Author Topic: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!  (Read 25663 times)

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Offline joao9856

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #30 on: June 14, 2013, 07:50:20 pm »
I portuguese!! I'm not worried at all, here at my school no teacher knows how to work with a Nspire, silly i know but whenever a teacher of mine asks me for a calculator, i bring mine already in a calculate sheet and he just looks at the calculator and says "I don't get any of this, someone bring a normal calculator!", its just like Ti Nspire doesn't have big black number on the center witha white background, it really must be a hard job to find such keys!
So i'm fine though i wont bring the CAS to the exam.

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #31 on: June 14, 2013, 08:46:07 pm »
I'm not surprised about the new update changing the minimum OS requirements and blocking ndless and the like. However, if this calculator is available for sale now, it's irresponsible for TI to not have the new OS available on their site. The reason being, if an OS gets accidentally deleted or if someone tries to downgrade not knowing about the protection, they have a broken calculator. :/ That's my biggest issue with this.

Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #32 on: June 15, 2013, 01:45:21 am »
It is, indeed, flat out irresponsible.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #33 on: June 15, 2013, 01:54:10 am »
And there's still the whole freedom issue to do what we want with the hardware we paid for. I mean, maybe they can try to prevent blocking CAS on non CAS calcs, but not if it means preventing us from installing whatever non-CAS OS we want or downgrade.

Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #34 on: June 15, 2013, 02:10:15 am »
Excatly. This attempt to prevent the usage of Linux on a platform which can run it (and whose Linux support is in the process of mainlining) will almost certainly attract a new class of attackers on the platform at some point: skilled people, who have no special interest in the expensive, underpowered platform in itself, but are infuriated any kind of blatant disrespect for users' basic rights, which makes them willing to spend free time and money on punishing the manufacturer. That's exactly the type of persons who blew the PS3 castle to smithereens. Perhaps the "nLaunch team" / "nLaunch CX guy" already belong to that group, we don't know...
If TI EdTech reacts inappropriately to the inevitable future attacks, like Sony did, then they take the chance of infuriating yet another class of attackers, even more harmful to the interests they're so hell-bent on trying to safeguard. The kind of attackers who can deeply penetrate network infrastructure and computer systems. In such an event, I think that the top-level managers to whom I patiently explained all of the above and more (and their successors, since high-level management people at TI often swap jobs) will be fired for incompetence.
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Offline pimathbrainiac

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #35 on: June 15, 2013, 02:51:34 am »
My take on all this: TI is doing not only what is good for them, but what is good for the community as a whole.

First of all: There will be a workaround, for sure. It WILL happen, as it always does ;)

Second: TI needs to be on tests. This makes them bigger and have a larger consumer base, which means more $$ for them but also means more people could potentially be in the community, which is good for the community as a whole, if you follow. I'm willing to bet you that TI might have let a back door open for us (intentionally or not) because the testing people would overlook the "bug", but we will not. Also: the community will benefit from this because of joint efforts to get ndless and other OSs on the calc.

Third: We could just crack the signing keys on the boot1 and/or boot2 and/or OS itself. TI might not even come after the community this time!

(This is the optimist in me talking)
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Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #36 on: June 15, 2013, 03:17:31 am »
Quote
but what is good for the community as a whole.
Oh, god... what kind of heinous crime does TI have to do for everybody to really wake up and start facing the truth, if even the current episode still isn't enough ?
TI is milking customers with underpowered products sold at very high price tags for such limited power and storage space; they're treating customers as foes; they're pissing on their basic rights.

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Second: TI needs to be on tests.
TI is on tests even with open calculators, witness the whole TI-Z80 series or the Prizm. Lockdown is in no way a requirement. Their trouble with the Nspire line is because it is not open. The solution is openness.

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Third: We could just crack the signing keys on the boot1 and/or boot2 and/or OS itself. TI might not even come after the community this time!
No, we could not. The topic has already been discussed (too) many times on the forum, look out for the topics... We cannot just do what we did with the TI-Z80 and TI-68k series.

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(This is the optimist in me talking)
The completely unrealistic optimist who doesn't know what he's talking about, yeah. Sorry.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2013, 03:27:33 am by Lionel Debroux »
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Offline pimathbrainiac

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #37 on: June 15, 2013, 03:19:40 am »
Thanks for taking away my optimism.

