Rosh Hashana

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unplanned-for obsolescence (sic)

You probably have several devices or software applications that periodically phone home. OS upgrades, anti-virus updates, your cell phone if you go off the network (I assume this is why my battery is sucked dry in a few hours in Toronto), any modern version of Windows for validation, and so on. We live in a wired world and we make things that take advantage of that.

I wonder how often the producers of such things take into account that such support will someday end -- there will be no more updates to this OS, for instance, so why bother continuing to check? This thought was brought to mind by my series-1 TiVo, which occasionally hangs and requires a hard reboot via the power cord. Today after reboot I was greeted by the message that the device would be unable to serve my needs until it phoned home, which it wants to do once a day and which it assures me it needs to do for software updates and the program guide. So I had to let it.

There have been no updates to the software for years and the program guide would not be helpful to this box in these modern DTV days. (The box doesn't contain a digital tuner.) There is nothing they could possibly be sending to my TiVo via the internet that could make my box perform any better than it does today. And yet, because a periodic check was programmed in without apparent consideration for expiration conditions or even support for a "stop calling" message from the server, my box needs to go through the motions.

(Yes, all it can do is record manually from channel 3, and I have to control what channel 3 points to externally. For as little current TV as I watch this is just fine and it's not worth spending the money on a new TiVo with new contract.)

Hmm. I just realized that this means that if TiVo should ever decide to, they could disable older boxes remotely -- even ones for which a lifetime contract was purchased (like mine) -- just by not answering that phone call. In other words, TiVo was in the "you're really just renting content" business years before some of the other players. They might not have intended to be in that business, but by programming their devices to require a useless service call, they have built in a weakness that they could later decide to exploit. I wonder what it would take to hack around this.

now it can be told

Yesterday Dani and I went to the Canton of Beau Fleuve for the elevation of dagonell and cigfran_cg to the Order of the Pelican, the SCA's highest award for service. Yay!

I hope people who weren't in the ceremony like I was will post pictures (and tell me where :-) ).

( two pictures )