This is pathetic. As noted in the link-blog a couple of days ago (as well as everywhere else), TiVo’s new DRM features have been spotted ‘in the wild’, protecting the valuable Intellectual Property that is Family Guy and Simpsons reruns.
The icing on the cake is that TiVo have come up with a hilarious hand-wavy explanation — apparently it was line noise. Marc Hedlund of O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow are having none of it, and rightly so; as a bonus, Cory asked a group of DRM experts, who ‘burst into positive howls of disbelief’ that line noise could corrupt the DRM bits and the corresponding checksums to match.
From my angle, though, there’s another noteworthy factor:
“During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals. We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives.” (– Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo)
Interesting use of the term ‘false positive’ there. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned bug if you ask me ;)
Anyway, I’m glad I went for the home-built option. It was pretty obvious that TiVo are in the cross-hairs, and their product is only going to get worse as the DRM industry push harder…