The software can be changed easily. The author is wrong.
There's one model that I know of (the R10, sold by DTV) that requires one chip to be reflashed, but every other TiVo out there can be modified pretty easily. The security measures that he mentioned are there, but bypassing them borders on trivial.
The article says it's too hard to hack the TiVo SW.
Well, then the article is wrong, depending on your definition of "hacking the TiVo software".
Yes, changing the function of the binaries is pretty much limited to some simple patches to enable or disable built in features.
If you define "the TiVo software" as the entire system, though, there's a lot that can be done relatively simply. Simple, easy things like, for example, adding a fucking NFS daemon!
What you're proposing is, technically, probably within the realm of possibility, but the idea has one major flaw. It's an overly complex solution to a problem that has already been solved in a simple manner. You asked for ro access to the tivo drive while it's still running in the tivo. I already have full rw access to the drive while it's running in the tivo, and I have my choice of accessing it through nfs, ftp, or simply telnetting to the tivo and manipulating the files using whatever tools I choose to install on the thing.
I had just made a post listing some ideas on how to repeat what the original author did using WinXP. As soon as I hit "submit", it occured to me that doing so is a really, really bad idea.
Given that I had just (possibly) nudged somebody into trying it out, I wanted to make sure that my followup post got noticed by anyone who read the parent.
Believe me, I don't make a habit of posting in all caps, but when you're limited to text and need an attention getter, the choices are limited.
Sure has. If only he'd posted this back in May of 2000 when these things weren't already common knowledge. Coulda saved me and a couple other guys quite a bit of time back then.
Was there really any question about that? From what I read in the article, he didn't even change any files. No reason it shouldn't be working.
The only thing that would have been likely to hose it up, given that he made to changes, would be if he had booted into WinXP with the disk attached to the system.
DON'T BOOT INTO WINXP WITH YOUR TIVO DRIVE ATTACHED TO THE COMPUTER!!!!!!
DON'T DO IT!!!!
XP will write its "DiskID" or whatever they call it to the boot sector and it won't work in your TiVo anymore.
Shit, I got sidetracked thinking of tools that would do the job that this "minor issue" completely slipped my mind. Long day, couple of beers, you know... Damnit! It's times like this that I really wish it was possible to go back and edit posts on this site.
Yep. That's why I bit the bullet and coughed up $100 a pop for used HDVR2s off of eBay, even though I could have gotten R10s from DTV for almost nothing at the time.
I've never been silly enough to try it under windows.
I'm pretty sure there are Windows hex editors that will read the entire disk. If I'm not mistaken, HackMan has that ability.
As for dumping specific sections of the disk, I'm not sure if dd under Cygwin can access the raw disk or not. I've honestly never tried. Hackman probably has the ability to dump subsections of the displayed file to a separate file, though I'm not sure about that.
In short, it's probably "possible" under Windows, but I don't see much reason to try it.
You're going to need a Linux system in order to get anything useful done to the TiVo anyway, may as well bite the bullet and learn it.
Exactly. Whereas the standalone TiVo is piping an analog signal through an inexpensive MPEG encoder chip, the DTV version is simply dumping the raw data stream from the satellite to disk. This signal has been encoded with some serious equipment, and is MUCH cleaner at equivalent file sizes.
DTV can't afford to sanction features that could be seen as making it easy to get that stream onto your PC, strip the commercials, and share it via eMule. They'd find themselves very short on content to broadcast in a short time.
To look at the raw bytes on the drive, just fire up a hex editor and aim it at/dev/hdx. I assume that's what you meant, since looking at the raw bits isn't really all that useful.
Do dump specific sections of the disk to a file, just use dd with the bs, seek, and count args.
No, there's way more to it than that. You also have to make the multiplexing invisible to both of the host systems.
Essentially, you'd need a piece of hardware that can emulate two separate IDE drives on one side, while consolodating those commands onto a single drive. And you need to manage to keep that drive from being corrupted by this scenario.
Then, you also need HUGE amounts of buffer space to capture the TiVo's writes, not a single byte of which can be missed. Also, some pretty sophisticated predictive read algorithms so as not to cause timeout issues on the TiVo side of things when it needs to read from the disk, but the PC has access at the moment.
