"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

"Big Brother....is Watching YOU!" by Chaotic Good01 on Flickr (CC-BY)

David Pogue reports on his blog that Amazon has secretly pulled electronic copies of 1984 and Animal Farm purchased on its Kindle service:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

According to Amazon, the person who let Amazon sell the copies of the books in question didn’t have the rights to them:

“These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in an e-mail. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.”

Herdener said Amazon won’t handle things the same way in the future. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

It’s understandable for Amazon to be confused as to who holds what rights on these books; most of Orwell’s books are in the public domain in some countries — Australia is one example — but not, for instance, in the US or the UK. Even so, this incident only makes plain, for those who didn’t already know, the pitfalls of investing in closed systems like the Kindle Store and iTunes; there, not only do you have no rights to what you have purchased, but you may have no choice to unpurchase something, should they deem it necessary or desirable.

• New York Times blog entry
• CNet reporting on statement from Amazon

stephen_conroy by Dr Ron on Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Yesterday, Australian Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy unveiled a report that vowed to crack down on illegal filesharing:

“The Government recognises a public policy interest in the resolution of this issue,” the report said. “A number of submissions received during the consultation phase for the development of this paper argued that a role for Government exists in addressing the apparent popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing of music and movies, without the necessary permissions of the relevant copyright owners”.

The report goes on to outline submissions made to the department by various stakeholders.

“One solution proposed by copyright owners is a “three strikes” or “graduated response” proposal under which copyright owners would work together with ISPs to identify the ISP’s customers who are suspected of unauthorised file sharing and the ISP would then send a notice on behalf of the copyright owner to that customer advising of this allegation”.

Why does Conroy hate the Internet so much? First he tries to filter it, now this. One has to wonder if it beat him up and took his lunch money when he was a kid…

• iTnews.com.au article

Microsoft’s latest service pack for Office 2007, which included native support for OpenDocument, has been shown to have poor interoperability with other ODF-using applications. Rob Weir, Chief ODF Architect at IBM, showed, on his blog, the results of Office 2007 SP2’s attempts to read and write an ODF spreadsheet:

The new entry to the mix is Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, which has added integrated ODF support. Unfortunately this support did not fare well in my tests. The problem appears to be how it treats spreadsheet formulas in ODF documents. When reading an ODF document, Excel SP2 silently strips out formulas. What is left is the last value that cell had, when previously saved.

[...]

In the other direction, when writing out spreadsheets in ODF format, Excel 2007 SP2 does include spreadsheet formulas but places them into an Excel namespace. This namespace is not what OpenOffice and other ODF applications use. It is not the ODF 1.2 namespace. It isn’t even the OOXML namespace. I have no idea what it is or what it means. Not every ODF application checks the namespace of formulas when loading documents, but the ones that do reject the SP2 documents altogether. And the ones that do not check the namespace try and fail to load a formula since it is syntactically different than what they expected. The applications essentially display a corrupted document that is shows neither the formula nor the value correctly.

Mr. Weir did not test any other ODF document types, but not supporting formulae in ODF spreadsheets makes them next to useless, and thus the ODF support useless in a business environment. I have to wonder whether or not Microsoft did this deliberately to hamper adoption of ODF by businesses.

• Rob Weir’s blog post with detailed test results

The UK Intellectual Property Office has drafted proposals for dealing with “persistent” copyright infringers, particularly filesharers, as part of a discussion of the scope of a proposed UK Digital Rights Agency. The guidelines involve ISPs restricting the access of repeat infringers:

The new discussion piece, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions, in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked or users might find their service speeds seriously restricted[...]

One particularly interesting aspect of the new proposals is that it would not be limited to tackling unlawful peer to peer activity. Instead the DRA would be geared towards finding effective ways of reducing the overall levels of online copyright infringement over time, allowing for changing behaviours and technologies (i.e. it might tackle Newsgroups, FTP and other services where illegal usage takes place on a users account).

[...]

Typically all of these proposals rest on ISPs being able to reach some kind of agreement with the creative industry. Should that fail then the “less attractive” option would be for tougher measures to be introduced through legislation. “This would be necessary if there were little prospect of an effective rights agency,” says the paper.

So, essentially, the UK IPO wants to impose a kind of “three strikes lite” on their citizens. Never mind, of course, that a filesharer may want to download (or seed) a new version of Linux or talk with friends over Ekiga or something. She’s a *gasp* filthy filesharer! She’s not fit to interact with others online!

Imposing social rules through legislation rarely works out well.

• ISPreview article
• Link to paper (PDF, 448 kB)

"Money Clip Shuffle" by re-ality on Flickr (CC-BY)

Apple’s third iteration of the iPod Shuffle contains a nasty surprise for consumers — headphones with DRM:

[...]the new shuffle doesn’t fully work with any headphones except Apple’s. Because of what Apple has done here—something sneaky and arguably terrible for consumers, especially if it continues with other iPod and iPhone products in 2009—if you plug your old third-party headphones of any sort into the new shuffle, you’ll find that you can’t do anything with the device other than have it continuously play music, without volume controls or interruption, unless of course of you turn it off. Surprise: the only third-party headphones that will work are ones that haven’t even entered manufacturing yet, because they’ll need to contain yet another new Apple authentication chip, which will add to their price.

