Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

You're not wrong at all.

(emphasis mine)

People are free to do whatever they want to the manual (I would discourage that they try to crack it - it's encrypted for a very good reason), but as long as they don't post about it here, there's nothing we can do. In the past, the discussion is usually okay if it focuses on the theory of encryption and breaking them, but once it crosses into actually trying to break the password is when we move towards the wrong side of the grey area.

...just my $0.02 and interpretation of the rules

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Thank you. But no I can't. I'll be up all night with anticipation for saturday.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

If there's no way you could rationally expect to be able to break the password,¹ is it really wrong to try (or to talk about trying)? No—because we can say with scientific rigour that you will not succeed, and thus no direct harm will come to the competition.² (Note that if you actually could break the encryption, this would be a different moral quandary.)

But that doesn't mean that people who don't understand the difficulty, or who understand but don't agree, will happily go along with your conclusion. FIRST could get mad at you (even in failure) and sanction you. That's not in the rulebook, but obviously FIRST has some practical capability to do things administratively.

In actual fact, the idea (adapted from the ChiefDelphi rules quoted previously) that breaking the encryption represents stealing copyrighted material is kind of specious. There's a fairly complicated and nuanced legal argument to be had, but the basics are that you can't steal what you already possess lawfully,³ and that even if circumvention of effective technical protection measures can be a DMCA violation, it's distinct from stealing.

Despite this, it's nice to be nice to the people running the forum, even if (in that one case) their wishes are kind of unreasonable and unfounded.

¹ Assuming FIRST doesn't do anything foolish like make the password an anagram of the game hint. (They won't do that again, at least until institutional memory of why they don't do that anymore has faded.)
²From a slightly bigger perspective, what's the net result of you trying (and of course failing)? You know more about breaking encryption—maybe you'll use that skill for good or evil later in life. We spend more time discussing your moral failings—now we've used time and resources that could have been otherwise allocated. We can propose all sorts of possible consequences, but I think it's fair to say that the impact of your actions in this case would be minimally negative, if at all.
³ For example: someone provides you with a locked box. (There is no key provided.) You decide you want it, and take it home. They can't say you stole the box, nor can they say you're trying to steal the contents of the box by prying the lock open. But if the box contains the FIRST game rules, then the copyright to those rules remains with the author, even though you own the container and the physical media on which the rules are printed.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

If you are able to break 128-bit AES encryption in a matter of days, you should be expecting a job offer from the NSA any minute.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

I'll pass along your resume to our security people here at work too. I'm sure they'd love to have ya working here.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Ha! I've actually guessed the password and opened the Game manual.
And I can say that it contains at least ONE instance of the letter "e".

There, I've done it.

Believe me?;)


EDIT: A great example of 100% accuracy with almost 0% precision.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Honestly, I don't believe you because there is no way that you could have possibly "guessed" it. There wasn't even a great enough hint, considering even if the hint is related to the password at all. I don't think that it has been that way in a while.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Surely, Don's playing on the fact that the most commonly used letter in the english language is 'e'. Go ahead, try to write a sentence or two (that make sense) without using 'e'.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Plus, Don didn't say tha password had an 'e' in in. He said it had an 'e' in it, and could have been speaking about the manual :rolleyes:

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

True, but honestly I thought that the most used letter in the English alphabet was the letter "t".

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

According to Wikipedia, t is number two.

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

Challenge accepted: "According to you, I don't know how to do this," and "My brain hurts now."


And now, back to your regularly scheduled topic of discussion...

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

The simple answer (we've gone a bit far afield in this thread) is that there is no gray area.

You should not be trying to break the encryption. If you want to play with encryption, encrypt a file of your own and try to crack it.

Gracious Professionalism is the cornerstone of Junior FLL, FLL, FTC, FIRST, and Card. Trying to open the game description and rules before kickoff is decidely non GP. We're on the honor system (yes, even with the encryption).

Re: Encrypted morally grey
 

This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out! Try to do so without any coaching! You probably won't, at first, find anything particularly odd or unusual or in any way dissimilar to any ordinary composition. That is not at all surprising, for it is no strain to accomplish in so short a paragraph a stunt similar to that which an author did throughout all of his book, without spoiling a good writing job, and it was no small book at that. By studying this paragraph assiduously, you will shortly, I trust, know what is its distinguishing oddity. Upon locating that "mark of distinction," you will probably doubt my story of this author and his book of similar unusuality throughout. It is commonly known among book-conscious folk and proof of it is still around. If you must know, this sort of writing is known as a lipogram, but don't look up that word in any dictionary until you find out what this is all about.

:D

Also, this