Encrypted morally grey
 

While briefly being mentioned earlier, I was curious if the encrypted manual can be decrypted pre-kickoff without bringing shame to the FIRST system. I would guess its ok to guess it Bc in last years hint, they used an anagrams of the password which wouldn't help anything otherwise.
So in short: did FIRST basically say it was legal to do this? If not, how?
(To be clear, I'm not saying I wish to do that, I'm just attempting to understand why first would (in my eyes) endorse such disgraceful behavior)

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

I believe that if someone doesn't want you to look at something you shouldn't look at it. FIRST encrypts the manual because they don't want us to see it until Saturday. Therefore it is wrong, in my opinion, to try and break into it. Besides this type of encryption is difficult to crack as the keys are very large. It could take hundreds of years to break with a brute force attack. So trying to do so would likely be a waste of time.


If by chance you have broken it I would suggest keeping the secret to yourself.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

I doubt anyone has enough CPU power to do that. And I understand as well as agree with you. I was just curious what others thought about it so I'm sorry if I offended anyone by posing the question.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

No problem. The only dumb question is the one you don't ask.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Last year? I think you mean 2008, where "vet hurdling FIRST tetra" became "drive straight turn left." While that was the major part of the key (which had some added punctuation), it was also a description of what the robots had to do on the field. I believe that the game description was what the hint was supposed to mean, not to give us a hint at the password.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Sorry. First year kind of meshes with all my other years. I wasn't allowed to do much that year. But that makes more sense. Thank you for the clarification!

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Just for fun, I threw a brute force password cracker at it with all letters caps and lowercase, numbers, and special characters. Even after setting the password start length to 18 (a guess based on last year's password) I had an estimated crack time of over a year. I think 128 bit AES is going to be more than enough to hold people out for a few days.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

You shouldn't try to crack the code with the intention of getting an advantage for the build season. There are at least 1000 teams that will kill you because of it (and the rest will probably just build robots better than yours anyway).

If you guessed the code and opened the packet, but didn't do anything with it, we'd never know and couldn't judge you. The moral issue is more about how you use the decrypted manual than the decryption itself.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

How could you not gain an advantage from that though? Just by opening it, you'd know more than anyone else way ahead of time, regardless of what you do.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Not necessarily. The first page of the manual is just a table of contents, which reveals very little beyond a vague sense of the game's theme, so you probably won't get much out of it that will give you a leg up.

However, if you think just opening the manual gives you an advantage, then it isn't fair (and therefore unethical) to open the manual.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Why is this discussion coming up so much this year? I havent ever seen so many people wondering about breaking the encryption before.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

I'd rather this didn't become a thread on breaking the rules of Chief Delphi, from what I hear on other threads, you can't discuss such things. Just the morality of it.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Im not suggesting that he cracks it, but learning for learnings sake and learning for malicious intent are two different things.
I dont encourage anyone to actually try to see the game manual early, I simply like to speculate.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they don't mind what your intent is, just what you can say on their forum.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

For the sake of avoiding a pointless dispute i have modified my questionable post. You may now sleep easy :rolleyes: