People pushed & pushed for "the team" and/or "the person" to finally come forward, and I really hope that we can leave it at 548's statement. It may not be 100% what everyone dreamed of... but I don't think anything will ever make the situation right.
The team could and SHOULD only have issued their understanding of what happened, which means they are 100% reliant on what the mentor told them happened. Whether the mentor told them the entire truth or not, what are we so worried about? The person is banned, the vulnerability fixed, tons of more issues were found and tediously documented, so lets move on. People that are worried about "discrepancies" are you looking to call the team or the mentor a liar? What good does that do? Or are you legitimately interested to know if there was "a second attacker"? And if so, are we just on our next witch hunt?
I'm not sure people are fully understanding the team's statement. I pieced this together long before the team's statement, and I'm not sure people are getting it...
I'm going to stop dancing around the numbers/"vaguery"....
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1. During the first match on Einstein, there was a robot failure in the alliance that included Team 548.
2. An individual mentor from Team 548 believed the failure was likely caused by an interruption.
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Translating into english... When 118 went down, the individual assumed someone else was using the attack they knew to be possible. They thought THEIR alliance was being attacked...
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3. Acting on their own accord, they entered the field in an attempt to notify FIRST personnel of their belief.
4. The FIRST Technical staff did not pursue the suggestion by the individual and asked for them to leave the field area in which they complied.
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How frustrating would it be to think that your alliance was denied the opportunity to compete fairly because of a security hole? They thought 118 had been targeted and that they had lost a key part of their alliance to this attack. Just putting myself in the mentor's shoes I can see how heartbreaking and distraught I would feel. We have all said numerous times that the frustration with this whole thing is that so many of us feel that the Einstein teams never got a "fair shot" to see who really could have been the winner. In that exact moment, this mentor really just wanted a fair shot... perhaps an opportunity at a replay with the bug fixed, or attacker identified... but when the mentor was asked to leave and disregarded, the mentor had no idea what else to do.
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5. Unfortunately, to further demonstrate the issue, and making a poor decision, they created a 3 second field interruption in match 2.
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548 acknowledges that this was a poor decision, and we can all see how it most definitely was the wrong way to go about it, but even I can acknowledge that being in the same exact situation, the thought would cross my mind. But I would hope even in the heat of the moment, I would make the right decision and let it go. But with how heated debates get here on CD, I would be willing to bet that probably 10% of the FIRST population may have done the exact same thing if they were put in the exact same circumstances and had the exact same knowledge. I'd like to say I hold us all to higher standards, but many of us crack under pressure and none of us has made the absolute right decision every single day of our lives.
I don't think this person was doing it to intentionally harm an alliance or to prove their ultimate hacking skills... I think it was a sad, last ditch effort to get the attention of FIRST and get their alliance "a fair shot" at competing.
Lets let go of the details and all move on. The issue has been fixed, the team has come out into the open & apologized, and many other good things have resulted from all of this. So lets focus on moving forward.