"205/365" by _rockinfree on Flickr (CC-BY)

On July 30th, a rather curious posting was made on United TI, a forum devoted to discussing Texas Instruments graphing calculators. The post, made by Benjamin Moody — known as “FloppusMaximus” on the site — gave the factors of a very large number. It was quickly deduced to be the RSA modulus of a key — particularly, one needed to sign the OS on a TI calculator — which Moody confirmed:

This one is for the TI-83+.

The TI-83+, like all modern TI calculators, has its OS cryptographically signed by TI for validation purposes; if someone tries to upload an unsigned OS — like, say, an open-source OS — into the calculator, it is rejected. Thus, the discovery of the signing key is a major breakthrough, which ticalc.org, a popular TI calculator site, makes clear:

With this achievement, any operating system can be cryptographically signed in a manner identical to that of the original TI-OS. Third party operating systems can thus be loaded on any 83+ calculators without the use of any extra software…Complete programming freedom has finally been achieved on the TI-83 Plus!

A few days ago, however, the original post was removed and replaced with this:

Dear community,

I have been politely asked to remove the former contents of this post.

No further explanation was given by Moody as to who asked him to remove the key or why it had to be removed. However, Brandon Wilson, a developer who reposted the key on his website, explained:

Ben was hit by TI with a DMCA notice as was I. We of course must comply with whatever is specifically requested, but you can’t stop a group of people from factoring large integers. I will not be silenced.

Wilson has posted the DMCA notice and his reply on his website. Meanwhile, a distributed computing project has been set up to use Moody’s brute-force methods to obtain the keys for all other TI calculators.

It seems pretty clear to me that TI is abusing the DMCA to maintain a stranglehold on their hardware. The key in question does not encrypt the OS, so it’s unclear how the key counts as a device to circumvent access controls on copyrighted works. You don’t need it to obtain a copy of the OS, as copies of the latest OS are freely downloadable on TI’s website. The only thing the keys are useful for is to be able to upload another OS onto the calculator such that it can be installed. One poster on the United TI forum drew parallels between this situation and the situation with iTunesDB, and I think that’s a valid point to make.

TI is not trying to protect their copyright, but merely trying to protect their lockdown on their hardware. If TI is really interested in promoting the education of young people, they should stop trying to harrass others whose only crime was to explore what they could do with the hardware they legally purchased.

• “Fun Number Theory Facts” thread on United TI Forums
• “TI-83 Plus OS Signing Key Cracked” — ticalc.org
• Brandon Wilson’s website containing the DMCA notices

Textbooks. Source: "just the ones i'm getting rid of" by Plutor on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

AOL Money & Finance reports that Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publishing company that publishes college textbooks under a semi-free license, will reach over 40,000 students at over 400 universities in the fall.

The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.

“We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and to 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”

While I would prefer a fully free license instead of a semi-free one (the books appear to be licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), this is still an improvement from the “traditional” model of overpriced physical textbooks that somehow manage to outdate themselves after only one year and digital versions or supplements that lock you in to a specific format or viewer and deny you the right of first sale.

• AOL Money & Finance

Textbooks. Source: "The reason I don't sleep at night..." by Amanda Munoz on Flickr. License: CC-BY 2.0.

Ars Technica reports that the state of California has started a project to write free digital textbooks for the state’s public schools. The project is focusing on high school math and science courses.

Schwarzenegger has tasked California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas with making sure that the new textbooks are ready for deployment in fall 2009. Thomas will be collaborating with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the president of the State Board of Education.

Public education is costly in California and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the state government’s annual budget. The state’s current financial woes have forced Schwarzenegger to search for ways to cut some of the fat out of school spending.

“As California’s budget crisis continues we must find such innovative ways to save money and improve services,” said Governor Schwarzenegger in a statement. “California was built on innovation and I’m proud of our state’s continued leadership in developing education technology. This first-in-the-nation initiative will reduce education costs, help encourage collaboration among school districts and help ensure every California student has access to a world-class education.”

This is great news, however it is worth noting that the article points out a number of roadblocks in California’s school system with regard to textbooks. Hopefully these can be overcome, although that will be a huge battle. Even so, education, whether K-12 or higher, desperately needs free (libre) resources, and it’s good to hear that California is stepping up and starting this initiative.

• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

Looks like YouTube is testing allowing users to post their work to their site under a Creative Commons license. Only official registered partners can participate in the pilot. They are also working on downloadable content, both gratis and for a fee paid with Google Checkout. It looks like the videos won’t be encumbered with digital restrictions management. I can certainly imagine the awful irony of CC’d works being put under the lock and key of DRM when you download them.

Will the downloads be subject to digital rights restrictions management (DRM)?
- For this pilot test, all videos will be downloaded in MP4 format, which is not DRM-managed.  Users will be subject to certain legal restrictions, dependent on the license a partner has chosen for their downloads.

