Shawn Morton, a 36-year-old product development manager from Louisville, said he began looking for a way to get movies faster after noticing that titles showing long wait times in his queue were shipping immediately to coworkers with trial memberships. He discovered that removing all movies from his queue except those with an expected "long" or "very long" ship time caused the DVDs that remained to ship immediately. His technique was widely adopted in the Netflix hacking community, though with mixed reports of success. And like many Netflix hacks, the trick stopped working about two weeks after it became public.

"I wasn't trying to harm Netflix with any of this," Morton says in his e-mail interview. "I was simply trying to demonstrate that there are limits to the company's 'unlimited' service."

¶ 7:34 AM