OS 3.2 blocks Ndless

[critor]

Since may 2011, the TI-Planet admin team (Adriweb, Levak, Lionel Debroux and me) has had privileged contacts with TI, but didn't stop working/newsing on Ndless and related things. We didn't sell our souls but tried to make everyone benefit from those contacts, both the TI community and TI.

It seems that we failed at trying to give TI a different opinion of the TI community, we have to admit it.



Adriweb from the TI-Planet admins is currently in Chicago for the T3 conference and met Melendy Lovett, the 2nd most important person in TI.

Melendy Lovett told him they had to block Ndless to avoid having to deal with tools which for example, would run a CAS OS on a non-CAS Nspire, or which would attack the PTT mode.
(edit by Adriweb : These are examples that I myself refer to, I don't think she was the one to bring these examples in.
What she insisted on, and I think it's fair to write about this here, in order to have some objectivity, is that TI is liked "ruled" by its clients, and its main clients are teachers and schools. Meaning that they have to make what teachers want, and they listen to teachers and what they say. Since TI and the teachers are really close, TI can't really allow multiple opposite "development directions", and rather than do as what the community would like, they have to align with what the teachers want, most often. The thing is that there is a real trust relationship between TI and the teachers, and TI thus can't lose this trust by providing tools/devices that can (in the bad case, but since it's a possibility that cannot be marginal, it has to be said) not be trusted because some people can crack it and do things they normally wouldn't be able to do. As teachers want to feel safe about TI products, TI has to provide such products, that's why they try to block Ndless at each update : "protect the teachers" to avoid losing the trust they have established.)

Except that no such tools exists. Did she forget everything that happened (or didn't happen) between TI and its community in the last 10 months?

The OSlauncher from Ndless2 from may 2011 just doesn't run with Ndless3, and no tool I know of has ever attacked the PTT mode on the TI-Nspire.



The TI community hasn't released such tools.
So are we accused of what we haven't done?

In my opinion, blocking Ndless for such reasons a mistake. Such blocking might bring hate on most TI forums in the world... And, it wouldn't surprise me if some people started to develop and release such similar tools now...



Be very careful when OS 3.2 is released, as it might upgrade your calculator without asking for your advice - indeed a "force update" option in the TI-Nspire software update request reply has been discovered, and has allways been set to "no" up to now.



See this TI-Planet news about Ndless 3.1 being blocked in OS 3.2:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=121287#p121287



It's a sad day for the TI commmunity, as no way has been found up to now to Ndless OSes 3.0.1/3.0.2.
Meaning that TI might be very close to a secure OS, and just made a little error in the 3.1.0 OS update code.

If that error is fixed in OS 3.2 and if downgrading is blocked, that would mean that Ndless would disappear for months, years, or even forever.

As it still might be possible to downgrade classic Nspire to 3.1 by keeping (or reinstalling) Boot2 1.4 with TNOC or an RS232 interface, there is no such trick to bypass the downgrade protection without Ndless on a  CX Nspire as far as I know.



What can we do?
Maybe just write to TI.

The message that should have been read by Melendy and her team can be found below:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/download/file.php?id=127

Seems our message was not understood - so knowing what didn't work, you could try sending them different messages which could work.
It's our last hope: we have something like 2-3 months to convince them.

UPDATE (by DJ): Removed broken image link (and hoping this OS doesn't contain this)

UPDATE (by critor): Fixed broken image link.

Update (by Adriweb) :
Here's a photo of me (and Peter Balyta). You can see my TI-planet T-shirt 

[Jim Bauwens]

At least Ndless 3.1 will have a little time to live.

[Snake X]

They might have anticipated that we were going to perhaps in the future write these tools? I think that's what they were going after

[critor]

And the chances for such tools to be written just got much higher...

[jwalker]

they definately did.

[Snake X]

Well I mean as in to block any potential that they might be written prior to their decision to block it. I understand if they didn't want CAS on non-cas calculator's, but I think it was a lack of communication how we may have never intended to deliver such things

[alberthrocks]

Well, we can always go ahead and crack RSA keys...

Nevertheless, I think this shouldn't be considered the end-all, be-all. No one was able to launch a rocket or get someone on the moon the first time, but each step along the way there was progress. The fact that we can talk to the insiders at TI - not just via email, but IN PERSON - is pretty significant! No one with the Casio community has achieved that, AFAIK. (I could be wrong, though )

That said, we shouldn't expect open arms from TI soon, so we shall march forward with Ndless 3.2
Our relationship is just like that of the iOS jailbreaking community and Apple - the devs love the 3rd party development, but they are forced to act in accordance with the higher-ups at Apple unless they change their mind. And of course, the best part: the jailbreakers, no matter what bugs Apple fixes, never give up.

