On Thu, 01 May 2008 22:33:36 -0500 Jer <gdunn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
| I don't have one, but I've been poking around about the external drive
| stuff. USB2.0 on either of two jacks (one front, one rear). An
| external drive has to be formatted by, and remain dedicated to, the sat
| box. One can only move protected (HDCP?) programs between the internal
| and external drives, not copy them, and playback from either. Once
| moved to the external drive, it cannot be copied again, only moved back
| to the internal DVR. Presumably, protected material is encrypted, or
| otherwise locked to the drives. I've not seen any details about
| non-protected material.
They do say that if you have to change to a new receiver for some reason,
the new receiver CAN play the archived recordings. So I presume that the
encryption is keyed to the account, not the receiver S/N.
I don't know why they need to reformat. Account keyed encryption would
be sufficient to protect the data under any format. OTOH, maybe they are
using something better than the FAT-32 filesystem that comes default on
the drives. Maybe they are using Linux ext3 journaled filesystem, and
maybe the "need" to reformat only exists because they expect drives to
have FAT-32 on them. If this is so, it might be the case that a drive
someone with Linux reformats the same way will work. But for the average
consumer, they would need to say this. But I would expect if I archive a
bunch of movies on an attached drive, then replicate that drive sector by
sector onto another one of the same size, and attach the replica, it would
not really know any different (and thus I can make backups of my
archives).
If they really are using ext3 or something Linux or BSD based, in theory
I could archive movies on smaller drives (USB keys, for example) then move
the (encrypted) files over to a large storage array using Linux to access
the formatting. They could still break this by having encrypted indexing
files added in there. Then I would be limited to keeping only whole drive
images (so them I might have a few hundred "USB key images" on a storage
array).
If I can literally _buy_ a receiver (not directly from them since they no
longer sell anything, but maybe from a retailer I can, as some people have
suggested elsewhere), then I might be able to "break in" on the JTAG port
(I've done embedded programming, so I know what is going on) and load up
my own Linux OS. But I don't know how much of it I can do without
crossing
the line of legality (breaking their encryption would be that, I am sure).
Given how easy it is for hackers to crack their poorly designed satellite
feed encryption, at least the TVRO/FTA receivers that they do this with
are
easy to reload. If I were to have designed the receiver, I would not put
a
JTAG port in there, so maybe they didn't.
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