Breaking the law!
2002-11-02 � 10:49 a.m.

I am currently in the process of using school resources, and therefore taxpayer resources, to assist in what is -- in these days of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- a criminal offense.

Woo!

Yeah, I set one of our servers to crunching numbers in an effort to break the password on people's TiVo television boxes.

Why would I do this? Well, it goes like this -- according to the DMCA, it's illegal for you to attempt to circumvent a copy protection scheme on hardware or media that you own. (That's why that poor kid got his house raided for writing a DVD decoder for linux -- never mind the fact that it wasn't about piracy at all...he just wanted to be able to watch his DVDs on his computer.) It doesn't matter if you're doing it for profit or not, it doesn't matter if the copy protection scheme is essentially worthless (as in the DVD case), it doesn't matter if you own the thing you're messing with. It's now illegal.

But these guys with their TiVos -- what's up with them? Well if you don't know what a TiVo is, go here. Most people with TiVos are probably just normal consumers, and they don't care about what's going on inside the box as long as it works. But the TiVo is basically just a specialized computer, so the geeks out there want to play with the inside bits...and have been, up until this latest OS upgrade.

So they're trying to crack the password so they can go back to playing around with the toys they bought and continue to pay for. I support that, just as I support the idea of fair use when it comes to music I have paid for or books that I own. Big media can kiss my ass!

In TiVo's defense, they haven't ever been real hardasses about the people out there tweaking their boxes. But it obviously was enough of a concern that they really ramped up the security on this release. Enough so that the TiVo user community couldn't break the password without working together. And rather than make it an insular process, they opened it up and asked for help. I have decided to donate CPU cycles to this cause.

(I know this is only one step removed from "bumper-sticker activism" -- but I'm a lazy Amerikan.)

Wonder if I'll get caught? The program is currently utilizing...let's see...99.9% of the resources on the server it is running on. *Cough* Of course, that server isn't being used for anything else, but...

There was a guy down south somewhere, he was IT for a small college, and he got fired and fined for running the SETIatHome client on all the lab computers he supported. The thinking was that he was stealing computer resources from the college. Never mind that this stuff only takes the spare CPU cycles...it automatically ramps itself back if something else wants to run...or with SETI it can run just when the machine goes into screen-saver mode. I fail to grasp how that is "stealing." I figure they just wanted an excuse to get rid of the guy.

And SETI isn't doing anything illegal, unlike this new thing. I'm running SETI here at school too. *And* I'm running the cancer research client. I've got something close to three hundred SETI work units, and according to the cancer client, I've contributed one year, one hundred and thirty-four days and eighteen hours worth of CPU time (I'm not sure how it computes that though, because I know I haven't been running it for a year and a hundred and thirty-four days).

I guess if they want to get me for some reason, they'll have an excuse. Not that they didn't already have enough.

-t

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