Longtime TLF readers may recall the Great Shopping Cart Debate of 2006, in which Jim Delong, Jim Harper, myself, and others made increasingly strained analogies between DRM and those wheel locks you find on shopping carts.
At the time, the debate was entirely theoretical, since the shopping cart cartel had succeeded in keeping a tight rein on the supply of shopping cart circumvention devices. Well no longer. Slashdot reports that some troublemakers have reverse-engineered those shopping cart wheel locks:
The two major shopping cart theft prevention systems are called CAPS and the GS2. From our escapades, we have found the GS2 system is far more effective at actually stopping carts on smooth ground. It also has a longer range (!) and a more sophisticated locking and unlocking signal. Best of all, it can be reset remotely, meaning double the fun as you play “red light/green light” with unsuspecting customers.
The picture below is of the GS2 wheel, found only at your finer supermarkets.
Discussion topic for the day: it appears that such a device could be used to steal shopping carts, at least the type of cart that can be reset remotely. If that’s true, should these “circumvention devices” be illegal? Should information about them be illegal? If someone wrote software that could be installed onto software-defined radio to perform the same function, should that software be illegal?
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