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When Profiling Goes Wrong
huskymo writes "This morning's Wall Street Journal is carrying a funny story on TiVo and Amazon's automatic customer profiling. As most Slashdot readers probably know, TiVo keeps track of which programs you record and--if you haven't told it not to--records other programs it thinks you'd like. The article describes users that TiVo's mistaken for Korean, for gay, even for "a pregnant gay man.""
Funny as hell.
Free Mac Mini
To read the story without having to register for the (pay) site, use this link:
3 6872356908,00.html
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
Here is the link:3 6872356908,00.html
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
That's not the article! Here's the real text from wsj.com:
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
The Actual Article
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man." [TiVo Remote] Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at
jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
For non-programmers:
A bitmap is a data structure where a collection of bits is stored. This allows for more compact storing of information. For example a 32 bit word can be used to store 32 true-false values. This is more efficient than storing an array of 32 bytes with TRUE or FALSE in them. Bitmaps are not limited to storing true-false data. A 32 bit word can store 8 four bit values as well.
In the pregnant gay man example, the bitmap likley had bits for male/female, gay/straight and pregnant. Set them all to 1's and you get a pregnant homosexual male.
Uninitialized variables are caused when a function accesses a variable before explicitly setting it. This is a common problem in C/C++ and can result in some odd behavior. An uninitialized variable could result in the bits being set even though the program never explicitly set them.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I see in the article it talks about people trying to "outwit" the profiler, with someone searching around Amazon.com for stuff on politics and computers so it wouldn't think he's a pregnant, gay man. While this may provide for a better story, Amazon does allow you to see what it's using to profile you, and you can uncheck a box that basically says "Use this product to profile me" so he could remove the parenting book from the pool of data used to judge him.
It is most certainly a copyright violation, and not covered by fair use, since it is the entire article, with no commentary.
:)
That being said, thanks for posting it
But I never want it to record the 700 Club,
Find the 700 Club in the listings and give it 3 thumbs-down, or if TiVo is suggesting it, give the suggestion 3 thumbs-down before deleting it.
Alternatively, drop the entire channel it airs on from the list of channels you receive. The whole channel's run by Pat Robertson anyway.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I'll agree with everyone who has complained about the submission. The article itself, though, is weak on substance. Tivo thinks you like something, and if it is wrong you thumb-down its recommendations. Big deal. It happened to me but I wouldn't tell the Wall Street Journal about it.
Regarding the pregnant gay man, Amazon has a feature where you can see what the basis was for a recommendation. If you find it was based on a book or other product that you do not want them to consider for your recommendations, you click a button and that is the end of it. The writer of the article should have done more research.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
That's not quite how it works, and you can turn it off anyway.
Suggestions are only recorded if there is space not currently used by things you asked for. They will never overwrite something you explicitly recorded; only free space or other suggestions.
There is also a switch to turn suggestion recording off.
(Leaving it on is actually useful, because there's no other way to tell how much space you have available; that way, when your suggestion list starts to shrink, you know you're running out of space and it soon will be deleting stuff you asked for.
the device is instructed to record content you don't explicitly request? Is this an option to be turned off? Or (as I think I saw someone say) the TiVo will nuke content I wanted for content it thinks I want?
Yes, Yes, No.
TiVo will record suggestions, you can turn it off, and a suggestion will never delete or prevent a show you requested from recording.
-Tommy
Suggestions only use idle time. It won't bump a scheduled recording or delete something you actively recorded. You can turn it off, but I can't see why you would.
Sometimes it turns up gems which you wouldn't have found and at least a portion of the suggestions are worthwhile when nothing on your now playing list is to your taste. I get random Simpsons episodes and the BBC news as suggestions when there's space, which is worth 20 seconds deleting a-team reruns every so often.
As the article points out, the suggestion algoritm isn't perfect, but if it gets off target, it's fairly easy to correct... even though the users in the article obviously hadn't figured out the most efficient way to do so. The suggestion system works by allowing the viewer to press the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" button. Strangely enough you can give a show up to three thumbs up or down (most people I know only have two thumbs;). The algorithm uses these ratings to find shows that have been catagorized the same way as shows that the user has rated highly. One thing that most people don't realize is that any show selected for recording automatically gets one thumb up. Naturally, for this system to work, show catagorizations have to be accurate, which isn't always the case.
The users in the article who recorded lots of shows to counter the ratings were doing things the hard way. A much easier way is simply to go to the suggestions screen where TiVo supplies a list of recommended shows that it thinks the viewer might want to see. From there, it's easy to just give three thumbs down to each of the shows that the viewer doesn't like. On a lucky day the show that caused the problem in the first place will appear as a re-run, so the problem can be fixed quickly. This can be repeated until the suggestions screen only shows stuff that the viewer likes.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Now that's worrying. I *know* I haven't got a subscription to WSJ, yet it allowed me to read the article without paying. You didn't just see "WSJ" and then post that comment without realising that only the WSJ archives are "fee-based"?
Rather than go through all the trouble of engineering a profile, though, he could have found the purchased item in "Improve your recommendations" and deselected the "Use to make recommendations" box. Problem solved.
