If you really don't want to do anything illegal your best bet might be to call the company...though they give receivers away like they're free, so that probably wouldn't save you any money.
As far as hack/modding such devices you might want to look at yahoo groups. I'm am member of a few groups there about Tivo, ReplayTV, Garmin GPS and other such device hacking. Seems there's a group for pretty much anything.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishmod/