Rise of the Netflix Hackers

In less than 10 years, Netflix has grown into a $700 million DVD rental powerhouse, shipping more than 1.5 million DVDs a day to its base of 6.3 million subscribers. But the very systems that have made Netflix so successful -- everything from its sophisticated recommendation engine to a profit-maximizing formula that determines which subscribers get movies first -- have proven irresistible to hackers, who are constantly looking for new ways to crack, manipulate and reverse-engineer the company.

Case in point: Just weeks after Netflix took its first, long-awaited steps into the digital delivery arena by rolling out its Watch Now instant viewing feature, which allows users to stream some movies and TV shows over the internet, one hacker claims to have figured out how to bypass the mechanism that tracks and limits a subscriber's viewing time.

The hacker, who calls himself Livesunkept, told Wired News in an instant messenger interview that Netflix stores a subscriber's minutes on the user's own PC, in cookies and browser cache files. Livesunkept discovered he could pause a movie a few minutes into playback, then wait until it was completely downloaded, unplug his network adapter and watch the film offline. When he was done, he'd clear his cache and cookie files before plugging back in, keeping Netflix from knowing he'd watched more than the initial few minutes of the film. <-- Continue reading at wired.com/news.