The firewall is reporting attempts to connect to a specific port on your system known to be used by a trojan exploit. It does not mean your system has the trojan. SubSeven has been around for a long time, but the identification as SubSeven is not definitive - that's just the name associated with connects to that particular numbered port.
If you want food for thought, shut down your system and look at the data light on your cable modem (assuming you have one). If it's like mine, it flashes continuously, indicating attempted connects to your IP address. Those are typically coming from people running port scanners and virus-infected systems.
"Because DirecTV is so difficult to receive and often so expensive to have installed, NFL Sunday Ticket is restricted to a lucky few -- and is something of a rich man's toy."
Spoken like a true shill for the cable industry!
DirecTV is usually cheaper than cable for comparable service levels, and is available with free installation. The boxes are often free to new subscribers as well. Unlike cable, DirecTV hasn't raised their rates multiple times a year (in my town, standard cable rates have nearly doubled in the past three years, DirecTV hasn't budged.)
Rather than being a "rich man's toy", satellite TV is just as affordable as standard cable. The only caveat is that you need to be able to mount a dish that points to the correct part of the sky. Most homeowners can do this, as can many apartment dwellers.
I couldn't care less about football, but I shed no tears for the cable industry which has used its monopoly to drive up prices and drive down service quality.
Perhaps because I'm smart enough to look at a PC and realize that it would make a lousy PVR. I know what a real PVR is like (I own two TiVos), and a power-hungry PC operating off a generic program guide isn't it. A good PVR is so much more than a hard-disk VCR, but it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived with a good PVR such as TiVo.
So we're looking here at a DVD player that can fetch pictures and music off of a PC. Fine. What makes this any kind of step towards a PC-based PVR? All I have to do is run the video output from the graphics card to the A/V input of my receiver, and then futz with the kludgy remote control solutions, to play video from the PC to the TV. You don't need a DVD player for that. Oh, you want wireless? There are plenty of wireless audio/video transmitter devices around.
Yes, there have been a lot of attempts to turn a PC into a PVR. All of them have failed miserably so far - they're expensive, fragile, and don't come anywhere near the simplicity of use of a good purpose-built PVR with a service behind it. I'm sure that one of these efforts will come up with something that demos well, but I doubt it will appeal to a larger audience.
Yes, a PVR is full of recognizeable bits of a PC - there's a processor, a hard disk or two, video encoders and decoders, and some software. But this doesn't mean that a PC would make a good PVR, any more than a PC would make a good bedside alarm clock.
There's a lot more to a PVR than just these bits - multiple inputs and outputs, control of cable and satellite boxes, a quiet, low-power box that can sit next to your TV and doesn't cost a lot and can be dedicated to its purpose.
A PC-based video recorder has its uses. But a PVR it's not.
It's even more misleading than it first appears - the article discusses a DVD player that allows display of content from your networked PC. The only reference to PVRs is a mention that ReplayTV boxes from the same company also offer network connectivity. There's nothing PVR-related in this announcement at all.
Don't people actually read the articles they point to before posting here?
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.
When you first get a TiVo, it doesn't have a lot to go on, so it seems to use some generic suggestions to see what you think of them. After a few weeks of regular use, especially if you have set up multiple Season Passes and/or asked to record shows, it will fine-tune the suggestions. Also, if you delete a recorded suggestion without watching it (or more than 5 minutes), the TiVo notes that and adjusts future suggestions (though not as much as a ThumbsDown).
It is not a good idea to give three thumbs-down on a lot of shows, this will tend to deterioriate the suggestions algorithm. One thumb is usually sufficient, but keep in mind that TiVo doesn't know, for an individual show rating, WHY you thumbed it, so it adds or subtracts weighting from entries for genre, actors, directors, etc.
As an example - my wife has season passes for various home improvement shows, such as Changing Rooms. So we get lots of suggestions for other home and garden shows, including various Martha Stewart shows. My wife hates Martha, so we give her shows one thumb down, but the TiVo doesn't know it's because of Martha. It's the collective weight of other ratings that tune the suggestions.