They are offering four licensing options:

1. BY-NC-ND
2. BY-NC-SA
3. BY
4. PD

In an effort to promote the sharing of information, we are testing free downloads of YouTube videos from Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV (broadcasting programs from throughout the UC system). YouTube users who are traveling or teachers who want to show these videos in classrooms with limited or no connectivity should find this particularly useful.

I’ve always been annoyed when teachers show us grainy YouTube videos in class, and sometimes when the network is congested buffering can take a while. Maybe the downloadable videos will fix this.

• YouTube blog post
• Creative Commons blog post
• Information about becoming part of the pilot program

Most of you know about or have used Blackboard. Blackboard has been actively involved in pursuing and enforcing aggressive patent and IP policies. Thankfully, there are several open-source alternatives that provide similar functionality: Moodle and Sakai.

The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-sourceSakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Most surprisingly, our very own Virginia Tech has been working on a customized implementation of Project Sakai. It’s called Scholar and is accessible to anyone with a VT pid. At least one person I talked to had used this CMS in their classes. Does anyone else know more about this project?

Scholar is an innovative and robust collaboration and learning management system. Designed by higher education for higher education, it offers tools in support of teaching and learning, research and collaboration, and assessment/accreditation projects.

An example of open clipart. Credit: Chrisdesign

The Open Clipart Library is a very interesting project that contains artwork and clipart licensed under CC or PD.  From the site:

This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons.

I think this is a compelling add-on to the OpenOffice suite if someone is interested in writing one.  Using clipart from the site would a be very nice way to encourage use of CC’ed material.

• Open Clipart Library

Device Guru reports that Stanford has offered up 10 free courses under the title of “Stanford Engineering Everywhere.” The courses are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported.

Course participants do not register, and have no direct contact with Stanford instructors or professors. They do, however, have the ability to communicate online with other SEE students. A detailed SEE FAQ is available here.

The University says SEE’s initial courses include “one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.”

The license under which the courses are being released is the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. According to the University, this license stipulates that “original content [can] be the remixed, tweaked, and built into new non-commercial content as long as the original source is credited and the new creations are distributed under the identical terms.”

As noted, the courses are nearly identical to the ones offered to Stanford’s registered students. However, some content has been omitted in cases where a copyright holder’s consent could not be obtained for releasing the material under the Creative Commons license. There are also “a few other exceptions,” according to the University.

I would have preferred a freer license, but this is certainly a huge step forward. Let’s hope more universities follow suit.

• DeviceGuru
• Stanford Engineering Everywhere
• Slashdot

Virginia is going to make a free physics textbook (or flexbook) that will be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike.

“We need to move instructional materials from the 19th century into the 21st century. The CK12 approach can reduce the cost of instructional materials while making them more customizable for each locality and each student,” said Neeru Khosla, Founder of CK12. “This pioneering effort by Virginia will help students in Virginia and elsewhere get better prepared for tomorrow’s world. We are very excited about this partnership.”

“As Chairman of the JCOTS Open Education subcommittee, I applaud the efforts of the Kaine Administration in the creation of this physics ‘Flexbook’,” said Senator John Watkins. “This aligns with our subcommittee’s efforts to bring our educational content into the 21st century and I am hopeful that this will be replicated across other disciplines.”

Go Virginia!

• technology.va.gov
• Slashdot

The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning has released v1 of their Open Educational Resources for Educators handbook.

The actual handbook isn’t so mini—though it weighs nothing at all in the virtual world, the printed version is a hefty 269+ pages. But you don’t have to print it out; you can access it in various forms for free on the web: as it currently exists on WikiEducator or as black and white or full color pdf’s on Lulu.com.

The OER Handbook for Educators is the collaborative result of various contributors, ultimately authored by Seth Gurell and edited by David Wiley. Its aim is to serve as an introductory guide to educators on open educational resources: how to “find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom.” The handbook is an especial eye-opener for those new to the world of open education. However, it is also useful for more seasoned OER creators and users, grappling with such topics as “The Copyright Paradox”—because we all know that copyright is no simple matter.

The handbook itself is licensed CC BY-SA, so go check it out! If your connection is slow, don’t worry: the black and white graphics are just as stunning as their full color counterparts.

Yay!  I want to give hard copies to the educators I know.

• Creative Commons
• WikiEducator
• Lulu

The LA times has printed an article on free/open textbooks.

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven’t looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away — online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

…

Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices.

McAfee is a leader in his academic field, a featured speaker at the Yahoo Big Thinkers India conference in March. Tall and genial, he dresses in khakis, a polo shirt and geeky river sandals. A coauthor of the best-selling book “Freakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, has described him as brilliant. What McAfee is not is anti-capitalist.

“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” McAfee said.

…

Just mention textbook prices to university students and the response is outrage and a willingness to switch to online readings.

OER is slowly gaining mindshare, but they are doing it. It’s very good to see.

• LA Times
• Slashdot