Saturday, March 12, 2005
The Borders DVD Lock Mystery
A friend inadvertently took a copy of "Eternal Sunshine..." from Borders this week, that still had the anti-theft device inserted. The system is designed to prevent shoplifters leaving the store with either the DVD case, or the disc alone.
It consists of a little plastic shiv, that inserts through a specially designed case, and locks under the disc itself. When it's in place you can't open the case, and even if you could open the case, you can't pop the disc off its mount.
Instead of having a deactivateable magnetic strip, it has a small permanent magnet at one end. This presumably triggers the alarms if you try to walk out of the store.
I figured it would be only a few seconds work to crack open the case, and then "reverse engineer" the real unlocking mechanism.
It took me half an hour of wheedling and poking with various implements to realise that it's a pretty secure system. It was however only 10 seconds work with a Stanley Knife (read "X-acto" US visitors) to dissect the case itself. Once open, it just needed brute force to break the hook off the shiv, then slide out the locking bar.
This is where the mystery begins. There don't seem to be any secret holes, magic buttons, or even any moving parts. The locking mechanism is a very solid little metal clip, that gets utterly wedged inside the case when you insert the device. I have to admit defeat. Please please if anyone knows how this little b*stard works, email me. I promise I won't use the knowledge to steal movies (when I want to do that I just use bitorrent), but I'll feel less stupid.
A friend inadvertently took a copy of "Eternal Sunshine..." from Borders this week, that still had the anti-theft device inserted. The system is designed to prevent shoplifters leaving the store with either the DVD case, or the disc alone.
It consists of a little plastic shiv, that inserts through a specially designed case, and locks under the disc itself. When it's in place you can't open the case, and even if you could open the case, you can't pop the disc off its mount.
Instead of having a deactivateable magnetic strip, it has a small permanent magnet at one end. This presumably triggers the alarms if you try to walk out of the store.
I figured it would be only a few seconds work to crack open the case, and then "reverse engineer" the real unlocking mechanism.
It took me half an hour of wheedling and poking with various implements to realise that it's a pretty secure system. It was however only 10 seconds work with a Stanley Knife (read "X-acto" US visitors) to dissect the case itself. Once open, it just needed brute force to break the hook off the shiv, then slide out the locking bar.
This is where the mystery begins. There don't seem to be any secret holes, magic buttons, or even any moving parts. The locking mechanism is a very solid little metal clip, that gets utterly wedged inside the case when you insert the device. I have to admit defeat. Please please if anyone knows how this little b*stard works, email me. I promise I won't use the knowledge to steal movies (when I want to do that I just use bitorrent), but I'll feel less stupid.
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