My C&D experience

[FloppusMaximus]

Hi again, everybody. Some of you have probably wondered about my relative absence over the past few days.

Yes, I was contacted by TI. No, it was not the same letter that Brandon received. I don't know about Brandon's, but my letter was hand-delivered (thankfully not by a guy in black suit and sunglasses, but it was a bit unsettling nonetheless. ) It would appear that TI is not too happy about having their calculator keys factored; they have asked me not to participate in any future discussions on the subject. I think TI's position here is regrettable, but I also understand and respect it.

I honestly don't know whether I, or anyone else here, could have been violating the DMCA (or DADVSI, for that matter. ) It seems to me to be a somewhat ambiguous legal area. But in any case, TI has made it clear how they feel on the matter, and I have no intention of arguing with them about it.

This is not a "why-the-DMCA-sucks" thread. If you want to talk about that, then - for the Americans out there - I would suggest you take up the matter with your friendly neighborhood Congressman (202-224-3121.)

[JoeYoung]

No copy of the letter?

[brandonw]

I was starting to worry you were in a hole somewhere. I'm glad to hear everything's okay.

I can certainly understand as well, but they can bite me.

I hope you're not shaken from further participating in the community...I'm looking forward to that TI-81 ROM dump!

EDIT: I also want to state I'm sorry that this happened to you, but it's very big and you certainly won't be forgotten for it, and the community and I thank you very much for starting this. I have to apologize if I made it worse by spreading your name around...hopefully that's not the case.

EDIT 2: Where do you live? I'm curious how far they sent a guy to deliver that.

[DigiTan]

How the?...

*Scratches head*

How the hell did they FIND you?

[FloppusMaximus]

DigiTan: I've wondered about that myself. I'm not sure I want to know.

Brandon: I'm certainly not going anywhere. I have a few other TI-related projects (such as TilEm) that have not gotten enough attention of late, so there's nothing to worry about there.

Also, I live in Newton, Massachusetts. There, now everybody knows. :)

metagross: Perhaps I'll send a copy of it to chillingeffects at some point.

[Graphmastur]

Okay. From what I can see here, we have 2 options.

The first one involves someone going to court. (1... 2... 3... NOT ME!)

The second is a little more interesting, and favorable. It involves TI releasing a special key to sign third party OS. The problem is, that the issue still remains if TI doesn't want us to do minor patches to the TIOS. (This seems to be the case, considering the DMCA copyright notice.). If so, someone would need to contact them, and convince them that we would be writing from scratch. Then, the DMCA is nullified, because we aren't trying to circumvent the protection of TI's OS, in order to modify it. (bye OS2....)

[Lionel Debroux]

Well, a new key for signing anything means extra installation work (a certificate file, or a program exploiting the OS for writing the key into the certificate memory) for users, while factoring the public keys enables zero-hassle install of arbitrary OS and FlashApps.

A third option is finding a way to make TI release all of their current keys before our hundreds of cores factor them all (I'm not the inventor of that idea). Perhaps I can be proved wrong, but, uh, _I_ have extremely little hope for someone finding a way to make TI release their keys: TI are clearly considering those RSA keys crucially important, otherwise they wouldn't send C&D and DMCA takedown notices about them !

[Mapar007]

[DarkerLine]

They'd need to know more than that, presumably: at least the location, specific enough that there's nobody there with the same name (it would be embarrassing to deliver the notice to the wrong person). This is probably information you'd be able to find by trying hard enough (e.g. on this thread) but I'm kind of surprised they did that (instead of just sending an email notice).

[Mapar007]

Yeah sorry, I was in "Belgium spirit". It's such a small country here that if your last name is uncommon enough, there's little chance that there are too many people with the same name out there. But you're right. My primary school's site mentions me, for example, in a school's news message of 'bout 8 years ago, that kind of things occur and can really help to vaguely track one's location.

[ztrumpet]

[Graphmastur]

[Michael]

[Graphmastur]

So if we were to go to court, we would win it, only if we convince them we would create our own os. Correct?

[FloppusMaximus]

I never understood what the deal was with "removing the Finance app." It's not an app, it's just a collection of built-in OS functions that didn't fit anywhere else, so they got stuck in the apps menu. It's not as if removing the menu item would magically make the OS smaller.

[brandonw]

Me neither, but I think that they think it's taking up a 16KB app slot (which of course is nonsense).

[Michael]

Don't ask me either, but people loved that feature when I added it to Omnicalc.

[Graphmastur]

I liked it simply, because I didn't have to scroll to see my other apps.

[Lionel Debroux]

Modding their proprietary, copyrighted OS is indeed illegal in most Western countries. Factoring the RSA keys in order to ease the transfer of third-party OSs that have nothing to do with TI's copyrighted OS has the side effect of making TI-OS mods easier... well, they have to live with that !

I'm convinced that if TI was more community-minded, with a better-documented OS, more open platforms and TI-Cares less sleepy (or losing less mails), factoring TI's public RSA keys would have been a LOT less necessary.
No matter what some North American schools would like (locked-down calculators), I'd argue that openness is in their business interest, as the relative openness of TI-Z80 and TI-68k for user-space development in C/ASM (compared to a number of models from other manufacturers) is what increased TI's sales, and the closedness of Nspire (coupled to sub-par BASIC programming) is that makes them undesirable for end users !

[Super Speler]

Seems like some interesting stuff has been going on.

I'd be a little weirded out if I got a hand delivered letter like that though.