For a while, there was a hidden feature called TeachTiVo, that allowed you to rate individual actors, directors, titles and genres. The UI wasn't complete (and was buggy), and you had to "enable backdoors" to get at it at all. The whole feature was removed in recent versions, unfortunately. I'd like to see something like it return in the future.
There is now an 80 hour (80GB) standalone model available for $50 more than the 60 hour model. Capacity for standalone boxes is rated at "basic" quality. There are four quality levels, basic, medium, high and best. When I had a standalone box, I used "high" with a satellite feed and got good results. High gets you about 40% of the "basic" capacity. You can set quality levels on a per-recording basis and set a default.
Note that if you get the DirecTV-TiVo combination boxes, such as I have, you get much more high-quality recording time per gigabyte - 35 hours with a 40GB disk, a duplicate of the DirecTV signal.
These capacities are "approximate", since bitrates vary.
My two boxes have 160GB total disk space each for 149+ hours of recording time (each). The maximum disk space you can have used in most TiVos is 2x137GB (using 160GB disks). The brand new Hughes HDVR2, a DirecTV box, can hold only one disk (so far).
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.
TiVo suggestions are generated in the TiVo box and do not leave the box - the subscription has nothing to do with it. And hacking to steal the service is wrong.
I have been a TiVo user for two years now and find it has dramatically improved my enjoyment of television. My wife is completely enamoured of TiVo and gets annoyed with me if I do anything to disrupt it! The TiVo service is a large part of what makes TiVo work so well, and it's worth paying for.
1. Posting on a newsgroup with a valid e-mail address. (I use Sneakemail (www.sneakemail.com) to generate addresses for postings, and within hours of a post, I get new spam.)
2. Have a web page with your e-mail address on it in cleartext.
3. Respond to any spam, sign up for web contests, etc.
4. Have an e-mail address that is easily implied from your domain name (for example, john@johndoe.com, info@whatever.com, etc.)
5. Have a registered domain with contact info in the registration record.
The TiVo lifetime subscription offering is discontinued only for the DirecTV combo TiVo boxes - it makes little sense now that the monthly fee is under $5. (If you already have the lifetime option, it stays in force, but there is some question as to whether it is still tied to the box or to your DirecTV account.) The lifetime sub is still available for the standalone boxes ($249).
The QuadCard, like the AirNet and TurboNet adapters also sold through 9thTee, were developed by a TiVo user named Nick Kelsey (known as "jafa" on the TiVo Community Forum.) 9thTee is the distributor - though I don't want to take anything away from them, they have been remarkably supportive of the TiVo community and they deserve kudos for taking the financial risks of selling these add-ons.
It is truly amazing what Nick has been able to do with his electronics expertise.
Re:A User Of MD and Betamax *ALMOST* Every Day
on
Sony Kills Betamax
·
· Score: 2
The SL-2700 was not the original Beta Hi-Fi VCR, that was the SL-5200. My first VCR (and the second after the first got stolen!) was an SL-2700 - in my view, one of the finest VCRs ever built.
I still have my SL-HF1000, which, I think, was the fanciest Beta VCR Sony ever made (I had read about a special one for the 20th anniversary of Beta, but never saw it available for sale.) I haven't plugged it in for a few years, but it's there to play the boatload of Beta tapes I made after my son was born (using the first consumer camcorder, which I think was called Betacam, not to be confused with the pro format).
I too am a big Sony fan, though I never got into MiniDisc. My first TiVo was a Sony, though!
It was with a touch of sadness that I read this story. Yes, Sony took a great concept and screwed up its marketing and licensing. Ah well...
Yes, TiVo definitely derives revenue from ads and promotions in the "Showcases" menu as well as from the use of the iPreview (also called TiVoMatic) icon (the "press thumbs up"). The financial details are not public, but you can probably derive some information from TiVo's 10K filing.
I think this is great - it's a fun and pretty much unintrusive way for TiVo to generate revenue (some people gripe about the "yellow star" that shows up on the TiVo Central menu for a few days during the Showcases promotions), and TiVo has been learning how to provide interesting content this way (the actual content gets recorded onto reserved disk space from an early morning program on DSC.)
