Sure, the article is from 2005, but precious little (if any) progress has been made since then.

The cable industry seems to be hell bent on having a lock on viewer equipment in much the same way the DVD industry has a lock on DVD playback equipment. We could write letters about this to the FCC, but it's unlikely cable companies will do anything other than shriek "PIRATES!" on behalf of their corporate masters. On top of this, there doesn't even seem to have been a lessening on the bullshit provisions that would appear to require the third party appliances at the cable company's bidding do something as onerous as say, put more f**king ads on the screen when you're just trying to see what's on.

Me, I just want to be able to either get (and pay for) digital cable to use with my homebrew PVR, or have Comcast STFU about it every time I talk to them. So long as I have to suffer the insanity of using a firewire cable to change channels (and they're begrudging about even that around here) but not actually get the video through that medium, I'm not going to be using digital cable. It's really that simple. F**k your extra advertisements--I'm already paying a monthly bill. While we're at it, f**k the onerous restrictions they're trying to place on the system under the guise of preventing video retransmission and piracy--the actual cable and media thieves really haven't had much of a problem breaking encryption systems, so it's not like this is going to pose more than a miniscule slowdown for them. The real question people should be asking is why these measures are so clearly aimed at preventing people at home from recording a TV show and then burning it to watch again later, just like they've always been able to do with VHS tapes.

There really should not be a problem doing this.