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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.'"
"Hobbyists are taking their own tools and making them better, in the best tradition of American innovation"? I think you misspelled "Pirates and cyber-terrorists are stealing money from TI's hardworking engineers at virtual gunpoint."
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?
Or maybe they'll change the startup screen to say "58008" upside down
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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?
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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."
All sorts of companies produce the exact same hardware and then have a registry bit/flag hidden somewhere to enable the more expensive features. nVidia and their Quadro cards comes to mind... Or Intel and their underclock/overclock crap... the chips are identical, one is stamped with a different number and frozen at a different multiplier.
TI probably has some features disabled or unavailable in their lower-end models, hack the software, and lo and behold, the actual hardware can probably do most of the same stuff the more expensive model can. I can see why they wouldn't want people *SHARING* this information with the general public.
Actually, come to think of it, if TI loses on this one, I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all, it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
"Computer" and "development platform" are fancy words for "calculator" and "programmable calculator", respectively.
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.
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.
The DMCA is totally ridiculous, but it's the only thing TI can grasp onto in this situation. TI graphing calculators are the de facto standard for many high school and university level math classes. It's easy to verify that one has had the memory erased when it's in an untampered state. Of course there are somewhat sneaky ways to make it look like it's been erased without close inspection, but performing the reset in front of someone made it almost a certainty. If the hack causes schools to move away from such an "untrustworthy" device, TI stands to lose many sales of those overpriced gadgets.
in the best tradition of American innovation
But how can this be innovation if no-one is making any money from it?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
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
A prime number can represent information which is forbidden to possess.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
This goes back about a decade to the AACS encryption key controversy.
Actually, come to think of it, if TI loses on this one, I'm quite eager to start 'testing' satellite TV signals again... After all, it's just some keys used for signing, right? I purchased my hardware receiver for money, right? Quite the slippery slope, isn't it?
Yes. Finding keys on smartcards in order to watch TV program you haven't paid for is the same as finding keys on a calculator so you can put your software on it.
Man, you are a fucking genius.
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.
Not really. The argument about the AACS key was not that the number itself was copyrighted, but rather that the number was the means to circumvent the protection measures controlling access to a copyrighted work. Thus, distribution of the number was a violation of the DMCA.
I'm not aware of anyone claiming that the number itself was copyrighted. Some people have suggested that line of argument in this case, but if TI really wanted to pursue this in court, they'd have to register the signing key with the copyright office (you have to do this prior to starting litigation). I'd really like to see them try to register a small number!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
You can code equations to your heart's content for the calculators, but IIRC the SAT people walk around and force you to clear the memory before the exam. The same rules probably apply to other tests, too. Of course, nothing is preventing someone from coding an app that makes it just look like it cleared the memory, because the test proctors make only a cursory inspection.
SSC
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.
Here are the three keys: TI-83 (Plus): n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0 AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE 83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3 47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7 EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927 6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1 e=11 TI-84 (Plus): prp77 factor: 67070508990537181066342707695603050521324524613874331879259881495826493920589 prp78 factor: 186923771200711284770368041572205320486346816476524340240220962467860568859381 n=EF5FEF0B0AB6E22731C17539658B2E91E53A59BF8E00FCC81D05758F26C1791CD35AF6101B1E35 43AC3E78FD8BB8F37FC8FE85601C502EABC9132CEAD4711CB1 p=94489014C63CC9E1E1ADB192DBBDD1F78F90A630DA9C86EFC4CBCA44E5B4D54D q=19D431AF2794229620B884E3750D622D1C74F2E4569DC15486FC8D5A3BCDFE2F5 d=2A3E1B2010F318D9BD7C7E19300980B055A0E2A9554B77E7142E23CDF7C7CA13C233A3D462FDFC 968B1F9CEAF2AC2CF305147992AD9E834192ACEBB517DB9941 e=11
TI - 89: prp76 factor: 2231124525637629443181963045297394875470510167130210300957267082210173784611
prp79 factor: 3226885534240147415018248397410101286362761128614350056368675111071170873486957
TI-83 (Plus): n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0 AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE 83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3 47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7 EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927 6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1 e=11
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.
When I took statistics exams 10 years ago we had a choice of using the exam board's printed tables or our calculators for values of the normal, Student t and chi-squared distributions. It's tricky. In "real life" you're going to use the calculator: it's easier than the table and gives more significant figures. On the other hand, if you used the full accuracy of the value provided by the calculator and then rounded to the specified number of significant figures at the end then sometimes you would differ by 1 ulp from the figure obtained with the less precise value in the tables (which was also the figure specified in the marking scheme, at least for the mock exams we took).
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.