By the time you invest the price of a small house developing the hardware, not to mention several years of man hours, you just have to ask yourself, wouldn't it be simpler to just install nfsd on the TiVo? You can already download it in binary format, precompiled just for the TiVo.
Yes, it is a silly question, for the simple fact that you eliminated the only possible answer within the question itself.
You can't have an IDE hard drive connected simultaneously to two controllers, so the only possible way to accomplish what you're asking is to use some variety of networked file system.
This, of course, requires making software changes on the TiVo, which you apparently can't be bothered to do.
Um, I don't believe that I every made any claim of the nature that video games don't have an effect on behavior. Quite the opposite. I believe I claimed that there was a sound psychological basis for making the argument that horrendously violent video games have a calming effect on real world behavior.
The site you linked to appears to not discuss video games. It seems to discuss violence on television.
That's a completely separate subject.
Thanks for playing. Please try again.
(FWIW, I've never even seen GTA in person, and I really couldn't give two shits about the personal issues you happen to have with the game.)
Trying to legislate technology in some attempt to revoke the ability to do things that may or may not actually be illegal is... [*explitives deleted*]... well lets just say I don't think it's a very good idea.
I'll go you one better. In a free country, it's a necessity that EVERYONE have the ability to do something illegal when, in thier best judgement, it is necessary to do so.
"Of the people, by the people, and for the people"
NOT....
"Of the congress, by the president, and for the police..."
I agree that a system of law is necessary, along with the accompanying infrastructure. I'm also not advocating breaking the lay "just for fun", or anything of that nature. There are times, though, where specific situations arise where the letter of the law runs contrary to what the "right thing to do" is.
One example: 8 or 9 years ago I was out on a date with this girl. We were at a bar in her hometown, a town that I'd never been to before. When we left the bar and were on the way back to my car, I got jumped from behind by her ex-boyfriend. I beat him senseless, as my right to self-defense entitled me to do. He spent several weeks in the hospital as a result of that beating.
Here's the kicker, though. Even after he was no longer able to pick himself up off the ground, he kept mumbling threats about what he was going to do to her later. Even though I was, personally, out of danger at that point, I went back and increased the severity of his medical condition by several notches.
Was it wrong for me to continue to beat on a helpless man? To be honest, my gut reaction would be to say yes. At my trial, however, her testimony about the hell that this guy had been putting her and her children through for several years, and about how they had had a calm and peaceful life after what I did to him was enough to convince the judge to not only send me on my way, but to thank me for stepping up to the plate when the circumstances called for it.
By the letter of the law, I could have (and maybe should have) spent several years in prison. Thanks to the concept of "spirit of the law", I got turned loose, the judge actually THANKED me for what I had done, and a single mother and her two children now live a life free from constant harrasment.
So, no, I don't think it's a good idea to remove the ABILITY for people to choose to break the law.
(Don't even get me started on this "mandatory sentencing" bullshit....)
What little credibility that guy had just flew out the window after reading that article, as far as I'm concerned.
Don't get me wrong, I love animals in general, and dogs in particular, but what he's taking part in is nothing more than outright theft. In that article, he effectively admitted to participating in an interstate theft ring, and recieving stolen goods.
Perhaps in a situation where everyone else EXCEPT you is speeding, and a fast moving car comes up behind you from over a hill and has to suddenly brake hard, causing the car behind him to have to brake hard, etc... Sooner or later, somebody's getting rear ended.
Also worth taking into consideration is a scenario in which someone is trying to flee a violent crime... Or perhaps rush a seriously wounded person to a hospital...
Personally, I normally set my cruise control right on the speed limit. I'm getting a little older and more mature, and paying speeding tickets just isn't as entertaining as it once was. Still, I can imagine several scenarios in which exceeding the posted speed limit would not only be justified, but the right thing to do.
I'll not be turning that decision making process over to an automated system, voluntarily, any time in the near future.
I haven't RTFA yet, but unless this system allows for some sort of "manual override" by the driver, I think it's a horribly bad implementation of an idea that wasn't all that good in the first place.