TiVo, so far, seems to be doing well at being a user-oriented company that doesn't close the door to useful funding approaches that will keep it in business. I don't see anything, yet anyway, that causes me to be concerned about my TiVo being turned into an advertising display box.
What part of "opt-in" don't you understand? As is clearly explained, this information isn't collected unless the TiVo owner has signed up to be a Nielsen household and agrees to the collection.
In part, "There is software we can enable if you're a Nielsen household. This software allows the Nielsen box to query the TiVo and find out what is currently being displayed onscreen.
"But you not only have to be a Nielsen family, meaning you opt-in to data collecting per their privacy policy, you also have to opt-in to data collection from TiVo, per our privacy policy. "
I've tried various add-on pop-up stoppers, but none seemed to be both effective and unintrusive. I choose to use MSIE, and was delighted to find that CrazyBrowser, a free MSIE add-on whose primary purpose is to add a tabbed interface, is supremely effective at blocking pop-up ads without also suppressing useful popups. It has a number of other cool features as well. Did I mention it's free? It's not "spyware", either. I like it a lot.
On a related and truly ironic note, I was helping my mother set up her web site on 50megs.com, and was amused that the first time I brought up her new page (using stock MSIE, no popup stoppers), a popup appeared advertising a popup blocker! At least that didn't show up again!
I've seen regular phone cards like this - there is a "scratch off" coating over a code number on the card. You buy the card and then scratch off the coating - like a lottery ticket. My guess is that you call some central toll-free number to enter the code and authorize additional minutes.
My company distributes evaluation copies of our software through resellers, who then send a 30-day evaluation key to the user by e-mail. Some customers were reporting that the keys didn't work, but when we asked the customer to forward the e-mail they had received back to us, it looked fine.
It was only when we started asking customers to send the key file from their PC that we discovered that the string "eval" in the license key name was being changed to "review"! At first we blamed the reseller, but eventually figured out it was Yahoo. I didn't know until reading this article what had been done to us and why.
The whole mess prompted me to design a new key mechanism that had the advantages of being easier to enter (no worrying about line wraps) and not subject to the whims of Yahoo.
Nowadays, the UK press and media use the 1E9 meaning of "billion", and that's the appropriate number for this story.
Re:Any use of Tivo without programs database?
on
Inside the Cult of TiVo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Where are you that you don't think you have local program listings available?
A Series 1 TiVo that came with version 1.3 or earlier of the TiVo software factory-installed (even if it upgraded to a later version) does not require a subscription - it can be used with manual programming if you don't mind a nag screen that comes up when you go to schedule a recording. Anything newer won't record without a subscription.
I'm not saying this is unfair, but I think the company should better clarify "lifetime" to people buying the machines.
Um, they state it as clearly as I think they can. If you click on the link for Product Lifetime under "Buy TiVo" on the tivo.com site, you see:
A product lifetime subscription to the TiVo service covers the life of the recorder or receiver you buy - not the life of the subscriber. The product lifetime subscription accompanies the product in case of ownership transfer. The subscription remains in effect even if you upgrade your recorder, for example, to increase storage capacity (please contact an authorized dealer or the manufacturer) or if the recorder needs to be repaired or replaced due to a malfunction (see manufacturer warranty details).
Because a product lifetime subscription is linked to a particular recorder, it cannot be transferred to any other recorder (unless the recorder is replaced due to a malfunction covered by the manufacturer's warranty). Each recorder purchased requires its own service subscription and activation.
Of course, hardware products don't last forever and their lifespan will vary. TiVo makes no representations or warranties as to the expected lifetime of the product aside from the manufacturer's warranty.
The policy wasn't always this clear, which is why TiVo allows a one-time transfer of a lifetime sub that was activated prior to (I think) January 31, 2000, when they clarified the description.
Neither Philips nor Sony ever manufactured TiVo boxes directly. All TiVos roll off a third-party OEM assembly line in Mexico. Philips-branded boxes are just the TiVo reference design, Sony specified some minor changes and a different (nicer in my opinion, but others disagree) remote control. TiVo even handles the technical support for Philips.
