/butter, and eggs. So you’re paying a higher price for all-purpose flour that someone else added sugar, salt and baking powder to. What have you saved…20 seconds? Was it worth the cost?
Cold press coffee in a French Press makes a weeks’ worth of coffee with virtually no effort or clean-up. Most non-electric coffee makers clean up with a quick rinse, including the filters. If you drink coffee on a daily basis, your kitchen should be set up in such a way that pulling out the beans to grind them and then putting the grind into your coffeemaker of choice takes under 30 seconds.
It’s just not that big of a deal to really make something rather than pay a company to package things to save you a pittance of time.
Public places are different, of course. It makes sense to provide choice and convenience to customers without adding to the workload of employees. And there are certain to be private homes that need that level of convenience due to frequent guests or family members all preferring different flavors, or something like that. But to have yet another electric behemoth sitting on the counter to make one cup of coffee a day (or less) seems like overkill to me.
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After all the ballyhoo, what if it’s just a matter of putting a piece of tape on a moulded notch on the edge of the cup like the old cassette tapes 
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What about those “Officially licensed product” or “certified compatibility” seals and other promotional badges you see on lots of products? As I understand it, manufacturers often have to pay a good deal of money for those “certifications”
Make a machine that won’t brew (to ensure quality!) for any pod without a certified compatibility badge. If you want to be certified compatible, give Keurig a cut (they mentioned licensed third part vendors in their earnings call or whatever when DRM was first let out of the bag) and they will go through some totally high tech process to make sure your 3rd party cup still makes shitty coffee correctly, and then you can print the magic seal.
I imagine they don’t really care about people who are intent on defeating the system. They just want to keep cheap pods off amazon where office managers and my mom are buying refills. People willing to go digging though the discard bin and retrieving old foil lids to tape on unlicensed pods so they can save 10 cents aren’t the people they worry about killing their shitty pod coffee business.
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Why else have an 80 MHz 32-bit microcontroller in a coffeemaker?
But besides that, anyone who “circumvents” a Keurig machine’s “access controls” will learn a whole lot about it that will make them (the “circumventers”) pretty much lawsuit-proof. “Settled out of court for undisclosed terms” might as well be a keyboard macro.
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I’m thinking it would be more likely to store that data in an RFIC/NFC chip, to be read by a reader built into the coffee machine.
RFID is ridiculously cheap.
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[quote=“doctorow, post:13, topic:24931, full:true”]
I find it unlikely that a barcode would rise to the level of copyrightability.[/quote]
They’re using a 32-bit controller with a fair bit of memory. At coffee-making speeds it’s not all that hard to recognize something that can be trademarked – and trademark is seriously protected.
They had a legal monopoly (patent) for almost 20 years. Part of the concept on a patent is that your monopoly only lasts for a limited time, and after that it’s open competition. Keurig’s patent ran out a little while ago, thus their new plan to DRM the coffee.
As far as “should have bought a different machine” goes, that really assumes that consumers know up front what the restrictions are.
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Nope, DRM works quite well as intended without calling home. Printers, DVDs, HDCP, and even garage door openers do this currently without internet connections.
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Actually, we have some pretty good case law on this. Remember the Nintendo gameboy? Their boot rom would pull the nintendo logo out of the game cartridge memory and display it on the screen. If it wasn’t correct (e.g. someone else’s logo), it wouldn’t play the game. The idea was that an unlicensed game could not include Nintendo’s trademark (due to trademark laws) and, well, if the gameboy didn’t play the game, that was tough luck.
The courts ruled that using a trademark as an access control device was improper. Third party games were allowed, and if Nintendo displayed the access-control data (the image of their logo) on the screen, it was their own fault that the games looked like they were officially sanctioned.
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I guess you haven’t been in an office environment for a while. While not the best tasting coffee, it’s pretty much the easiest/cheapest/fairest way to make coffee in an office where the company isn’t buying the coffee. Communal machine, personally bought k-cups. No clean up necessary.
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Easiest way to circumvent it is not to buy the damned thing. Fifty cents plus per small cup of coffee of indifferent quality? I’d just as soon have instant at that level.
Outside fo an office shared coffee environment, these things silly expensive anyway.
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