Such an approach, however, completely ignores one very important psychological aspect: Violent video games allow a person to blow off steam in a harmless, vicarious way.
It could be argued that the more violent the behavior exhibitted during a video game, the less likely that person is to exhibit violent behavior in the real world. The more a person is able to submerse themselves in the game's environment, and accept it as a temporary "reality", the less likely they'll be to have much of an urge to perform similar acts out on the streets.
All people, to one degree or another, build up certain levels of anger, hostility, and rage over time. It's important to have an outlet for these emotions that doesn't actually involve hurting other people.
I don't remember the author, but there was one who stated something along the lines of "writing is the only thing that keeps me from going on a killing spree". I would suspect that many other authors, and lyricists, hold similar sentiments.
Also, if memory serves, the main ingredient in a caipirana, one of the best mixed drinks ever.
I'll be damned if I can find a bartender around here that knows how to make one, though.
Still going off memory here, but I believe that cachaca is made by distilling sugar cane. Good stuff. A caipirana is a drink made with this liquor that is somewhat similar to a "real" margarita (not this blended, overly sweetened crap that most people think of as a margarita).
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as anything. I still can't help but laugh my ass off whenever I hear a woman bitching and moaning about not being able to find a "nice guy". It's not that there aren't plenty of nice guys out there, it's just that women don't give them a second glance...
I should also mention that the strategy I laid out in my above post is much more effective if you can also make yourself seem really, really dumb as a part of the act...
As far as being able to pull it off, that's easy. You just take your pent up frustration from dealing with morons day in and day out, and let it loose. A few drinks makes it even easier. It is a delicate balance to treat people like morons while trying to act like one yourself, but with a little practice, it can be done.
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but I think the TiVo people already solved THAT problem.
Their interface may be prettier, but in terms of functionality, they're still playing catch-up with their own hacker community.
The software can be changed easily. The author is wrong.
There's one model that I know of (the R10, sold by DTV) that requires one chip to be reflashed, but every other TiVo out there can be modified pretty easily. The security measures that he mentioned are there, but bypassing them borders on trivial.
Ahh..
Strange that the lameness filter didn't touch my post, actually.
The article says it's too hard to hack the TiVo SW.
Well, then the article is wrong, depending on your definition of "hacking the TiVo software".
Yes, changing the function of the binaries is pretty much limited to some simple patches to enable or disable built in features.
If you define "the TiVo software" as the entire system, though, there's a lot that can be done relatively simply. Simple, easy things like, for example, adding a fucking NFS daemon!
What you're proposing is, technically, probably within the realm of possibility, but the idea has one major flaw. It's an overly complex solution to a problem that has already been solved in a simple manner. You asked for ro access to the tivo drive while it's still running in the tivo. I already have full rw access to the drive while it's running in the tivo, and I have my choice of accessing it through nfs, ftp, or simply telnetting to the tivo and manipulating the files using whatever tools I choose to install on the thing.
And sometimes yelling is appropriate.
I had just made a post listing some ideas on how to repeat what the original author did using WinXP. As soon as I hit "submit", it occured to me that doing so is a really, really bad idea.
Given that I had just (possibly) nudged somebody into trying it out, I wanted to make sure that my followup post got noticed by anyone who read the parent.
Believe me, I don't make a habit of posting in all caps, but when you're limited to text and need an attention getter, the choices are limited.
Been done.
Sure has. If only he'd posted this back in May of 2000 when these things weren't already common knowledge. Coulda saved me and a couple other guys quite a bit of time back then.
Was there really any question about that? From what I read in the article, he didn't even change any files. No reason it shouldn't be working.
The only thing that would have been likely to hose it up, given that he made to changes, would be if he had booted into WinXP with the disk attached to the system.
SHIT!!!!! I forgot this part!!!
DON'T BOOT INTO WINXP WITH YOUR TIVO DRIVE ATTACHED TO THE COMPUTER!!!!!!
DON'T DO IT!!!!
XP will write its "DiskID" or whatever they call it to the boot sector and it won't work in your TiVo anymore.