As for subsidies, TiVo did pay a subsidy with the Series 1 boxes (no longer manufactured), but does not do so with the Series 2 boxes being built now, which is a major step forward in their path to profitability.
Slashdot Mirror
The firewall is reporting attempts to connect to a specific port on your system known to be used by a trojan exploit. It does not mean your system has the trojan. SubSeven has been around for a long time, but the identification as SubSeven is not definitive - that's just the name associated with connects to that particular numbered port.
If you want food for thought, shut down your system and look at the data light on your cable modem (assuming you have one). If it's like mine, it flashes continuously, indicating attempted connects to your IP address. Those are typically coming from people running port scanners and virus-infected systems.
"Because DirecTV is so difficult to receive and often so expensive to have installed, NFL Sunday Ticket is restricted to a lucky few -- and is something of a rich man's toy."
Spoken like a true shill for the cable industry!
DirecTV is usually cheaper than cable for comparable service levels, and is available with free installation. The boxes are often free to new subscribers as well. Unlike cable, DirecTV hasn't raised their rates multiple times a year (in my town, standard cable rates have nearly doubled in the past three years, DirecTV hasn't budged.)
Rather than being a "rich man's toy", satellite TV is just as affordable as standard cable. The only caveat is that you need to be able to mount a dish that points to the correct part of the sky. Most homeowners can do this, as can many apartment dwellers.
I couldn't care less about football, but I shed no tears for the cable industry which has used its monopoly to drive up prices and drive down service quality.
Perhaps because I'm smart enough to look at a PC and realize that it would make a lousy PVR. I know what a real PVR is like (I own two TiVos), and a power-hungry PC operating off a generic program guide isn't it. A good PVR is so much more than a hard-disk VCR, but it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived with a good PVR such as TiVo.
So we're looking here at a DVD player that can fetch pictures and music off of a PC. Fine. What makes this any kind of step towards a PC-based PVR? All I have to do is run the video output from the graphics card to the A/V input of my receiver, and then futz with the kludgy remote control solutions, to play video from the PC to the TV. You don't need a DVD player for that. Oh, you want wireless? There are plenty of wireless audio/video transmitter devices around.
Yes, there have been a lot of attempts to turn a PC into a PVR. All of them have failed miserably so far - they're expensive, fragile, and don't come anywhere near the simplicity of use of a good purpose-built PVR with a service behind it. I'm sure that one of these efforts will come up with something that demos well, but I doubt it will appeal to a larger audience.
Yes, a PVR is full of recognizeable bits of a PC - there's a processor, a hard disk or two, video encoders and decoders, and some software. But this doesn't mean that a PC would make a good PVR, any more than a PC would make a good bedside alarm clock.
There's a lot more to a PVR than just these bits - multiple inputs and outputs, control of cable and satellite boxes, a quiet, low-power box that can sit next to your TV and doesn't cost a lot and can be dedicated to its purpose.
A PC-based video recorder has its uses. But a PVR it's not.
It's even more misleading than it first appears - the article discusses a DVD player that allows display of content from your networked PC. The only reference to PVRs is a mention that ReplayTV boxes from the same company also offer network connectivity. There's nothing PVR-related in this announcement at all.
Don't people actually read the articles they point to before posting here?
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.
When you first get a TiVo, it doesn't have a lot to go on, so it seems to use some generic suggestions to see what you think of them. After a few weeks of regular use, especially if you have set up multiple Season Passes and/or asked to record shows, it will fine-tune the suggestions. Also, if you delete a recorded suggestion without watching it (or more than 5 minutes), the TiVo notes that and adjusts future suggestions (though not as much as a ThumbsDown).
It is not a good idea to give three thumbs-down on a lot of shows, this will tend to deterioriate the suggestions algorithm. One thumb is usually sufficient, but keep in mind that TiVo doesn't know, for an individual show rating, WHY you thumbed it, so it adds or subtracts weighting from entries for genre, actors, directors, etc.
