"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

[Judge] Patel said the RealDVD software violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that prohibits the circumvention of encryption technology. DVDs are encrypted with what is known as the Content Scramble System, and DVD players must secure a license to play discs. RealDVD, she ruled, circumvents technology designed to prevent copying.

But the decision, although mixed, left open the door that copying DVD’s for personal use “may well be” lawful under the fair use doctrine of the Copyright Act, although trafficking in such goods was illegal.

“Because RealDVD makes a permanent copy of copyrighted DVD content, there is no exemption from DMCA liability, statutory or otherwise, that applies here. Whatever application the fair use doctrine may have for individual consumers making backup copies of their own DVDs, it does not portend to save Real from liability under the DMCA in this action,” Patel wrote (.pdf) in a lawsuit brought by Hollywood.

Glickman praises this decision in the article, as if RealDVD would be of any use to those who wish to violate copyright on DVDs by making copies for others to use, or its prohibition will stop others from ripping movies with other software instead, without seeming to consider that such actions may be causing the very infringement the MPAA claims to be fighting against. No doubt many people get their DVD-purchased films from sources unsanctioned by Hollywood because they are unaware of or don’t know how to use DVD ripping software with their own discs (or because they might consider a $150,000 civil fine a lighter sentence than 5 years in prison). The long-established process of CD ripping gives them the belief that their acts are not in violation of copyright (or that their violation is justified) due to their purchase of the DVD. Removing the DRM on DVDs could very well reduce this behavior, as the awareness of rippers would increase and the lack of legal concern could lead to easier and more efficient ripping technologies. It could also make Hollywood stop looking like they believe we are still in a world where CSS is a barrier to DVD access.

• Wired.com
• Slashdot

Mi Escritorio en Archlinux. - Credit: BiatoNotUnix on Picasa (CC BY SA)

The latest iteration of the multi-platform desktop environment has been released.

KDE 4.3 (Codename: “Caizen”) Delivers Incremental Innovations to the Free Desktop Users and Software Developers

4 August, 2009. The KDE Community today announces the immediate availability of “Caizen”, (a.k.a KDE 4.3), bringing many improvements to the user experience and development platform. KDE 4.3 continues to refine the unique features brought in previous releases while bringing new innovations. With the 4.2 release aimed at the majority of end users, KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office.

This release is truly worlds apart from the highly controversial 4.0 release. If you were put off by the earlier releases I would say now is the time to give KDE another shot. Congratulations to the KDE community on this great release.

• Slashdot
• Release Announcement

Phone Struck by Lightening - Credit: david.nikonvscanon on Flickr (CC BY)

eBay may have to shut down Skype, because parts of its code is still owned by the original owners.

eBay has since been licensing the technology from the founders’ new company, Joltid, but the pair recently decided to revoke the licensing agreement.

The matter is now the subject of a legal battle in the English High Court of Justice, with eBay trying to force Joltid to let it continue using the technology.

In a quarterly report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, eBay said in no uncertain terms that if it lost the right to use the software it would most likely have to shut Skype down.

eBay said it was working on developing ‘‘alternative software’’ to that licensed through Joltid, but this ‘‘may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive’’.

Death to Skype (or at least its proprietary protocol/code).

• The Age
• Slashdot

Waves. Source: "scope" by noii's on Flickr. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Google has released two parts of its Wave protocol under the Apache License version 2.

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation. The prototype is intended primarily as a simple “hello, world” implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code — nearly 40,000 lines of Java code — is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we’ll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Hopefully Google will make good on their promise to release more code in the future.

• Google Wave Developer Blog
• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

Blackboard. Source: shonk on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

The Washington Business Journal reports that all 38 contested claims in Blackboard’s e-learning patent have been invalidated on appeal of the Desire2Learn infringement case.

“Blackboard is obviously disappointed with the Federal Circuit’s decision and will seek further judicial review,” said Matthew Small, chief business officer for Blackboard (NASDAQ:BBBB). “Meanwhile, claims 39-44 of the 138 patent remain valid and enforceable. These claims were not at issue in the appeal.”

