Hackers Trick Keurigs Into Making Uncopyrighted Coffee

When we last checked in with Keurig, the coffee machine maker had just turned itself into a big, fat target for copyright reform activists. The problem: Keurigs’s promise to make its 2.0 machines incompatible with any single-serving coffee pods it hadn’t licensed. Critics compared the approach to the DRM restrictions that hobble the sharing of digital music.

And as with DRM, it now appears that Keurigs have been hacked.

Not that getting the Keurig 2.0 to brew non-compliant coffee pods seems to have required the same kind of technical savvy required to reverse-engineer digital copyright protections. Instead, according to Keurighack.com, it takes one piece of tape and “not much aim.” (And maybe some scissors.) In a video accompanied by Darth Vader’s theme music, an anonymous hacker snips a small section of the lid from a Keurig “K-cup” and tapes it over the lid over what the video calls a “rebel” pod. The strip seems to fool the machine into thinking the cup inside is a member of the Keurig “empire.”