[DampRobot]

I've been watching this thread with much interest lately, and a few interesting points that (I believe) have not been addressed are still fresh in my mind.

First, aren't we forgetting the second person who brought down communications? The story that is corroborated both by the 548 mentor and the official report implies that there was a second attacker, who interestingly attacked the wifi network only after the 548 mentor did his three second demo attack. Most people appear to be assuming that the 548 mentor did all of the wifi atacks, which just doesn't appear to add up. Why did the second attacker act? Did they believe something similar to the first attacker, that they were being attacked? Or did they simply have a malicious intent?

Second, was there institutional knowledge of this security hole? It appears that at least two (and probably more, if this thread is any indicator) FRC members knew of this specific hole. Did no one on the official FRC team know of this? This seems unlikely to me, but depending on the extent of the knowledge of this hole, it certainly could be true. If so, why didn't they attempt to patch it? If not, does this point to an institutional problem in a lack of focus on security? In either case, more needs to be done to recognize and address future security holes.

Third, why did we never learn about this hole at Einstein, where it's relativity unlikely that two separate people coincidentally used this technique to bring down a match. Were there smaller incidents at regionals and division championships that simply did not get noticed until Einstein? Were people with knowledge of this quite until then, or simply unnoticed? And why did a thread never appear on CD with information about this? Surely, unless there was malicious intent, any loyal FIRSTer would rather report this than use it in a match. Were malicious (or simply very quite) people the only ones who ever knew or suspected a exploit of this type?

Hopefully, my questions were constructive and not offensive. I'm just a little surprised that I've never seen them asked or answered yet.