The EFF remarked on how little this had been covered by other reviewers:

One final thought: why have so many of the reviews of iPods failed to notice the proliferation of these Apple “authentication chips”? If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft “authentication chips” in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), I’d think reviewers would be screaming about it.

Yes, and rightfully so. Granted, Apple’s pulled shenanigans like this before, but having one pair of headphones just for your iPod Shuffle and one pair for everything else is ridiculous. Maybe people are becoming accustomed to being treated like crap by Apple. That’s a dangerous thought in and of itself.

• iLounge review pointing out the DRM (first paragraph after the second picture)
• EFF Commentary on the DRM

"The White House" by ktylerconk on Flickr (CC-BY)

On January 31st, Jamie Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, filed a US Freedom of Information Act request to the White House for documents relating to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Last Thursday, the request was denied, citing national security reasons:

Love had written in his original request on January 31–submitted soon after Obama’s inauguration–that the documents “are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public.”

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure.”

Apparently, lobbyists have more of a right to know what their government is doing than their own people, even when  the treaty would have dramatic impacts domestically. Love will have to sue to get the documents, and by the time it makes it out of trial it may be too late.

So much for change we can believe in.

• CNet article

Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), the political party to which French President Nicholas Sarkozy belongs, is being accused of copyright infringement by US indie band MGMT over using one of their songs:

The Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party paid a standard €53 fee ($75.54 Cdn.) to France’s music licensing body, but MGMT’s lawyer Isabelle Wekstein says that this was not enough to cover subsequent uses of the song, particularly on the Web.

The party has admitted to using the popular track, Kids, at its national congress in January, in two online videos and in political advertisements. But it claims this was an unintentional mistake and offered the band a symbolic €1 ($1.43 Cdn.) for copyright infringement.

Wekstein has rejected the offer, calling it insulting.

This is especially ironic, considering that UMP — and Sarkozy in particular — has been pushing for 3-strikes copyright legislation, railroading it through France’s legislature. I’m somewhat surprised that this issue was allowed to explode; one would think a large political party would have the resources to pay whatever licensing fees they needed.

• CBC story
• ZeroPaid’s take on the story

Green Tech -- Credit: jurvetson on Flickr (CC BY)

Two weeks ago, Representative John Conyers (D-MI14), along with 4 other Democrats in the US House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar federal agencies funding research from making open access a condition of federal funding, like has been done at the NIH:

If passed, the bill would essentially bar agencies of the federal government from requiring the transfer of copyright, whole or in part, as a condition for receiving public funding. That would prohibit measures like the recently enacted NIH public access policy, which requires investigators who accept taxpayer funds to deposit their final papers in the PubMed Central repository and give the agency a non-exclusive right to offer free access within a year.

HR 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, is a reintroduction of a House bill from last year, which was left to expire after committee hearings in Congress. The argument for that bill — which has changed little since last year — goes like this:

In his testimony, former Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman, said he didn’t “have a dog in this fight,” but clearly had a favorite breed: Oman bluntly told lawmakers that in his opinion, the NIH mandate would “destroy the market” for commercial scientific journals, and cause a “dilution” of copyright. Oman said that Congress directed the NIH to provide access “consistent with copyright law,” a phrase lobbied for and added to the NIH mandate by publishers, which the current policy does not do. Perhaps Zerhouni “misunderstood,” Oman said, noting that Congress directed him to address “public access” not “free public access.” In written testimony worthy of a presidential campaign TV commercial, Oman suggested that “the hairy snout” of government be kept out of science publishing, drawing a good-natured rebuke from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).

Open access policies benefit everyone, and the American taxpayer should have the right to see the fruits of their investment in the scientific community. The argument saying that this bill would bring open access policies into harmony with copyright law is nonsense; if the policy was violating copyright law, why didn’t the publishing companies sue for a remedy? This is a gimme for the publishing companies, and the people involved in sponsoring this bill should be ashamed of themselves. Why is it, with things like this, that the argument is always about the damage to business and never the damage to the public?

• Open Access News
• LibraryJournal.com
• LibraryJournal.com on last year’s hearings
• Bill Status at OpenCongress.org

SCO has posted in its winter 2009 news, “Blah. Blah. Blah.”

Winter 2009

Dear SCO Customers and Partners,

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Best regards,

Jeff Hunsaker
President & Chief Operating Officer
SCO Operations

I’m glad to see they are taking themselves seriously.  If you don’t know why I’m posting about SCO, take a month off and read all the Groklaw archives.  Oh, and notice that we’ve started using fail/win tags.

• SCO
• Boycott Novell