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EFF Warns TI Not To Harass Calculator Hobbyists
Ponca City, We love you writes "The EFF has warned Texas Instruments not to pursue legal threats against calculator hobbyists who perform modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators. TI's calculators perform a 'signature check' that allows only approved operating systems to be loaded, but researchers have reverse-engineered signing keys, allowing tinkerers to install custom operating systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators' hardware. In response, TI has unleashed a torrent of demand letters claiming that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require the hobbyists to take down commentary about and links to the keys. 'This is not about copyright infringement. This is about running your own software on your own device — a calculator you legally bought,' says EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. 'Yet TI still issued empty legal threats in an attempt to shut down discussion of this legitimate tinkering. Hobbyists are taking their own tools and making them better, in the best tradition of American innovation.'"
someone show apple this news. :/
What about all the similar crap that goes on with other devices? iPhone, XBOX, Wii, NDS, plus loads others?! EFF, why aren't you defending user's rights there?
Maybe they are afraid someone will write a decent RPN code for their calc?
The product was not sold as a computer or development platform. It was sold as an end user product with documented functionality as described in the user's manual. Sure enough, when the hacks disable their machines TI will get the support call. Most slashdotters will probably flame me for this.
I would be very surprised if a calculator hobbyist tried to get support for a modded device. And it is pretty easy for TI to say the warranty is void so STFU in that situation.
How many ubuntu users make support calls to Microsoft?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How many people have to buy the overpriced calculators because they are required for an exam.... by required I mean "approved" for use on an exam. Think about it, a calculator costing $100 dollars? What year is it again? If you could program them yourselves suddenly all those "approved" calculators aren't so trustworthy not to solve the exam for students.... although honestly if a calculator can solve the exam then probably the exam isn't testing much...
It's really hard for me to see how TI has a case under the DMCA at all. They're claiming the anti-circumvention clause, but it doesn't seem to apply here.
The anti-circumvention clause makes it a violation to circumvent copy protection -- but what the hobbyists are circumventing in not copy protection, it's a validation key. Without the key, you can still read and copy the existing OS without a hitch. The key is needed to put you own intellectual property on the device, no to copy theirs.
The key itself was never published by TI, and as far as I can tell was never registered with the copyright office, so copyright doesn't apply to that (even if it can apply to a number, which I doubt.)
So where's the copyright violation? this looks like a criminal (bad faith) abuse of the DMCA to me.
No. The DMCA reads "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title".
How does TI's signing system do that? The TI system just prevents people from loading a new OS onto devices that they already own. It doesn't protect access to work.
The DMCA is a bad law, but it's not so broad as to say "everything to which a technology company with a market capitalization of over $10 million objects is henceforth illegal."
When will companies realize that kicking and screaming about an issue they can't legitimatize will kick them in the testicles? Will T.I. really lose oodles of greenbacks because Joe geek likes to mod his calculator to play Mario or run Linux or watch porn (last item questionable). I highly doubt people hacking their calculators will cut into revenue, if anything it will increase it by bolstering interest in the extended possibilities of their products.
Technophiles do not like to buy equipment they are legally castrated for modding or learning about the inner-workings.
When profit is valued more than satisfaction of customers...oh wait..*status quo* *status quo*.
The answer to the original question lies our government and legal system's ability to cease giving them the fucking pacifier every time they cry wolf.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Thank you EFF for confronting the corporate greed machine where it concerns this electronic frontier. Now we need to find lawyers to confront them on every other issue where citizens and consumers are ripped off and enslaved by corporate monoliths and their shareholders. People come first. Not Corporate interests. Wake up America. We need better elected officials, apparently.
whatthefuck?
If I buy a TI or anything else, how is that STEALING from the people that made it. they asked for a fair price, I paid. what difference does it make to them what I use it for once they have their money.
does that mean I can't install linux on my computer without being called a cyberterrorist?
I have an automotive screwdriver that was sold as an automotive screwdriver, not a...a... window...keeper-open...thing.
If Sears/Craftsman has a problem with that, tough. Same concept.
That's why those types of things are done with fuses, so that's it's virtually impossible to re-enable features that have been fused out. It's certainly impossible to do purely in software.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
I think you missed the sarcasm in the GP.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
The numbers they are distributing are the prime factors of the RSA key used by the calculators. The factors were determined by a general number field sieve calculation; this was effective because the keys are only 512 bits long.
The public key itself - the modulus - might be subject to copyright. However, the prime factors were never copied from TI - they were mathematically determined from the modulus. Attacking them because they distribute numbers mathematically derived from a copyrighted number is new legal territory.
If numbers derived from a calculation on a copyrightable number are themselves "derivative works" in the copyright sense, it would cause far-reaching problems well beyond calculators. For one thing, it would be illegal to distribute SHA-1 hashes of copyrighted material without permission.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Well, stick around some more, because it's not what the DMCA is designed to prevent.
As others have pointed out, you can only invoke the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA if the technological protection measures are controlling access to a copyrighted work. Simply bypassing a measure alone is not a violation of the DMCA.
In this case, they obtained keys that allow them to install custom software on the device. Where that software comes from may be a copyright issue, but that is not relevant to the overall matter of whether obtaining and using the keys is a violation of the DMCA. These keys control whether the hardware accepts given software; rather than controlling access to copyrighted software, the keys, in a manner of speaking, control the software's access to the hardware, so it's not a matter for the DMCA.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Because in the case of direct tv, you're paying for the service, not the hardware. If i go down to Best Buy and shell out $200 or whatever for a new TI-89 Titanium (my classic TI-89 is starting to look somewhat stayed...), then I never need anything from TI again. I take that thing, and I'm done. No real need to plug it into anything; TI doesn't beam the CAS down via CDMA wireless signal like some sort of Kindle thing.
Basically, with the calculator, the hardware itself is the FINAL PURCHASE, whereas with DirectTV, you're basically renting the hardware as a means to access a service, which is what you're actually paying for in the end. Cheating on what you're paying for as far as channels go is clearly wrong. Modifying a piece of hardware that once bought never needs to have any interaction with the mother company again is completely different.
Although a Ti-83 can definitely be enhanced by a custom OS, the usefulness of a Ti-83 would greatly decrease for students if custom OS's existed. On many standardized tests, including the SATs and ACTs, the tests specify which calculators are permitted for the test. They have a very specific list, based on which ones they think are not too powerful and would give an unfair advantage to a test taker. All ti-83's are allowed on either test for example. But if the makers of the test knew that people could have ti-83's that had undocumented, unfair functions (such as symbolic algebraic solving as in the ti-89), the test makers would most likely disallow these calculators. Why do you think TI still sells the Ti-83 plus, a calculator created in 1999? Certainly hardware abilities and processor speeds have greatly increased in the last 10 years. The reason is that test makers will not accept calculators with very powerful abilities. They want the student to solve the problem and not the calculator. When browsing calculators at education.ti.com, each calculator has a page called "exam acceptance" (ex. http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_ti83p.html?bid=2). That is because TI sells a large number of its calculators to students. The custom OS's could greatly hurt TI's reputation in the eyes of its biggest supporters: the test makers.
The "legal list of allowable calculators" is precisely why the scientific calculator development is pretty much stagnant. I have an HP50G but it is basically a repackaged HP48 with a marginally better screen. But even the 48G was not allowed in the last math class I took that allowed calculators.
I started using an HP28S in college back in 1988. Back then, many teachers did not know what the calculators were capable of. Of course, I had one professor who did, and in fact LOVED them, and so made the tests that much harder to be used in conjunction with said devices.
Anyway my point is the calculator manufacturers are definitely in a pickle. They can't make their calculators too good, or their primary market - college students - can't use them.
If people can hack the OS of "approved" calculators, you can, as you note, basically sneak in anything in what appears to be a normal calculator.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so"
~some skinny bald pacifist guy...
Point being, of course, that just because something is codified into law, doesn't necessarily make it right.
> The DMCA is a bad law, but it's not so broad as to say "everything to which a technology company with a market capitalization of over $10 million objects is henceforth illegal."
Don't worry. They plan to fix that whenever they get the chance...
Yes, Liberty is a very slippery slope. This is why the enemies of liberty try to avoid any compromise with it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Bye-bye sales for that line of calculators.
GOOD!
TI calculators are $5 of hardware sold for $100 because of preferential (bought and paid for) treatment given by schools. They follow the same disgusting model that textbook publishers use; it hurts students, and it's kept calculator tech advancement practically stagnant.
If you install Linux on your PC when it came with Windows, thus giving yourself a full development environment, when the PC itself didn't come with that software capability in the first place, then that's the same according to your rebuttal.
Installing a new OS on your TI or on your computer is more like buying the DirectTV dish then re-purposing it as part of some amateur radio operation, not unencrypting channels in DTV's data stream.
in the best tradition of American innovation.
Sir Frank Whittle (British) and Dr. Hans Von Ohain (German) - indepently invented the jet engine. ... ...
Sir Alexander Fleming (Scottish - discovered penicillin.
Leonardo da Vinci (Italian) - inventor, artist, mathematician, painter, etc. etc.
etc.
I fully support what the EFF do but innovation is not simply limited to America - can I suggest in future they use the adjective "human", rather than "American", in similar statements? Otherwise, they're just affirming the stereotype that many of we non-US residents have, namely that Americans have no interest in the world outside their own shores.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"The public key itself - the modulus - might be subject to copyright. "
If it is a *public* key it is meant to be copied.
In any case a key is just a number, how the heck can you copyright a single number in isolation?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
God I hate this sort of statement.
While the guys making hacks obviously know a bit about the technology as they managed to get something working.
That in no way makes them qualified software engineers or developers.
I regularly turn out a 'hack' in a weekend, then spend a month getting it production ready, testing it, trying everything I can think of to break it, then throwing every automated test (based on stuff our customers have done) at it, then double checking documentation, and plenty of other stuff that I don't have on the top of my head at the moment.
This is something the FOSS supporters and hackers of the world don't get, the 'writing the first draft of the software' part is the easy part, and its also puts you at about the 5 to 10% complete stage. Documentation, Quality Assurance and other bits of the presentation are actually far more important to the customer 9 times out of 10.
Making a hack is generally the easiest part of the entire development process, and just because you can make one, doesn't mean you're a developer or engineer, stop thinking it does. Its only a small part of the job.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But a checksum, unlike a book, is not a creative work. It's a mathematical result. Mathematical facts cannot be copyrighted.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain