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TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, the Next Round
An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments has struck back against Nspire gamers and hackers with even stronger anti-downgrade protection in OS 3.0.2, after the TI calculator hacking community broke the anti-downgrade protection found in OS 2.1 last summer and the new one in OS 3.0.1 a month ago. In addition to that, in OS 3.0.1 the hacker community found Lua programming support and created games and software using it. Immediately, TI retaliated by adding an encryption check to make sure those third-party generated programs won't run on OS 3.0.2." But if you want it, you can get OS 3.0.2 here.
I believe it's related to them being certified tamperproof.. allowed in exams.. academia, their main customers etc etc
I remember when the community broke the TI-92. What did TI do then? Release an upgraded version of it and made it easier ton write in assembly. What happened, TI? I no longer need your calculator products, but this is a sad thing to see.
I run Ubuntu skinned to look like a Mac on a PC. Go figure.
*everyone* is trying to copy the iPhone these days
OK, so then perform an integrity check at boot. If the checksums don't match, display a message for 10 seconds. Invigilators can then confirm that the examinee has a clean device.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
The HP series of graphing calculators allow hacking and programming.
On the 50g, you can write in RPL, Saturn Assembly, C and ARM Assembly. It uses an ARM processor to emulate the Saturn processor that came in the 48.
While the 50g is not as nice physically as the 48gx in terms of keyboard, it's miles ahead of the 49. Stay away from the 49 and the 48gII.
--
BMO
I had a professor who had that mentality. I showed him how to program a calculator as a freshman, and he not only said that I deserve that advantage if I can write a program to compute a riemann sum, but if I wrote the source code on the exam he would count it as showing my work and give partial credit if I got the wrong answer.
As a non-programmer, which the test creators and proctors likely are as well, here is my train of thought:
1) Cool. Good solution.
2) Wait, that means we have to check every calculator.
3) There were ~100 students taking the SAT/ACT tests when I took them. About 20-30 students in my low level math courses in college. Decent time sink to have each student turn on the calculator, wait for the checksum, verify it, move to the next student. Waiting for students to turn off their calculators because there will always be some who jump the gun.
I had a TI, I loved the customization some could pull off. I just can't blame TI for wanting to perfect their device for their marketing niche. Still, couldn't TI just make a "Academia Certified" version with extra protection and their normal model for those who don't need it?
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
So it's a programmable calculator, but users are not allowed to actually programmed it?
I think calculators started to such around the point where the target audience was students doing exams that impose certain restrictions on calculators, instead of engineers.
I read before of a guy making a program that fakes the boot sequence to get around that kind of check..
which is totally what she said
Why would I want to buy a product from a company that so hates it's customers?
Two reasons: 1. If you don't buy one you can't do the homework and quizzes and thus fail the class. 2. If you pull out an Android device during downtime in class (even in flight mode) it gets confiscated by faculty, but if you pull out a TI product you're fine.
Why waste your time hacking a calculator that looks like it's from 1999?
I answered that in this comment.
IANAL but if, for example, Apple says, "You aren't purchasing an iPhone. You're purchasing a license to use the iPhone. By using it, you agree not to jailbreak the phone. If you do, we'll take you to court and you will have to pay us $2000 and can not use any other Apple products for five years."
While not very customer friendly, I don't see the difference between this and constantly trying to outsmart the hackers.
We don't live in Shouldland.
If you hack a calculator to cheat on an exam, you deserve that advantage, IMO.
The person who implemented the hack, sure, but what of the thousands afterwards who do nothing more than install it?
You have to check EVERY Calculator already to look for firmware revision. So how is this a problem? It's not like the older version added wrong, so running a older firmware will give me advantages that lazy test administrators will not bother to look at.
OH how about simply supplying the calculators for the test? Sounds like a better solution that all these highly educated nimrods cant seem to think of on their own.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just think about it for a moment; if someone managed to deliberately or accidentally bypass the maths integrity checks they could actually divide by zero and the whole universe would collapse in on itself - this would really ruin everyone's day.
AT&ROFLMAO
In high-school I wrote an arbitrary problem approximating algorithm for the TI-82 in its horribly broken calculator basic. Also, we wrote applications to play solitare, reversi, tetris, and a really crappy overhead shooter without resorting to assembly.
