TI Bans all Assembly Programming, Casio Limits Add-ins. Please don't follow suit HP.

[TheLastMillennial]

Note: This is a cross post (with an addition near the end) from an article I posted on the LinusTechTips forum.

​For those who are unaware:
Just a few days ago, TI Education announced that the most recent OS for the TI-83 Premium CE removes the ability for the calculator to run any Assembly (ASM) code. With the decision planned to go global, this means that any program written in ASM or C will not run on any CE operating on the newest TI OS 5.5.1 or higher!


(Source: TI-Planet: Français | English)

Why did this happen?
One big factor in the decision to ban ASM was due to a video created by a student and a teacher that showed the exact steps to bypass a Test Mode restriction in OS 5.2.2, an obsolete, 3 year old OS. What made the matter worse is they passed the issue off as if it were still present in modern OSes! With the video gaining almost a quarter of a million views, TI thought they'd need to take some drastic measures to uphold their Exam Mode security reputation.

Why is this so frustrating?
This is quite a punch in the gut for the community, TI had given TI-Planet (a very reputable TI forum that has been reporting on calculator news for over a decade) a beta build of OS 5.5.0 to review and post about. This build given to TI-Planet had all the benefits of the new Python abilities, however ASM was not banned on this build. To the community, it looks like TI knew we would hate the removal of ASM and therefor gave a different build to us just to drum up support. Then when release date came, they pulled the rug from under our feet and released OS 5.5.1 instead which did include the ASM restrictions

TI-Planet, has privately shared security flaws related to Exam Mode TI needed to fix, and kept vulnerabilities a secret as to not cause this exact situation. TI Planet has put so much meticulous care into protecting the hobby of thousands of students and future Computer Science Majors, like me, it's infuriating to see one clumsy video with a quarter of a million views set years of hard work go up in smoke.

TI Planet's time trying to protect the community isn't the only thing wasted, the hundreds developer's countless hours spent creating amazing content from overclocking utilities, to math additions like CAS, and games will become obsolete when newer calculators inevitably outnumber older ones. TI does offer alternative programming options like TI-BASIC and Python, but as TI Planet user jean-baptiste boric points out on Cemetech:

Quote:Performance is bad. It's the slowest Python implementation in a calculator. From TI-Planet's numbers, just about the only calculator that's roughly as slow is a Casio Graph 35+E, a monochrome calculator, and only mostly on integer benchmarks.
...
Graphics performance in particular is simply atrocious. TI-Planet clocked the put_pixel() fill rate at 48 pixels per seconds. The next two best calculators are 100x to 200x times faster. The next one is 1000x times faster. Forget about gLib, how can anyone be expected to write a simple ray-tracing or fractal script on-calc when it'll take nearly half an hour just to push the pixels out? Even when using TI's proprietary ti_graphics primitives it's still several times slower than the competition's put_pixel().

Source: Cemetech: English

It's also infuriating that TI's consistent reactions of killing a fly with a sledge hammer has done nothing to solve their security, in fact it has only worsened it. I think forum Planet Casio explains it better than I can:

Quote:Almost all calculator models have flaws allowing cheating to varying degrees, and many are vulnerable to modification of the hardware or the [Exam Mode notification] LED. [Currently, there is no enforcement in testing locations that requires you to show up with an updated calculator]. [This means,] in the short term, exposing the vulnerability has only spread it and increased cheating. confused2.gif
... The potential circumvention of the exam mode is ... what has allowed Planète Casio and TI-Planet to point out to manufacturers several annoying flaws concerning the exam mode, without exposing the national exams to more cheating.

Note: I have paraphrased the French to English translation in order to make it sound as coherent as possible.
(Source: Planète Casio: Français | English)

Now that ASM is banned and this situation can't get much worse, the community is already finding exploits that allows not only the ability to run ASM code anyways, but ways to bypass TI's insecure Exam Mode (which was only ever 'secure' because the community was careful not to release the exploits to the public). The community is already brainstorming alternatives that will both satisfy TI and the dedicated programming community. We're doing our best to come to terms with TI and avoid creating another cat-and-mouse game of finding and patching exploits (which happened on the Nspire).

Conclusion:
Like I said at the beginning, my goal is to spread the word about this as much as I can. Although this is only effecting the CE line up of calculators right now, TI has not ruled out releasing updates to older models that also bans ASM.

Quote: Q. Does this mean you will also be removing it from the TI-84 Plus?
A. At this time, we are only removing ASM capabilities on the TI-84 Plus CE, TI-84 Plus CE-T and TI-83 Premium CE.

(Source: An e-mail from TI-Cares posted on TI-Planet: Français | English)

My Plead to HP:
I know the HP Prime already doesn't have any popular ASM utilities yet. However, now that TI has banned ASM and Casio is limiting add-ins, the communities are trying to find alternative platforms that are more developer friendly. The HP Prime and the Numworks calculators are the top picks right now. Like I said above, the community has done a great job over the past decade keeping exploits incredibly private. I just hope HP doesn't freak out if ASM tools are developed for the Prime or if they receive a (private) notice about a potential exam security flaw. I know the developers here are amazing people and I think they'll be OK with it. However, they don't always get to make the decisions they know are right (i.e. the orientation of the Prime's LCD). At least the devs here get to communicate with their community and consider other methods than 'ban everything that's remotely bothersome'.

From my time here, I've seen this community is a bit small and new programs are sparse, especially compared to the hundreds of thousands of users at TI Planet. Right now is the ideal time to try and bring over new users. Right now is the ideal time to seriously focus on adding full Python support and give Numworks a run for its money.

Finally, I'd love if the users here could help spread the word as best you can. We could potentially get a segment on TechLinked, or ideally a full LinusTechTips video if my thread catches enough attention. If any of you have an LTT account, I'd appreciate if you could help out the thread!

Sources:
These go more in-depth than I did in this article. TI-Planet's 20 year history of ASM on calculators is a particularly great read.
Cemetech:
TI Removes ASM/C Programming from TI-83 Premium CE: English
TI-83 Premium CE/TI-84 Plus CE ASM/C Removal: Updates: English

Planet Casio:
TI supprime les programmes assembleur sur TI-83 Premium CE et 84+ CE version 5.5: Français
TI removes assembly programs on TI-83 Premium CE and 84+ CE version 5.5: English

ticalc:
TI removes access to assembly programs on the TI-83 Premium CE: English

TI-Planet:
Mise à jour 5.5 supprime assembleur TI-83 Premium CE & 84+CE: Français
Update 5.5 removes TI-83 Premium CE & 84 + CE assembler: English