We have a pendulum building momentum - why not use it to our advantage? Ndless 3.1 is great enough for nearly all of us here, and we can develop platforms and apps that attract many users and developers alike. The motivation that results from that is the same that empowers many iOS hackers to find exploits to jailbreak the device! And besides, no one is going to update to 3.2 that fast anyways - it's not like Apple, where you hear about OS updates in every newspaper, magazine, TV show... **

So let's move forward with Ndless3, don't do anything to piss off TI, and who knows - we might agree to get the best of both worlds!

** I don't know if the TI-Nspire Student Software has a built-in functionality for checking for updates. It all depends whether or not the student uses the software.

[Jim Bauwens]

** I don't know if the TI-Nspire Student Software has a built-in functionality for checking for updates. It all depends whether or not the student uses the software.

It has, together with a force update toggle.
I've set up a system that will check if this is set to "true" and report it to some advance members here.

Also, people who buy a new Nspire will be forced to 3.2.

[willrandship]

I've noticed that I can still easily crash my calculator by causing overflows in program outputs. Strings, arithmetic and such throw resource exhaustion, but often the programs will not (sometimes they do, it depends on how you fill up the space)

Is there any chance that could be used as an exploit? If there was, then maybe TI would fix it It's annoying.

[Lionel Debroux]

Snake X: CAS on non-CAS calculators is a side effect of native code, OSLauncher and DummyOS, all of which are fully legal (and about which manufacturers). It's not our fault if TI's CAS OS can run unmodified on calculators sold as non-CAS, but perfectly CAS-capable.

alberthro: compared to the iOS / PS3 / Wii / whatever jailbreaking communities, the Nspire jailbreaking community has a significant handicap: hardly anybody gives a damn about the platform, and that's a shame.
The fact is that two years after the public release of Ndless 1.0, we have no reasonably complete graphics library, no usable C++ programming, no usable program loader with transparent relocation support, no usable Linux port... and the list of things that do not exist, or exist only as prototypes, goes on and on. And unlike the jailbreaking communities I mentioned above, we don't have sizable sets of vulnerabilities (belonging to different classes) ready for exploitation on the next OS/firmware version, should it fix the currently used vulnerability.

And TI has lots of ways to nag people into upgrading the existing calcs, the largest of which are the upgrade checking and nagging code built into TINC(L)S, and backwards-incompatible documents. Soon after the release of the new OS, brand-new calculators will have the new OS, and probably the anti-downgrade protection.
The end result is that native code programming will belittle immediately upon the release of the OS; in fact, it will probably even belittle way before the actual release of the OS - because having to spend time upgrading our work to newer OS versions is very demotivating of a task...

[Deep Thought]

Nevertheless, I think this shouldn't be considered the end-all, be-all. No one was able to launch a rocket or get someone on the moon the first time, but each step along the way there was progress. The fact that we can talk to the insiders at TI - not just via email, but IN PERSON - is pretty significant! No one with the Casio community has achieved that, AFAIK. (I could be wrong, though )

Except that there aren't people on the moon actively trying to prevent our landing there

I wonder if things might be easier to sort out if a TI employee joined one of the big forums. That way it'd be easier to contact them, and there wouldn't be multiple individual, differing complaints to their representatives when we do decide to send a couple of emails.

I know there was one person from TI who joined on UTI, but he seemed to have turned away when there was a problem with verifying his account. Maybe we could invite someone there to join us, like Austin_Casio did from Casio (if only to post some clarifications and information, which in any case is a great help).

[critor]

it will probably even belittle way before the actual release of the OS - because having to spend time upgrading our work to newer OS versions is very demotivating of a task...

Indeed... I'm currently completely demotivated at working on mViewer / nDoom, which still have minor bugs, knowing that those programs will probably become unusable for most Nspire users after the summer.

And I'm not the only one to be demotivated. The more hours we spent on Ndless, the more demotivated we probably are...
The "OS update blocking Ndless -> Ndless update using different flaws -> OS update blocking Ndless" cycle is exhausting.

[Yeong]

** I don't know if the TI-Nspire Student Software has a built-in functionality for checking for updates. It all depends whether or not the student uses the software.

It has, together with a force update toggle.
I've set up a system that will check if this is set to "true" and report it to some advance members here.

Also, people who buy a new Nspire will be forced to 3.2.

Hell, I want my nSpire link program back.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Can't calcs sites like here, TI-Planet, Cemetech and such simply continue to not provide direct ways to bypass PTT and ways to run a CAS on non-CAS models on recent OSes? If Ndless is allowed but we don't bother porting OSLauncher for Ndless 3.1 and we don't publicly provide Ndless 3.1 compatible software to remove PTT or even performs fake reset/reboot screens, then TI is safe because pretty much all Ndless-related tools comes from the TI community and since most calc users are illiterate about Ndless programming, they'll never bother creating such program themselves to cheat.

Over here we never really help people who needs to run OSLauncher and instead we tell them they should do more effort at tests and not cheat. On ticalc.org they reject fake 83+ reset programs.

[apcalc]

This is sad news.  Hopefully the TI community will be able to bypass it eventually!