If you have ANY ability to program your calculator exposed, you have zero test integrity. Anything less than that is delusional. Whether that's Ti-Calculator Basic or a more modern programming language doesn't really matter.
As another example, the TI-92 I had in College was banned from the SAT's for having a QWERTY keyboard, yet the TI-89's shared the same internals without a keyboard and were OK. The difference? You had to press the "Function" key to type with a QWERTY equivalent. It's security theater.
The ______ Agenda
OH how about simply supplying the calculators for the test? Sounds like a better solution that all these highly educated nimrods cant seem to think of on their own.
This will only work if the school buys calculators for everyone at the start of the year that will be identical in operation to the ones handed out during exams. Else students risk having to spend the first part of an exam learning how to operate a new calculator.
Say $120 per calculator, plus $20 per year for service / replacements. Multiply by number of students at the high school.
Then add the exam calculators, which have to be either bought new or re-flashed and inspected before the exam (what if a last year's exam evil genius hacked his exam calculator and added an overloaded function giving wrong results for a certain type of operations? Too bad for next year's student)
Seems like you have hit on a viable but very expensive solution. Good luck getting the vote for that over, say, books or replacing broken chairs.
I just bought a pork joint, now the instructions on the packaging are very clear on how to roast the thing but I was going to dry rub it and then smoke it for a few hours. Does anyone know if pork comes with DRM to stop me doing that or will I get a DMCA takedown notice halfway through smoking?
Because their main customers are academic test producers who mandate TI calculators for use with the scan tron tests because they're less "hackable". This causes every student in high school to be forced to go out and buy one for use on the exams.
The enthusiast crowd isn't even a rounding error in that market, so it makes sense for TI not to care about them.
I am disappointed with TI. My first programming language was TI-BASIC on the TI-83 Plus. My second was assembly for the Z80 processor on that calculator. Both were supported by TI (the program used to transfer assembly programs from a computer to the calculator was produced and distributed by TI). It is the reason I chose to pursue computer science in college, and has made me the happy programmer I am today. It is sad TI does not want to allow today's youth the same opportunity through the same means.
And why should anyone trust that message? Can you be sure it was generated by the trusted firmware?
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Gamers, hackers and cheaters aren't their target customers. Schools are. TI loves schools. Hence it does everything to please them. Such as preventing tampering.
Remove and reinsert the battery. After that I'm sure you'll get a real boot.
the Nspire CX and CX CAS have hard-installed Li ion batteries -- not easily removed
Why are we teaching children to do jobs that can be done by computers? Computers are terrible and math and really good at calculation -- why don't we divide the effort (and hence the instruction) along those lines.
I'm not saying we shouldn't teach children to do arithmetic, but there's a limited amount of math instruction time available, and I don't think we should waste it being sure Johnny can manually calculate large bits of long division instead of teaching him what division might actually accomplish.
If you want to be sure Johnny understands the calculation, have him write a program for his calculator that does it. Once he can do that he clearly understands the manipulation required so there's no reason to make him keep doing manually it when there's a $0.03 device that can do the same thing faster and more accurately.
To me this all seems equivalent to teaching kids to farm using ox-powered plows rather than tractors -- yes, it's important to understand how it works, but it's not important to be able to actually do it efficiently once you've got that understanding.
Er, I wasnt aware you could do 3d graphing on LibreOffice calc, factor algebraic equations, solve for x, or any of the other basic things a good decent TI-82 equivalent can do (and those things are like 20 years old).
Octave appears to be a programming language, that is, that I cant simply plug in Y=3x+z^2 and get a graph. Hooray for reducing simplicity! Hooray for complexity for its own sake!
Seriously, it sounds like youre either trolling, or have never used a TI-82+ equivalent. They are easy enough for a budding 7th grader to use, powerful enough for real world use, and have a quite nice BASIC programming function (which I credit for getting me into the world of computers). And honestly, I dont know what math class would allow you to bring a laptop in, or why its fair to compare a $100 (new) TI or HP calc to a $450 laptop.