As an example - my wife has season passes for various home improvement shows, such as Changing Rooms. So we get lots of suggestions for other home and garden shows, including various Martha Stewart shows. My wife hates Martha, so we give her shows one thumb down, but the TiVo doesn't know it's because of Martha. It's the collective weight of other ratings that tune the suggestions.
For a while, there was a hidden feature called TeachTiVo, that allowed you to rate individual actors, directors, titles and genres. The UI wasn't complete (and was buggy), and you had to "enable backdoors" to get at it at all. The whole feature was removed in recent versions, unfortunately. I'd like to see something like it return in the future.
There is now an 80 hour (80GB) standalone model available for $50 more than the 60 hour model. Capacity for standalone boxes is rated at "basic" quality. There are four quality levels, basic, medium, high and best. When I had a standalone box, I used "high" with a satellite feed and got good results. High gets you about 40% of the "basic" capacity. You can set quality levels on a per-recording basis and set a default.
Note that if you get the DirecTV-TiVo combination boxes, such as I have, you get much more high-quality recording time per gigabyte - 35 hours with a 40GB disk, a duplicate of the DirecTV signal.
These capacities are "approximate", since bitrates vary.
My two boxes have 160GB total disk space each for 149+ hours of recording time (each). The maximum disk space you can have used in most TiVos is 2x137GB (using 160GB disks). The brand new Hughes HDVR2, a DirecTV box, can hold only one disk (so far).
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.
TiVo suggestions are generated in the TiVo box and do not leave the box - the subscription has nothing to do with it. And hacking to steal the service is wrong.
I have been a TiVo user for two years now and find it has dramatically improved my enjoyment of television. My wife is completely enamoured of TiVo and gets annoyed with me if I do anything to disrupt it! The TiVo service is a large part of what makes TiVo work so well, and it's worth paying for.
The major ways of getting spam are:
1. Posting on a newsgroup with a valid e-mail address. (I use Sneakemail (www.sneakemail.com) to generate addresses for postings, and within hours of a post, I get new spam.)
2. Have a web page with your e-mail address on it in cleartext.
3. Respond to any spam, sign up for web contests, etc.
4. Have an e-mail address that is easily implied from your domain name (for example, john@johndoe.com, info@whatever.com, etc.)
5. Have a registered domain with contact info in the registration record.
The TiVo lifetime subscription offering is discontinued only for the DirecTV combo TiVo boxes - it makes little sense now that the monthly fee is under $5. (If you already have the lifetime option, it stays in force, but there is some question as to whether it is still tied to the box or to your DirecTV account.) The lifetime sub is still available for the standalone boxes ($249).
"The folks over at 9thtee are developing..."
NOT!
The QuadCard, like the AirNet and TurboNet adapters also sold through 9thTee, were developed by a TiVo user named Nick Kelsey (known as "jafa" on the TiVo Community Forum.) 9thTee is the distributor - though I don't want to take anything away from them, they have been remarkably supportive of the TiVo community and they deserve kudos for taking the financial risks of selling these add-ons.
It is truly amazing what Nick has been able to do with his electronics expertise.
The SL-2700 was not the original Beta Hi-Fi VCR, that was the SL-5200. My first VCR (and the second after the first got stolen!) was an SL-2700 - in my view, one of the finest VCRs ever built.
I still have my SL-HF1000, which, I think, was the fanciest Beta VCR Sony ever made (I had read about a special one for the 20th anniversary of Beta, but never saw it available for sale.) I haven't plugged it in for a few years, but it's there to play the boatload of Beta tapes I made after my son was born (using the first consumer camcorder, which I think was called Betacam, not to be confused with the pro format).
I too am a big Sony fan, though I never got into MiniDisc. My first TiVo was a Sony, though!
It was with a touch of sadness that I read this story. Yes, Sony took a great concept and screwed up its marketing and licensing. Ah well...
Yes, TiVo definitely derives revenue from ads and promotions in the "Showcases" menu as well as from the use of the iPreview (also called TiVoMatic) icon (the "press thumbs up"). The financial details are not public, but you can probably derive some information from TiVo's 10K filing.
I think this is great - it's a fun and pretty much unintrusive way for TiVo to generate revenue (some people gripe about the "yellow star" that shows up on the TiVo Central menu for a few days during the Showcases promotions), and TiVo has been learning how to provide interesting content this way (the actual content gets recorded onto reserved disk space from an early morning program on DSC.)
TiVo, so far, seems to be doing well at being a user-oriented company that doesn't close the door to useful funding approaches that will keep it in business. I don't see anything, yet anyway, that causes me to be concerned about my TiVo being turned into an advertising display box.
What part of "opt-in" don't you understand? As is clearly explained, this information isn't collected unless the TiVo owner has signed up to be a Nielsen household and agrees to the collection.
This topic came up in the TiVo Community forum a few weeks ago, and there is a response from TiVo in the thread explaining exactly what is going on.
. ph p?s=&threadid=68099
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread
In part, "There is software we can enable if you're a Nielsen household. This software allows the Nielsen box to query the TiVo and find out what is currently being displayed onscreen.
"But you not only have to be a Nielsen family, meaning you opt-in to data collecting per their privacy policy, you also have to opt-in to data collection from TiVo, per our privacy policy. "
I've tried various add-on pop-up stoppers, but none seemed to be both effective and unintrusive. I choose to use MSIE, and was delighted to find that CrazyBrowser, a free MSIE add-on whose primary purpose is to add a tabbed interface, is supremely effective at blocking pop-up ads without also suppressing useful popups. It has a number of other cool features as well. Did I mention it's free? It's not "spyware", either. I like it a lot.
On a related and truly ironic note, I was helping my mother set up her web site on 50megs.com, and was amused that the first time I brought up her new page (using stock MSIE, no popup stoppers), a popup appeared advertising a popup blocker! At least that didn't show up again!
I've seen regular phone cards like this - there is a "scratch off" coating over a code number on the card. You buy the card and then scratch off the coating - like a lottery ticket. My guess is that you call some central toll-free number to enter the code and authorize additional minutes.
My company distributes evaluation copies of our software through resellers, who then send a 30-day evaluation key to the user by e-mail. Some customers were reporting that the keys didn't work, but when we asked the customer to forward the e-mail they had received back to us, it looked fine.
It was only when we started asking customers to send the key file from their PC that we discovered that the string "eval" in the license key name was being changed to "review"! At first we blamed the reseller, but eventually figured out it was Yahoo. I didn't know until reading this article what had been done to us and why.
The whole mess prompted me to design a new key mechanism that had the advantages of being easier to enter (no worrying about line wraps) and not subject to the whims of Yahoo.
Nowadays, the UK press and media use the 1E9 meaning of "billion", and that's the appropriate number for this story.
Where are you that you don't think you have local program listings available?
A Series 1 TiVo that came with version 1.3 or earlier of the TiVo software factory-installed (even if it upgraded to a later version) does not require a subscription - it can be used with manual programming if you don't mind a nag screen that comes up when you go to schedule a recording. Anything newer won't record without a subscription.
I'm not saying this is unfair, but I think the company should better clarify "lifetime" to people buying the machines.
Um, they state it as clearly as I think they can. If you click on the link for Product Lifetime under "Buy TiVo" on the tivo.com site, you see:
The policy wasn't always this clear, which is why TiVo allows a one-time transfer of a lifetime sub that was activated prior to (I think) January 31, 2000, when they clarified the description.
That's actually a quote or paraphrase of a statement made by a Turner Broadcasting executive. Nobody with half a brain believes it.
To clarify the subsidy/manuracturing issues..
Neither Philips nor Sony ever manufactured TiVo boxes directly. All TiVos roll off a third-party OEM assembly line in Mexico. Philips-branded boxes are just the TiVo reference design, Sony specified some minor changes and a different (nicer in my opinion, but others disagree) remote control. TiVo even handles the technical support for Philips.
As for subsidies, TiVo did pay a subsidy with the Series 1 boxes (no longer manufactured), but does not do so with the Series 2 boxes being built now, which is a major step forward in their path to profitability.
You get 'em all...