Even though Blackboard won just more than $3 million in damages from a jury trial in the U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Texas in February 2008, that court also found 35 of 38 claims of the patent to be invalid.

A good victory against bad patents, even if a number of claims remain valid. Blackboard is still proprietary and still has a horrible UI, so if you are still in the process of ditching it, I would continue to do so.

• Washington Business Journal [Print Version]
• Slashdot

"Shuttle Launch" by oneaustin on Flickr (CC-By-SA-2.0)

Released under the AGPLv3, Launchpad is now Free Open Source Software.

Karl Fogel writes on the Launchpad Blog:

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to for a long time:

Launchpad is now open source!

We released it today under the GNU Affero General Public license, version 3. Note that although we had previously announced that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included — all the code is open.

Big congratulations (and thanks) to the Canonical Launchpad team, who worked overtime to make this happen sooner rather than later, and to Mark Shuttleworth, whose decision it was to open source Launchpad in the first place.

I’ve been waiting for this a good deal of time now, and I’m sure many others have been too. I favor the Bazaar VCS over git, so I’ll have no second thoughts using launchpad for any future application development.

• Entry on Launchpad Blog

"Google Chrome browser on Linux" by sermoa on Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Google has announced that Google Chrome, their web browser, will be using a new open-source algorithm for diffing binaries of software updates. The algorithm, called Courgette, produces binary diffs roughly 10% the size of those created by bsdiff, the diffing algorithm they used previously:

Rather than push put a whole new 10MB update, we send out a diff that takes the previous version of Google Chrome and generates the new version.  We tried several binary diff algorithms and have been using bsdiff up until now.  We are big fans of bsdiff – it is small and worked better than anything else we tried.

But bsdiff was still producing diffs that were bigger than we felt were necessary.  So we wrote a new diff algorithm that knows more about the kind of data we are pushing – large files containing compiled executables.

This is great news, especially for those on slower connections. However, even though they’ll be open-sourcing the code for the algorithm, I have to wonder about the patent situation. Does Google have any patents on the algorithm itself and, if so, will they agree not to enforce them?

• Announcement on Chromium Blog
• Chromium Dev article with technical details

There is a free implementation of an NX server based on NoMachine’s libraries named FreeNX, but this did not appeal to Google.

“FreeNX’s primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain,” according to Google.

“Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries.”

Neatx is written in Python with a time-critical process written in C and some wrappers in bash script.

Good to see Google contributing some code again.

• Neatx’s Google Code page
• TechWorld article

Carthaginian - Credit: wildfiregames.com

Wildfire Games has decided to make their work-in-progress RTS game 0 A.D. free content by releasing the source code under the GPL v2 and putting all of the artwork for it under a CC-BY-SA license. While it is not yet playable, the developers hope to attract new developers to the project:

We’ve been working on this game in some form or another since 2001. We’ve come a long way since then, but making this kind of game is really quite hard. The original team members were largely students, and have now moved on in life and can’t devote much time to the project. Attracting new developers is difficult and time-consuming – few people have the time and skill to learn how to work within our existing code and to make significant contributions. So we want to lower the barriers to entry, making it easy for people to check out our project and see if it interests them, in the hope that some will decide it does.

While Wildfire’s initial contribution is free content, whether or not future contributions will fall under that category is up in the air at the moment:

Licensing of contributions is an open question. On one hand, accepting GPL code would guarantee to contributors that we’re not going to unfairly use their work. On the other hand we’d like to keep our options open by only accepting BSD-licensed code, perhaps to produce a special version linked with proprietary cheat-detection software to discourage multiplayer map hacks that would be trivial to add to an open-source game, or to link with proprietary digital distribution systems to get more widespread distribution. The ideal solution is not clear, so we’d be interested in discussion of this issue.

The cynic in me wants to say that they’re doing this to revive a dying project that lacks developers, but even if that were true, this is a significant contribution to the free content gaming world, especially since the current offering of open content strategy engines don’t look nearly as good as 0 A.D. does. I’m a bit wary of the licensing of future contributions, but they seem open to discussion about keeping it free. Time will tell, I guess.

• Phoronix article
• 0 A.D. open source page