There's not a lot that one of the pieces of software I listed can't do.
Octave requires 4 lines for a 3D plot
http://math.jacobs-university.de/oliver/teaching/iub/resources/octave/octave-intro/octave-intro.html#SECTION00052000000000000000
But I LOVE the way you gibber on that I can't possibly have used a TI calculator having just dismissed Octave without doing a simple Google search. Way to be logically consistent.
There is a SHITLOAD of math software out there. Many of these pieces of software will overcome almost any limitation of your TI calc.
Here's a good one for simple graphing that I've used extensively some time ago (almost 2 decades! i started on the DOS version). Doesn't seem to be supported anymore but still works.
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~meredith/X(PLORE)/xplorepg.html
As for cost, a laptop will do a lot more than your calc - unless you're telling me your calc will edit photos and let you write email? So that extra couple of hundred dollars is well spent.
As for exams and laptops not permitted it isn't my fault or problem that Uni examinations are idiotic and set by lazy academics who don't know or care what counts in the real world - they're the same idiots who can't kick their 70s thinking that I was talking about in the first palce. By all means buy a calc to pass the test...but then don't complain the fucking thing isn't hackable.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why do students need graphing calculators to sit exams? My University specified a standard model for exams (I studied Physics), which they supplied during exams. You could buy one the same (cost was approximately $20, since it didn't do graphing or anything clever) if you wanted, but since all one needs is trig functions, perhaps some stats, and basic arithmetic. Everything else should likely be understood/remembered by the student since that's what exams are there to test.
Because it strengthens the part of the brain that does symbol manipulation. Learning to do long division quickly and accurately sets up the brain so it can do more complex algorithm's involving variables quickly and accurately.
OK, then TI could add a hardware "cut power" button (or simply a hardware power on/off switch). OK, in principle people could mess with the hardware as well, but if the button is installed in a way that it's hard to manipulate it without breaking or visibly damaging the calculator, it should be sufficiently tamper-proof.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
it's important to understand how it works, but it's not important to be able to actually do it efficiently once you've got that understanding.
How else do you test whether a student really understands how math works, if not by a proctored test free of computational aids?
I owned multiple graphing calculators in high school and college, and always had simple programs for some of the most common tasks (e.g. quadratic formula), which were immensely useful for checking my work (and occasionally a useful shortcut around actually doing anything, since the teachers didn't always look very closely). They're terrific tools, and I certainly wouldn't ever want to do quadratic equations in my head again. But what we're testing isn't the ability to do computation quickly, it's the ability to apply mathematical knowledge to solve a problem. If the tests are too computational, the solution is to make them more applied, not to dumb down the schooling even more. Besides, any student smart enough to program formulas into a calculator should have no problem doing them manually in a test setting; I certainly didn't.
I majored in physics. After freshman level courses we were NEVER asked to calculate a number. Everything was derived symbolically and the answer to a problem was a formula. That's really the hard part after all; plugging in numbers and getting a numerical answer is trivial.
Great plan, except you are one generation away from having no one capable of creating new algorithms for computers. If one cannot do it, one cannot tell the computer how to do it.
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we all did that in highschool.... the teacher would come around and reset each of our calculators, but we had an app that faked it so we wouldn't loose all the work we had been doing writing video games for the thing.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
As far as I understand, your main business is selling calculators for use in exams. You want the teachers to know that the calculators haven't been tampered with.
May I make a recommendation?
Make an external unit that quickly wipes a calculator's memory and resets the programming to factory default. For teachers that need a standardized calculator, this will be a deep blessing.
The students can bring home the school's calculators, to get used to them. Before an exam, the calculators can be wiped and re-passed out among students.
Symbolic integration requires a certain amount of 1. constancy and 2. ability to apply rules for symbol manipulation. Long division requires a certain amount of 1. constancy, and 2. ability to apply rules for symbolic manipulation. Symbols being just numbers rather than just numbers and variables, but a very similar process. You would not have been allowed in that class if you hadn't mastered long division. You practice Long division until you can do it quickly and accurately so you have the mental foundation and focus to move up. You don't teach long division because you need a student to do particularly well with Long division any more than Mr. Miyagi really needed his car waxed.