EFF says buy a DTV tuner card NOW!

Fred von Lohmann from the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests a proactive approach to counteract the digital lockdown of devices in the future: buy a DTV tuner card now. Fred wants you to spend your money now, just in case the dreaded HDTV broadcast flag is raised up on the ugly flagpole again.

We're all for snapping up a DTV tuner card; heck, we just did that last month for our WMCE machine. Is a proactive purchase really going to help us if the copyright standards are reviewed and implemented? Fred, we're not sure if you're a grandfather or not, but we don't think an early purchase will grandfather us under a broadcast flag ruling. If you're in the market for a DTV tuner, go for it, but trying to purchase technology to circumvent the future usually don't work. That's why we recently passed on a flux-capacitor purchase; it doesn't matter, we didn't have the DeLorean to go with it.

[Kesey Posted Dec 27th 2005 9:26PM]

You could purchase 1 now, but you have to know that the Flag will be hacked. No chance future DTV tuner cards will have unhackableness.