Texas Instruments threatens calculator hobbyists

Texas Instruments should stop using the DMCA to threaten hobbyists who blogged about potential mods to the company’s programmable graphing calculators, says the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). TI’s calculators perform a “signature check” that allows only approved operating systems to be loaded onto the hardware, says the story. But, “researchers were able to reverse-engineer signing keys, allowing modders to install custom operating systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators’ hardware,” it says, going on: “In response to this discovery, TI unleashed a torrent of demand letters claiming that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) required the hobbyists to take down commentary about and links to the keys.” The EFF says it’s representing three men who received threatening letters.

Tags: between-the-use, calculators, clients, code, digital, discovery, dmca, freedom, instruments, mahatma-gandhi, operating-systems, texas, using-the-dmca