I don't think raging at TI is the right thing to do right now. You don't want them hating us any more.
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Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #38 on: June 15, 2013, 03:25:16 am »
Quote
I don't think raging at TI is the right thing to do right now.
Raging creates resent. Resent is one of the three most powerful human feelings, one of those who get people out of their way. Another feeling of the triplet can help further: pride, for those who will make it, of slapping the silly manufacturer in the face, another time.
Getting people (and a larger number of people) out of their way, to fight back, is exactly what we need.

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You don't want them hating us any more.
They do want people to hate them even more.
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Offline pimathbrainiac

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #39 on: June 15, 2013, 03:31:40 am »
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You don't want them hating us any more.
They do want people to hate them even more.

No company wants their target audience to hate them, but sadly, their target audience is not us, it's the teachers and the tests.

But they also don't want hate from the community. They just want their target audience to like them more, so they prioritized.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2013, 03:32:01 am by pimathbrainiac »
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Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #40 on: June 15, 2013, 04:00:50 am »
I'm well aware of their priorities, but they're no valid excuse for blatant disrespect towards users ;)
As a result of their actions against users, and the predictable retaliations (which, for maximum impact, should occur around the best time of the year for inconveniencing TI EdTech and exam testing), even their target audience is likely to hate them.

Spoiler For Spoiler:
In April 2011, I made and published the legal, unreliable, and harmless OSLauncher tool, after seeing an April Fools prank showing the CAS OS running on the model sold as non-CAS and telling myself "it's certainly not hard, the legendary unpublished RunOS tool was a very small program". OSLauncher was released with the DummyOS proof of concept, and the ability to launch the CAS OS on the model sold as non-CAS was advertised weeks later, in May 2011.
Being relatively close to the exam season, the news of that capability of OSLauncher completely freaked out the standardized testing regulation authorities in TI's main target country, and therefore top-level management at TI, even if not only getting rid of OSLauncher's effect was trivial (a mere reboot did the trick), but also, the combination of the then-current second generation of Ndless not being persistent across reboots (unlike third-generation Ndless) + the effect of the PTT (and thereby forbidding user access to the documents used for installing Ndless + running OSLauncher) made it harmless.
That's how we learnt that the best time of the year for publishing attacks on TI's business plans is May.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #41 on: June 15, 2013, 10:36:37 am »
I wish that anon or another big online group went after TI like they did with Sony for these reasons, that would teach them. I wonder if such group would care enough about a tiny community like us to do it, though.

Offline Nosferatu Arucard 1983

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #42 on: June 15, 2013, 05:19:03 pm »
So far my concern of the TI policy to lock down the NSpire for third-party applications is only to try make alive the need of a expensive calculator in university.
However in my University (IST), the use of a CAS calculator is pointless  ;D
Even recentelly if exams that requires numerical calcultations, you can bring a smartphone to load a calculator application and use it.  O.O
It's because the professors that teaches the course can check and make caution to avoid cheating between the students, and they think now the calculators of any kind, due to cheap Android phones, are becoming an obsolete technology.
When I make the last exam of introductory Nuclear Physics for my Ph.D. graduate, I use Maxima on Android to solve the calculations with my Samsung Galaxy Mini without problems. O.O The only restrition is to use when is only needed, and then return to the desk openly to professor line-of-view to avoid cheating. (Even in convential calculators you can cheat  :-\)

This means one big thing: why wasting almost €200 for a NSpire CX with a poor CAS, since you can use a smartphone that cost less than €100 which you can install a much better CAS (Maxima), and you can use during classes other powerfull applications ?!  ::)

Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #43 on: June 16, 2013, 02:20:19 am »
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This means one big thing: why wasting almost €200 for a NSpire CX with a poor CAS, since you can use a smartphone that cost less than €100 which you can install a much better CAS (Maxima), and you can use during classes other powerfull applications ?!
Completely agreed. Calculators are severely obsolete, especially at such high price tags.
TI saw it coming and already has solutions for the new education market with the iPad (and likely Android) apps; other manufacturers would be well advised to follow suit, unless they can bribe exam testing officials for long enough in some countries and still pull out a profit on the obsolete hardware and software...
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Offline Streetwalrus

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Re: OS 3.2.4.1237 attacks nLaunch, Linux and Ndless!!
« Reply #44 on: June 16, 2013, 10:15:44 am »
Well, in France you can't use a phone in high school, so you're forced to buy a crappy TI-82 Stats for €50 (at least).
« Last Edit: June 16, 2013, 10:15:57 am by Streetwalker »