Rah Cha Cha Rukus (Rochester, NY) Observations

[purduephotog]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

"GP" is Gracious Professionalism. It's an important concept in the FIRST culture. Consider it a combination of Google's "Don't be evil", Scouting's "Do a good turn daily", and the old Army "Be all you can be" slogan.

The reason it applies here is that IFI has asked that the radio modem control protocol remain a secret. Someone with sufficient skill can figure it out (and some have done so), but having those skills often implies a level of maturity and wisdom that keeps one from using the knowledge for ill purposes. If the protocol were published openly, however, any random script kiddie would be able to hack together something to disrupt a FRC competition.

I'm going to stick with the response we use in business:

Security through Obscurity isn't Security- it's wishful thinking.

As you've pointed out, anyone with the right equipment could disrupt the competition- but anyone at the competition could RF in on them too.

I believe that that is a very small problem and one that warrants concerned indifference- Our team wasted nearly 2 hours trying to get the robots to work while not understanding why the system was failing (receiving other robots interference) whereas if the standards had been opened and they were able to implement the protocols correctly we would not have had those issues.

I hope.

3 more days till competition...