Shit, I got sidetracked thinking of tools that would do the job that this "minor issue" completely slipped my mind. Long day, couple of beers, you know... Damnit! It's times like this that I really wish it was possible to go back and edit posts on this site.
Yep. That's why I bit the bullet and coughed up $100 a pop for used HDVR2s off of eBay, even though I could have gotten R10s from DTV for almost nothing at the time.
I've never been silly enough to try it under windows.
I'm pretty sure there are Windows hex editors that will read the entire disk. If I'm not mistaken, HackMan has that ability.
As for dumping specific sections of the disk, I'm not sure if dd under Cygwin can access the raw disk or not. I've honestly never tried. Hackman probably has the ability to dump subsections of the displayed file to a separate file, though I'm not sure about that.
In short, it's probably "possible" under Windows, but I don't see much reason to try it.
You're going to need a Linux system in order to get anything useful done to the TiVo anyway, may as well bite the bullet and learn it.
Exactly. Whereas the standalone TiVo is piping an analog signal through an inexpensive MPEG encoder chip, the DTV version is simply dumping the raw data stream from the satellite to disk. This signal has been encoded with some serious equipment, and is MUCH cleaner at equivalent file sizes.
DTV can't afford to sanction features that could be seen as making it easy to get that stream onto your PC, strip the commercials, and share it via eMule. They'd find themselves very short on content to broadcast in a short time.
To look at the raw bytes on the drive, just fire up a hex editor and aim it at /dev/hdx. I assume that's what you meant, since looking at the raw bits isn't really all that useful.
Do dump specific sections of the disk to a file, just use dd with the bs, seek, and count args.
No, there's way more to it than that. You also have to make the multiplexing invisible to both of the host systems.
Essentially, you'd need a piece of hardware that can emulate two separate IDE drives on one side, while consolodating those commands onto a single drive. And you need to manage to keep that drive from being corrupted by this scenario.
Then, you also need HUGE amounts of buffer space to capture the TiVo's writes, not a single byte of which can be missed. Also, some pretty sophisticated predictive read algorithms so as not to cause timeout issues on the TiVo side of things when it needs to read from the disk, but the PC has access at the moment.
By the time you invest the price of a small house developing the hardware, not to mention several years of man hours, you just have to ask yourself, wouldn't it be simpler to just install nfsd on the TiVo? You can already download it in binary format, precompiled just for the TiVo.
Yes, it is a silly question, for the simple fact that you eliminated the only possible answer within the question itself.
You can't have an IDE hard drive connected simultaneously to two controllers, so the only possible way to accomplish what you're asking is to use some variety of networked file system.
This, of course, requires making software changes on the TiVo, which you apparently can't be bothered to do.
True, but Tivoweb is wonderful for those of us running modified DirecTV DVRs.
Don't forget a couple of little companies that go by the names Sprint and Qwest.
So the word "I" can't be trademarked just because it's short?
How discriminatory and non-PC....
Um, I don't believe that I every made any claim of the nature that video games don't have an effect on behavior. Quite the opposite. I believe I claimed that there was a sound psychological basis for making the argument that horrendously violent video games have a calming effect on real world behavior.
The site you linked to appears to not discuss video games. It seems to discuss violence on television.
That's a completely separate subject.
Thanks for playing. Please try again.
(FWIW, I've never even seen GTA in person, and I really couldn't give two shits about the personal issues you happen to have with the game.)
Repeat this post with a username and I'll get back to you.
Thanks....
Trying to legislate technology in some attempt to revoke the ability to do things that may or may not actually be illegal is... [*explitives deleted*]... well lets just say I don't think it's a very good idea.
I'll go you one better. In a free country, it's a necessity that EVERYONE have the ability to do something illegal when, in thier best judgement, it is necessary to do so.
"Of the people, by the people, and for the people"
NOT....
"Of the congress, by the president, and for the police..."
I agree that a system of law is necessary, along with the accompanying infrastructure. I'm also not advocating breaking the lay "just for fun", or anything of that nature. There are times, though, where specific situations arise where the letter of the law runs contrary to what the "right thing to do" is.
