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Inside the Cult of TiVo
StudMuffin writes: "A group of TiVo enthusiasts from over at the TiVo Community Forum recently got together. About 100 people showed up to roast weenies and swap TiVo hacks and screen names. This is just plain cool, if you ask me. TiVo rocks. Of interest, however, was the representation of the TiVo company and the fact that they didn't fight to stop hacking their product. Does this relationship between hi-tech companies and hackers act as a model of how this relationship can work? TiVo even seems tolerant of really hardcore hacks as discussed on /. in the past."
According to Tiger, who wrote the MFS Tools application that is used to add/expand drives, most of his handouts for the new version went to TiVo employees and engineers.
Speaking of MFS Tools 2.0, you can do all sorts of nifty adds and expansions with it - including adding and expanding the A Drive on Series2 units.
More on MFS Tools 2.0 here.
As any regularly hacking TiVo owner will tell you, the company is not merely tolerant of people who hack their product, but supportive. The latest version of the TiVo software includes built-in support for the 3rd party network adapters (TiVoNET and TurboNet). It's this kind of technical interaction that gives me hope not just for hacking, but for development of open source solutions.
Err.. that hasn't happened. They (and we) have discouraged such hacks, but Tivo's taken no real action to stop them from occuring.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Jesus, not again...
2) The Privacy Foundation's report on Tivo points out that
a) Your Tivo serial number is sent multiple times during each phone call and there is no way to guarantee data is truly treated anonymously except to trust Tivo.
Except by looking at the method which it uses to send the data and having intelligence enough to figure out that it's sending the serial-containing logs to a different place at a different time, and leaving no way to correlate the serial with the anonymous part of the data. Someone needs to tell "the privacy foundation" that you don't need an expensive box with modem trickery to spy on a connection, you just need a knowledge of how the system works. They've gone out of their way to stick to *exactly* what their privacy policy says, and all you need is a knowledge of Linux and TCL to see that.
b) Tivo's definition of "personal" information is significantly more narrow than the average privacy policy reader would assume, and so guarantees about your "personal" information are hollow.
Personal info, as defined by Tivo, is basically anything that can be tied back to you or to your box individually. Seems airtight to me.
c) Tivo suggests that the viewing information is never transmitted. In fact, all of the constituent pieces of the personal viewing information are transmitted to TiVo's computers.
Huh? Tivo explictly states that anonymous viewing information is transmitted. Read it, specifically section 2.3:
d) TiVo should disclose that their customer-identified diagnostic log can indicate when the TiVo remote control was in use.
The customer identified diagnostic log cannot indicate when the remote control was in use. The Privacy Foundation misinterpreted the meaning of several of the diagnotic messages because they simply looked at the log and not what the hell the unit was actually doing.
I agree, it's important to fight for your privacy. But it's equally important to pick your battles and not fight against the companies that explicit state what data they collect, how they use it, and then stick by that. Tivo has been incredible in that respect. They do it right, and if every company was as forthcoming as they have been about this sort of thing, then there'd be a lot less privacy battles to fight.
3) Anyone heard of Replay TV here?
Yeah, and we all hope they win. But frankly, they have an inferior product. They added nice whizbang features like ethernet (although Tivo Series 2 will have ethernet support too), show sharing, auto commercial skip, and a (somewhat lame) web control, which we geeks love, but they failed to fix the most important problems like: more intelligent scheduling, priorities that make sense, ability to see what the unit will do in the future and adjust it, etc... All the things that make a PVR better than a VCR. Adding neat features is easy. Making a unit work exceedingly well at one thing is more difficult. Tivo works better than Replay for the purpose of timeshifting programs. Replay works better than Tivo for the purpose of geek type stuff. And Replay, while they fight the good fight, are really pushing themselves into an uncertain future by doing so. Ever thought about "what if they lose", which they most probably will?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.