2012 Einstein Incident Finale 12/12 8:30PM EST on Candidly Speaking

[Munchskull]

Thank you for doing a show on this tough topic. I feel like it is nice to know more about this infamous incident and how it has helped shape FRC for the future.

[Jessica Boucher]

Originally Posted by Tyler Olds

I totally forgot about the drunks who bum-rushed Einstein and the Pits in 2012 too!

I still haven't. Ugh.

[Bennett548]

Tyler, Karthik and Libby: Thanks for doing this.

It is a hard subject to discuss with new members of our team, and this video presents it in a concise way that will really help start that discussion.

Big respect to Karthik for being so fair and graciously professional when it obviously still hurts. I probably couldn't have kept it together like that.

The only correction I would give is that 548 voluntarily declined the invitation to the World Championship in 2013. Even if we had felt like we should have gone (we didn't), it would have been hard to pay the travel costs after losing some sponsors going from the 2012 to 2013 season. I don't want people thinking there were persons within the FIRST organization that rescinded the offer. From everything I saw, FIRST and FiM were and are totally supportive of our team and never treated us with any stigma, officially or otherwise.

[Tom Line]

This show was poignant to me, but I suspect it lost much of its impact if you didn't live through the event.

Karthik's comments about Chief Delphi resonated with me. I don't know how you improve the level of discourse on the site. For instance, how do you teach people not to claim that "XX happened because I know it did" with out verifiable data? Did you have the router in your hand? Do you have network traffic logs of the event? If not, all you are doing is throwing fuel on a fire that doesn't need any help. It increases the noise to signal ratio - and that's never a good thing.

I guess you have to look on the bright side - as a community website, the community needs to try and correct errors like that when we see them and hope that folks learn in the process. It can be incredibly frustrating when you get a new batch of folks making the same mistakes every year, but that's why we make the big bucks

[Mastonevich]

Random thoughts that come to mind for me after the discussion and reading the report.

1. There are so many details in that report. Looking at all of the possible causes of communication issues, it is no wonder there are communications issues every year for many teams. The learning opportunities are many.

2. WIFI security and hacking concerns need better solutions still to this day. Maybe a FIRST alum is working that very issue.

3. The maturity and respect of all people involved in this situation is outstanding.

[tjf]

Originally Posted by Mastonevich

Random thoughts that come to mind for me after the discussion and reading the report.

1. There are so many details in that report. Looking at all of the possible causes of communication issues, it is no wonder there are communications issues every year for many teams. The learning opportunities are many.

2. WIFI security and hacking concerns need better solutions still to this day. Maybe a FIRST alum is working that very issue.

3. The maturity and respect of all people involved in this situation is outstanding.

In response to item #2, I'm decently sure that they stepped up the security severely. Based on what I know about cheesy-arena, a nearly-protocol identical FMS, each match 6 unique keys are generated for each robot on the field and sent to the access points, as well as all communications between DS and FMS VLANned so that each team can't observe or interfere with other team's traffic. (For this reason, inter-alliance data sharing isn't possible at the DS-level)

I also know for a matter of fact that several alum and volunteers do test the firmware and try to break in intentionally. I'm sure I wouldn't want a job of defending something like this, so kudos to them.