Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexa Stott
[bS/he was asked to stop and did not comply[/b]. The person also attempted to inform officials about it, indicating (to me, at least) that s/he was aware that what they were doing could have been causing issues.
If it had been one match that this happened in and had the person put the phone away when asked, my feelings on this would be much different.
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Then again putting the phone away doesn't mean much if you think about it. I can leave an application running with my phone screen off on any Android device.
So they put it in their pocket and it's still causing trouble. Then they take it out and it's still causing trouble. They are likely just as distracted as everyone else with the weather, the people watching, people's behavior near them, etc. It's really hard to say what people do when they put themselves in a bad spot like that. From the second they were asked to put it away they were in fact in a lot of trouble.
I don't disagree with your gut reaction. After all I had concerns about power issues before this all started and FIRST suggested we not test at Einstein those issues. As it turned out some of those issues existed who knows maybe they would have been found (I can't prove it either way). I even went so far as to ask the question in the official forum with regards to the championship.
However, no means no. We completed the testing of my little oscilloscopes for the power to the radio on off season events. We did it where it would do as little harm as possible to FIRST proper if something happened that was not expected. We did it with full knowledge of those who could be effected.
There was most definitely bad judgement at work with this person's choice of actions. They've made themselves a sitting duck for suspicion. It's highly unlikely we will ever know if they are the only source of the deauth issue.
The amateur way they handled themselves however, concerns me because usually where there's an amateur trouble maker that is easy to spot it is a distraction for someone that's not an amateur.
I mean not to start a witch hunt just to make the point. We live in a complicated world where rarely do specific effective security issues just magically appear to a single person. Like the systems themselves they are collaborative efforts. I have a hard time believing that a person so clearly asking to get caught just figured this all out on their own.
In a perverse way the drive to seek out the problem with the WiFi might have guided them to this issue via collaboration, but even then I doubt they crafted the attack and were ready to report it just in time of that one event.
I do computer security for a living in part so perhaps it's just in my nature to rarely assume the singular genius that hands themselves to me on the silver platter isn't covering for someone else.