OS 3.2 blocks Ndless

[krazylegodrummer56]

Just to state something that half of you care about, and the other half don't.
Just swich to Casio Prizm or stick with the Ti-8x series forget about the Ti-Nspire series.
If you don't like to lose programming then forget the Nspire!

thank you and just deal with updates.

[DrDnar]

Doesn't the ARM support protection rings? Why can't TI implement security through a kernel? They could mark most of the system RAM as being off-limits third-party software, preventing people from running the CAS OS on non-CAS models. With preemptive threading, they could ensure that PTT protections would engage when requested and have full effect. The only downside to this is that it would require TI to do some actual work---which costs money---, and understand complicated, difficult things like scheduling, resource tracking, least-privilege security, APIs, and such.

[lkj]

The effort wouldn't be worth it for TI, it isn't too difficult for them to just fix the flaws that Ndless uses.

No, with a little script to replace everything, swap case and so on before compiling
I just thought it could possibly work for non-cx os files, but apparently not.

Again, you know that keys.i doesn't have the actual keys inside, right?
Therefore the output you get will still be encrypted.... unless you have the keys and stuck them inside of keys.i

Ah you're right, I tested it with the non-cx key and it worked

[annoyingcalc]

This isn't good, if we can't make ndless 3.2 [a sad event] we need to block the force update

[Snake X]

Teachers who depend on fancy calculators to teach, IMO, shouldn't teach at all. They, in fact, are bound to later get fired, and TI's lovely market of dumb teachers and students will fall.

OMG I hope so! There's this teacher I had last year that absolutely depended on the Ti-Nspire for EVERYTHING! like her whole curriculum absolutely revolved around the nspire. She even had like 3 cradle kits set up and she'd make us loggin to them and send us polls through them and everything. It wasn't the prettiest thing. Oh, and to make it better they were the ones with the touch pad too..
She'd even demo how to do problems and what her calculator screen looked like and everything. She was Nspire'd

[calc84maniac]

Probably the easiest way to get around the forced update would be to block the Nspire Software from accessing the internet, am I right?

[runeazn]

yes thats quite easy my antivirus can do that

[annoyingcalc]

which one do you have?

[runeazn]

norton 360
4 euro a year is fine by me

for the curious who havent found it
main menu > settings > firewall > program rules
there you go individual internet access control

[DrDnar]

You may also be able to configure your router to block access, for example by blacklisting the TI domain name, or blocking whatever port TI's software uses (which won't work well if TI checks using a standard protocol like HTTP).

[alberthrocks]

/etc/hosts is not a bad idea either. (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts for Windows users)

[Juju]

Doesn't the ARM support protection rings? Why can't TI implement security through a kernel? They could mark most of the system RAM as being off-limits third-party software, preventing people from running the CAS OS on non-CAS models. With preemptive threading, they could ensure that PTT protections would engage when requested and have full effect. The only downside to this is that it would require TI to do some actual work---which costs money---, and understand complicated, difficult things like scheduling, resource tracking, least-privilege security, APIs, and such.

They should had done that since the beginning. But yeah, it's just damn more easy to just try to block Ndless than do actual work.

[DJ Omnimaga]

The issue with that though is that a lot of people will forget or not pay attention in news and stuff and will inaverdently update anyway. Not to mention new Nspires in stores will come with 3.2.

[DrDnar]

So TI never had any intention of allowing third-party native code ever, since that would require writing secure, reliable software. They just figured it would be easier to block us in every way they could. To make their software secure now would require significant refactoring of their code to meet the level of quality that secure code needs to meet. On the plus side, since security doesn't seem to have been on their priority list when they wrote the Nspire software, there's probably still plenty of holes waiting for us to exploit.

[Jonius7]

TI focusing on blocking ndless is really focusing on the things that don't really count at all. Instead of trying to block third-party applications that extend the functionality of the TI-nspire (and there's no real harm done), they could have used that time to further improve the OS.