Encrypted morally grey

[Guppy294]

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)

[E. Wood]

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.

[Guppy294]

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.

[E. Wood]

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

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by Guppy294

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.

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.

[Guppy294]

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!

[fortinj1354]

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.

[Sean Raia]

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

[Guppy294]

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.

[Sean Raia]

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.

[Guppy294]

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.

[Sean Raia]

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

[Guppy294]

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

To end this discussion: It's not grey, it's black and white. The same protection used by NASA is used here, so it would be like hacking into NASA. It's not right, and would give you an unfair advantage over the other teams. It goes against the rules of gracious professionalism and the values of FIRST, and therefore should not be done.

[Taylor]

There has been some discussion on this thread about the discussion on the thread being against forum rules (threadception?). Yes, the topic being discussed is of an unethical nature, but to be clear, nothing was said about the actual act itself (i.e. hey, if you wanna crack the password, here's how to do it); simply a discussion of the ethical consequences. My interpretation of the OP is suggesting a discussion of cracking the code just to see if it can be done, not to gain a competitive advantage or even read the contents of the manual. No moderators have felt the need to jump in; this to me is a great example of the beauty of Chief Delphi. We can discuss ethical implications of many issues in an academic way, be free with our thoughts, without fear of repercussions.
Hooray for Chief Delphi.