I like the system; over time it's brought authors to my attention that I might not otherwise have noticed.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Who gave this a score +5 Interesting? If you clicked on the link and actually read the story, you would know that www.wsj.com is not free, but online.wsj.com is free (atleast for this story).
And, frankly, anything and everything will offend someone, somewhere. If you don't want it, don't enable the feature.
You're not getting my point, Zathrus. I'm talking from a marketing standpoint here, not a personal one. I know perfectly well how to exclude stuff from Amazon (don't have a TiVO), though I haven't been able to figure out how to exclude a whole category that mistakenly includes a handful of books I am interested in - but that's another story.
There are certain topics which any marketing type will tell you are hot-button issues: political party, religious affiliation, sexuality, vi versus emacs. Unlike the last one, you are more likely to offend potential customers if you misidentify their political party, religious affiliation, or sexuality than you are to entice them if you identify them properly (significantly more; you'll maybe offend 3% of the population if you give them a copy of Business at the Speed of Light for Christmas, but you'll offend 60% if you give them a copy of al Quran for Christmas (those whose religious sensibilities are stronger than their curiosity, and those whose religious sensibilities cannot accept the idea of a Christmas gift in the first place)). And given the fact that there are more than two possible political viewpoints (a whole spectrum from Genghisid legalist to utopian anarchist), more than two possible religious affiliations, and more than two possible sexualities (straight/gay/bisexual + male/female), your odds of getting it wrong are greater than 50%. So a sensible marketer would stay clear of those topics.
This is what I mean by stupid profiling.
Yes, suggestions are automatically available for deletion should the TiVo need space to record something you've asked for. If you see a suggestion that got recorded that you want to hang on to, you can tell it to save it for "at least" some number of days (1-7) or until you explicitly delete it. Also, suggestions will tend to auto-delete after a day or two, depending on how full the disk is and how many other suggestions the box has on the list.
The people who get the most freaked about TiVo suggestions seem to be those who haven't used a TiVo and have all sorts of misconceptions about the way it works. I turned off auto-record of suggestions, but I still peruse the suggestions list from time to time and occasionally I've spotted things I would like to see that I didn't know were on. I've found new favorite series this way as well.
This happened to me when I first got my TiVo. I had never recorded anything in Spanish so I couldn't understand why. I posted in the newsgroup and was told that it will begin to think you speak Spanish if most of the movies you record have a secondary SAP track (like closed captioning, but in Spanish). Since most of my movies were from HBO, which has SAP, it thought I spoke Spanish. Don't worry -- you don't have to start giving Thumbs Down to movies. Just give 3 Thumbs Down to any program it records with the primary track in Spanish instead of English and it will figure it out pretty soon.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
Nah.
It's connecting to the Discovery Channel because there is a specific block of time that Tivo buys to send some of the previews and promo clips down to the unit. Instead of trying to dump all of that information over the modem, they buy a half hour block of paid advertising time and send it to the Tivo in encoded format. If your Tivo isn't doing anything else during that time, it will tune itself to Discovery Channel and download all that information.
If you were watching during that time period, you would also see all of the promotional clips, commercials, etc that your Tivo has on its main menu. Unfortunately, if you don't record anything else, your TV will be on Discovery once the show is finished. Sort of confusing, but I think it's documented on one of Tivo's FAQs.
To shed a little more light on this, TiVo's suggestions are collaborative; that is, other users' choices figure in to what it records as suggestions for you. That can help explain some of the "inappropriateness" that happens sometimes.
Here's a link to a thread on the TiVo Community Forums that further explains how TiVo's suggestions engine works: TiVo Community Forum
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
1) Plain old IDE hard drive. I think a 60-hour TiVo has a 30-Gig HD in it.
2) Yes, most TiVos have a single drive in them, and have two IDE connectors available. So if you open them, you can drop in another drive. You have to first "Bless" it, using software that various smart folks have put together. "Dylan's Boot Disk" is the easiest way. You hook the drive to be added to your PC, boot off of the Dylan's floppy. It boots a tiny linux kernel. You then run blesstivo, and you are done. Take out the drive, pop it into your tivo, and turn it on and you are set.
I don't know if anything is different for Series 2 TiVos, but you can find out way more than you want to know at:
http://www.tivocommunity.com
Click on "Tivo Underground" to see the message board discussing all sorts of tivo modifications and upgrades.
http://www.9thtee.com sells upgrade kits and also sells brackets, torx drivers, and other handy things if you want to do an upgrade.
Just curious, do you guys use the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons? I've had my Tivo for a few weeks now, and it seems to randomly choose a topic every few days and go out and grab a ton of programs relevant to that topic. As they are recorded, I run through and hit thumbs up or thumbs down on each one. The more you do this, the better the Tivo Suggestions feature will function. My Tivo's just about figured out things I would like.
Its just a computer. Think about it. If it randomly records Will & Grace, and you play the recording and then say "OMG GAY" and delete it, Tivo can't hear you and probably assumes you watched it. Press thumbs down three times and I guarantee you won't get Will & Grace again.
You can disable auto-recording of suggestions. Then just don't look at the suggestions list (which you have to explicitly ask for) and it's as if the feature didn't exist.
See my post above about the partially-implemented TeachTiVo feature.