Pastebin, the Ti-89 signing keys, and the DMCA

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I’ve had a DMCA takedown request sent in relation to a pastebin post containing the signing keys for a range of Texas Instruments calculators which, if I understand correctly, allow you to digitally sign a replacement operating system so that the hardware will accept it.

If you buy a piece of hardware, I firmly believe you should be able to do whatever you like with it, and people installing their own operating systems and *improving the damn product* is something TI should be happy about.

There’s a blog over at http://brandonw.net/ which is enthusiastic about this sort thing, and you can read wide and varied discussion about the issue on SlashDot too. (Edit: on 23rd Sep The Register weighed in with this article)

So, here is the DMCA takedown request Texas Instruments sent to me:

September 17, 2009
To Whom It May Concern:
Re: Illegal Offering of Material to Circumvent TI Copyright Protections
VIA: report abuse at pasetebin.com

It has come to our attention that the web site http://pastebin.com/f23af06b7, contains material and/or links to material that violate the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). This letter is to notify you, in accordance with the provisions of the DMCA, of these unlawful activities. Pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, we request that you remove any whole or partial reproductions of and/or disable links to the following:

The post located on http://pastebin.com/f23af06b7

Texas Instruments Incorporated (“TI”) owns the copyright in the TI-83 Plus, TI84 Plus and TI-89 operating system software. The TI-83 Plus, TI-84 Plus and TI-89 operating systems use encryption to effectively control access to the operating system code and to protect its rights as a copyright owner in that code. Any unauthorized use of these files is strictly prohibited.

http://pastebin.com/f23af06b7 is distributing or providing links to information that bypasses TI’s anti-circumvention technology. By providing copies of or offering links to such information, http://pastebin.com/f23af06b7 has violated the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA at 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1).

Please confirm to the undersigned in writing no later than noon on September 18, 2009 that you have complied with these demands. You may reach the undersigned by telephone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx or by email at xxxxxx@ti.com. TI reserves all further rights and remedies with respect to this matter.
I hereby confirm that I have a good faith belief that use of the Illegal Material in the manner complained of in this letter is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law, that the information in this letter is accurate, and that, under penalty of perjury, I am authorized to act on behalf of TI, the owner of the exclusive rights in the TI-83 Plus, TI-84 Plus and TI-89 operating system software that are allegedly misappropriated using unlawful methods.
Texas Instruments Incorporated

XXX XXXXXX
Manager, Business Services
Education Technology Group

I live in the UK, and pastebin.com is hosted in the UK, so hitting me with a DMCA takedown request is rather pointless. However, I do remove copyrighted content on request, so much as it pains me to do so, I’ve deleted that post for now.

It’s no biggie, if you want the keys, just check wikileaks or do a Google search for 82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0. That’s just a long hexadecimal number. Pretty sure I’m free to express that number in any form I like.

Can you say “Streisand Effect”?

Edit: Interesting post here on dealing with these TI DMCA notices. Persoanlly, I’m not interested in fighting to keep the post on pastebin.com as it is widely available elsewhere. I have a copy of the keys should I ever wish to actively distribute them though…

Edit#2, Oct 14th 2009: The Electronic Frontier Foundation have written the following about this issue: EFF Warns Texas Instruments to Stop Harassing Calculator Hobbyists.

pastebin.org considered harmful

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I run pastebin.com, and maintain it daily. I check for abuses of the service, block IP addresses of serial offenders and try to ensure it provides a speedy and useful service.

I make the software available for others to use and improve upon too.

pastebin.org is one such site, but I’m starting to get emails from people who’ve used that site and are now infected with the Win32/Alureo trojan virus. In addition, the site seems to have been compromised in other ways, with extra advertising banners and popups.

I’m not responsible for that site. I’ve tried to make contact with the registrant listed in whois records, but not had a response.

The moral of the story: if you want to stay safe, stick with pastebin.com!

There’s a bit of me in PHP!

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Last October I found a bug in PHP’s SOAP module. It was pretty obscure bug in the way PHP used Digest authentication. As it was a showstopper for me, I submitted a bug report and wrote a patch to fix it.

It took a while, but my patch has finally been merged into the 5.* and 6.0 sources!

I’ve been using PHP for ten years, and so it’s perhaps a little surprising it’s taken me this long to give anything back. Truth is, this was the first time I’ve come across a bug which halted my development work.

It’s a tiny fix, 6 lines of code, but it makes me happy that after all this time, finally, there’s a bit of me in PHP! Hurrah for open source software!

Recent Geograph Outages

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Geograph.org.uk has been offline all day, there seems to be a problem with a router which connects the Geograph servers with the rest of the Internet.

At the moment we don’t have a definite ETA but I think it could be Monday before we get this resolved. Enjoy the excellent bank holiday weekend weather!

Edit: We’re back! As suspected it was a router issue, our thanks to the sterling folk at Fubra who resolved this late on Sunday night.

Edit #2: …and on Thursday morning it seems we’re down again. Seems to be the same issue, should not be down for long….

Edit #3: We’re not having a good week. An entirely unrelated issue has brought the site offline again on Monday 1st June. This one is within our control but proving tricky to fix….

Edit #4:Our hosting provider have provided a full account of the network problems experienced in the past week, largely due to a complex sequence of upgrades. It seems we should now be entering a period of calm and unparalleled uptime! Touch wood…

Using Doxygen help in QtCreator

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If you’re documenting your classes with Doxygen tags you might be wondering if you can use that help inside QtCreator and get those F1 tooltips whenever you hover a documented class or method.

