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TiVo Hacking Book to be Released
weaknees writes "Wired News
reports that O'Reilly press has book in the works loaded with TiVo Hacks. The
author, an MIT guy, is collecting
100 hacks for TiVo, but is shying away from the most controversial hacks.... The
brief article points out that the most avid TiVo hackers seem intent on respecting
TiVo's interest in having hackers stay away from things like subscription theft
and video extraction."
"away from things like subscription theft and video extraction"
What is wrong with video extraction? No doubt this book will be bypassed for web sites, and possibly other books that don't overlook this important and entirely reasonable "hack".
I thought video extraction was one of the most popular hacks, not something people made an effort to stay away from. Certainly in the ReplayTV crowd, video extraction is one of the most popular hacks, right up there with drive upgrades.
And unlike bypassing subscriptions, it's not something that is going to cost TiVo money, so I don't see why they would be concerned by it.
TiVo seems to have a dual-faced plan for dealing with hackers. The hacks that they want to let happen seem to be too easy, while they make the hacks they don't want to happen hard. As a result, the hackers who take the path of least resistance get all the credit, the hackers who go into the marked red zones get shunned.
In most single-drive models TiVo just happens to provide a perfect mounting point for that second drive... in network-less models they just happen to provide a slot in which an add-on card can be installed... when you give you TiVo Internet access, they just happen to have left their data server exposed to the 'net and let you do your "daily call" that way... for some reason they just happen to use modems that support Caller ID decoding... and let's not forget all of the "cheat code" hacks you can do with your remote control...
But when you stray into the areas that threaten TiVo's business model, subscription theft and video extraction from the box, things stop getting so easy. In fact, TiVo starts actively programming to break such hacks in required updates if they are ever found to exist. These people are also shunned by the main TiVo-hacking community, so even if they discover something there's nobody who cares.
The result is that TiVo controls their hackers by letting them improve their units, but only in the way that TiVo has appoved. This strategy makes them appear hacker-friendly, when really there are two hacks that they specifcally forbid. By letting the hackers have the little things, they seem to have found the most effective way of preventing hackers from going after the big things...
Why would TiVo possibly be opposed to (or be less than neutral about) video extraction? It doesn't have any negative impact on their business model... with one critical exception: Legal fees!
ReplayTV was sunk because they were sued repeatedly, and TiVo hardly wants to spend its precious money on lawyers! Larry Lessig may be a great professor and scholar, and he might like little guys who want to publish copywritten books, but I don't see him supporting TiVo when they get sued by every media giant under the sun.
If and when the courts catch up with the this technology, and if the decisions come down like the betamax decision did, then I'm sure TiVo will be more than willing to add features and DVD recorders into the mix... but if they decided to be at the forefront, they'd get slaughtered.
It is for this reason that the larger tivo upgrade companies don't rock this boat... TiVo was brilliant to embrace (or at least not shun) the hacker community with respect to adding hours, and even built many nifty features that empowered the hackers to do cool stuff.... and we in turn respect that by not doing thinks to get them into legal hot water.
TiVo Upgrades