One example: 8 or 9 years ago I was out on a date with this girl. We were at a bar in her hometown, a town that I'd never been to before. When we left the bar and were on the way back to my car, I got jumped from behind by her ex-boyfriend. I beat him senseless, as my right to self-defense entitled me to do. He spent several weeks in the hospital as a result of that beating.
Here's the kicker, though. Even after he was no longer able to pick himself up off the ground, he kept mumbling threats about what he was going to do to her later. Even though I was, personally, out of danger at that point, I went back and increased the severity of his medical condition by several notches.
Was it wrong for me to continue to beat on a helpless man? To be honest, my gut reaction would be to say yes. At my trial, however, her testimony about the hell that this guy had been putting her and her children through for several years, and about how they had had a calm and peaceful life after what I did to him was enough to convince the judge to not only send me on my way, but to thank me for stepping up to the plate when the circumstances called for it.
By the letter of the law, I could have (and maybe should have) spent several years in prison. Thanks to the concept of "spirit of the law", I got turned loose, the judge actually THANKED me for what I had done, and a single mother and her two children now live a life free from constant harrasment.
So, no, I don't think it's a good idea to remove the ABILITY for people to choose to break the law.
(Don't even get me started on this "mandatory sentencing" bullshit....)
Holy shit.
What little credibility that guy had just flew out the window after reading that article, as far as I'm concerned.
Don't get me wrong, I love animals in general, and dogs in particular, but what he's taking part in is nothing more than outright theft. In that article, he effectively admitted to participating in an interstate theft ring, and recieving stolen goods.
What an idiot...
Perhaps in a situation where everyone else EXCEPT you is speeding, and a fast moving car comes up behind you from over a hill and has to suddenly brake hard, causing the car behind him to have to brake hard, etc... Sooner or later, somebody's getting rear ended.
Also worth taking into consideration is a scenario in which someone is trying to flee a violent crime... Or perhaps rush a seriously wounded person to a hospital...
Personally, I normally set my cruise control right on the speed limit. I'm getting a little older and more mature, and paying speeding tickets just isn't as entertaining as it once was. Still, I can imagine several scenarios in which exceeding the posted speed limit would not only be justified, but the right thing to do.
I'll not be turning that decision making process over to an automated system, voluntarily, any time in the near future.
I haven't RTFA yet, but unless this system allows for some sort of "manual override" by the driver, I think it's a horribly bad implementation of an idea that wasn't all that good in the first place.
Such an approach, however, completely ignores one very important psychological aspect: Violent video games allow a person to blow off steam in a harmless, vicarious way.
It could be argued that the more violent the behavior exhibitted during a video game, the less likely that person is to exhibit violent behavior in the real world. The more a person is able to submerse themselves in the game's environment, and accept it as a temporary "reality", the less likely they'll be to have much of an urge to perform similar acts out on the streets.
All people, to one degree or another, build up certain levels of anger, hostility, and rage over time. It's important to have an outlet for these emotions that doesn't actually involve hurting other people.
I don't remember the author, but there was one who stated something along the lines of "writing is the only thing that keeps me from going on a killing spree". I would suspect that many other authors, and lyricists, hold similar sentiments.
Also, if memory serves, the main ingredient in a caipirana, one of the best mixed drinks ever.
I'll be damned if I can find a bartender around here that knows how to make one, though.
Still going off memory here, but I believe that cachaca is made by distilling sugar cane. Good stuff. A caipirana is a drink made with this liquor that is somewhat similar to a "real" margarita (not this blended, overly sweetened crap that most people think of as a margarita).
Yeah, that makes about as much sense as anything. I still can't help but laugh my ass off whenever I hear a woman bitching and moaning about not being able to find a "nice guy". It's not that there aren't plenty of nice guys out there, it's just that women don't give them a second glance...
I should also mention that the strategy I laid out in my above post is much more effective if you can also make yourself seem really, really dumb as a part of the act...
As far as being able to pull it off, that's easy. You just take your pent up frustration from dealing with morons day in and day out, and let it loose. A few drinks makes it even easier. It is a delicate balance to treat people like morons while trying to act like one yourself, but with a little practice, it can be done.