I wondered the same thing, and it turns out Doxygen needed a little tweaking to make it work. Karsten Heimrich at Nokia rather kindly wrote a patch which will eventually make it into Doxygen, but if you have burning desire to try this, here’s what you do….

Patching Doxygen

Once I hear that Doxygen includes this patch I’ll remove this section – so if you’re reading this, you probably need to patch. So, lets grab the latest sources and apply the patch.

svn co https://doxygen.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/doxygen/trunk doxygen-svn
cd doxygen-svn/src
wget -O doxygen.diff http://blog.dixo.net/doxygen.diff
patch < doxygen.diff
cd ..

Then configure and build doxygen with any options you might need. Most people should be able to simply do this

./configure
make
make install

You should how have the patched doxygen in /usr/local/bin.

Generating the help

There are some Qt Labs posts on generating Qt Help from Doxygen, but here's a quick run through:

To generate a Qt .qch file you'll need the following entries in your doxygen configuration file


GENERATE_QHP = YES
QCH_FILE = /path/to/output/helpfile.qch
QHP_NAMESPACE = com.yourdomain.subdomain
QHP_VIRTUAL_FOLDER = yourfolder
QHG_LOCATION = /your/path/to/qt/bin/qhelpgenerator

Run patched doxygen and you should end up with a .qch file in the filename given by the QCH_FILE option. Almost done!

Installing the help in Qt Creator

  • Go to Tools -> Options -> Help, click "Add" and browse for the generated .qch file.
  • Click OK and your namespace should now be listed in the registered documentation box
  • Click OK to dismiss the options dialog
  • Now for the important bit - restart Qt Creator. If you don't do this, the help doesn't get propertly integrated into the IDE, at least on Qt Creator v1.1.

That's it! Now hover the mouse over one of your documented classes and you should get a tooltip suggesting you press F1.

Documentation nirvana! Again, my thanks to Karsten Heimrich for writing the patch, hope someone else finds this useful!

UK Photographers Rights Guide – version 2 published

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The UK Photographers Guide has been very useful in helping me understand how the law affects photographers. It has been particularly handy when resolving complaints from visitors to Geograph.org.uk, and I’m pleased to note it has been reviewed and updated in recent weeks.


Download version 2 of the guide here.

Kudos to legal consultant Linda Macpherson for putting it together, and to photographer Simon Moran for hosting it.

I’m a Qt Convert!

1 Reply

Once upon a time, I used to do a lot of GUI app development. My professional career started back in 1993 writing Windows 3.1 apps in C, and continued for several years, switching to C++ and using the MFC framework. But from about 1998 I found myself steadily doing less native GUI application development, and more and more web server based work.

While I enjoy all the work I do, I do miss being closer to the machine. The average PC is ridiculously powerful these days, but your average web application can’t do much with that power.

I’ve switched my home desktop to Ubuntu recently, and loving it. But, there’s a few Windows apps I miss. What’s a developer to do? What is a developer, skilled in C++ GUI development, to do, eh? Answer me that.

The recent release of Qt4.5 and it’s accompanying licence change couldn’t have come at a better time. I had an itch to scratch, and it looked gooood. One simple install, and you have a great IDE, a GUI designer, and a stack of great classes and widgets. I was sold on the ease of integrating a WebKit browser and the fact I could build a ECMAScript based scripting engine for my app. But there’s so much more! I was a little skeptical of the smoke and mirrors behind the signals and slots paradigm, but having used it for a weekend, I’m sold.

Bottom line is that I spent more time writing my app than figuring out the framework. There’s hardly any “boilerplate” crap in each class. Once you’ve written your first signal and slot handler, you’re away. It’s all thriller, and no filler :)

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, recompiling for Windows and Mac is easy too. Qt doesn’t just get you closer to your machine, it gets you closer to *all* machines. Hallelujah, Flying Spaghetti Monster be praised, I’ve rediscovered a love of programming I didn’t know I’d lost.

Anyway…..

I don’t want to say too much about the app I’m writing, aside from the fact that it’s aimed at geocachers. It’s called Ammotin, and will probably get released much later in the year. I think it will be spectacular, because Qt has got me so fired up and focussing on the app, that I don’t need to worry too much about the framework.

Am I over excited?

Using Qt Creator with Ubuntu 8.10

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The recent change of licencing model for the Qt toolkit got it a lot of press recently. My GUI-based development experience is all Windows based, using MFC and wxWidgets. As I’ve found myself using Ubuntu and OSX a lot more recently, the idea of using Qt to write software to run on Windows, Linux or OSX has some appeal. Of particular interest was the ease with which you can integrate WebKit, allowing you to embed web capabilities into a cross-platform app with ease.

Installation under Ubuntu 8.10 is straightforward, but I’m writing this post just to note the install steps I took. Hope it helps someone!

  • Download and install the SDK, which includes an IDE
  • Once installed, there’s a few packages you’ll need to ensure your first build completes:
  • sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig-dev libxrender-dev libsm-dev libglib2.0-dev

Now you’re good to go!

Edit: Edvaldo in the comments noted he needed to install some additional packages as follows:

  • sudo apt-get install libxext-dev libxext6-dbg x11proto-xext-dev

Geograph Deutschland

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While there’s been a few aborted attempts to use the Geograph code in other countries, it’s so cool to finally see one launch – ladies and gentlemen, Geograph Deutschland is here (also available in English)

This has been set up by Hansjörg Lipp, adapting and translating the open source Geograph software. Though you can’t easily tell from the Geograph British Isles map, we’ve merged the Irish and British gird systems into one grid. Germany uses the MGRS system for its mapping, and as it covers several UTM zones, the German map is broken into separate, more visible, strips.

Great to see it open its doors, I wish Hansjörg every success.