It's a good thing they painted them red.

Here in the US there's a new way (at least to us) to get DVDs on rental. Its called redbox. Its a kiosk that dispenses rental movie DVDs for a $1US per disk per night. Of course it requires a debit or credit card to operate it. They are conveniently located in high traffic areas (or they are used to generate high traffic like at McDonald's). So simple to use even kids can operate the touch screen based system, assuming they know the PIN for the credit/debit card.

You can return the disks you've rented in any other redbox. The movie disks have 2D barcodes printed on them so inventory control is automatic, no clerk required, practically foolproof operation.

There is even an applet you can download onto your i-Whatever to locate and reserve a copy of the movie you want.

As faster Internet access becomes more and more mainstream here, the utility of redbox is going to become much smaller. Most of the big rental stores have retreated under the onslaught of on-line Netflix and on-demand cable and satellite connected DVRs.

Obviously, the machines have some sort of Internet connection and therein lies the issue.

I have to wonder how difficult it is to embed a snooping, credit card reading, pile of malware into one of the redboxes? The systems are obviously PC or at least ARM based. Does the managing company maintain any sort of security surveillance on the systems?

Just something to think about the next time you swipe your credit card through the reader slot.