Actually it was Wednesday. The stream was on Tuesday and he said the game is finalized tomorrow meaning 1/6/16.
So the game has been done for a day. I assume there are a few people checking everything over to check for grammatical errors so I am going to guess it will be released tonight or tomorrow. If the release is on Saturday along with the game I beg someone to download it and put it on drive, or something of that nature temporarily I know its not the greatest thing to do but, for people like me at remote kickoff locations downloading the manual right away is next to impossible.
I was a little surprised the encryption test did not come out yesterday. Usually that proceeds the encrypted manual by a day or two. I agree that the manual will probably come out tonight or tomorrow morning.
Since it has been confirmed that it is a water game this year, I’m guessing that with the recent rain in California, they are relaxing the water usage rules.
I plan on posting the manual on my Google Docs account, and letting the team download it from there.
About Passwords - plenty of people understand things like rainbow tables, context dictionaries and salt generators. I’m guessing FIRST doesn’t, but understands that those types of things exist. So they’re waiting to release the manual itself until the time it takes to employ those is more than the time until kickoff. Or perhaps the new website is having major issues (always plausible).
For example, it makes no sense for aaaaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaaaaab, aaaaaaaaaac (etc) to be tried - so just skip them. Most passwords, especially recent FIRST passwords, have game context around them. So l33t variants and grammatical substitutions can be applied to a more context-sensitive set of passwords (on something like Stronghold or its theme) to reduce the probable password set down to a few hundred million combinations. This is crack-able in a few days.
Adding grammar and numbers to a password increases the bit entropy of the password. Adding context to a cracker’s rainbow table obliterates bit entropy. Yet making a diceware-based password increases information entropy to the point where a dictionary-based cracking attempt is completely obsolete while maintaining a sense of reason in how the password is disseminated on Game Day. The game manual could then be up a week ahead of time, presuming final edits are done.
I’m not an expert in cryptography, but the math behind information entropy is really enjoyable to read about, IMO.
They’re on Azure, or at least the FRC API is and it should be possible for them to scale up massively on Saturday morning if they want to. It could be the plan is to release the manual on Saturday morning without pre-releasing an encrypted version.
If it were me, I’d put all the documents on a “dumb” cloud web server (no .NET, no PHP, just an HTTP file server so it’s got low CPU draw) and then that could be replicated and instantiated as many times as they need to, to cover the bandwidth needs. They could have 50 instances on Saturday and then cut it down to 5 on Monday.
From this link http://www.firstinspires.org/resourc…nual-qa-system
“Game Manual
An encrypted version of the Game Manual will be posted before Kickoff. The encryption key will be shared during Kickoff and an unencrypted version will be available after that.”
So I would say we can expect it before kickoff, I would hope today.
I used the live support on the first website to ask when the encrypted manual will be release and got this response so this is what we can expect. By end of the business day tomorrow
Oh and to expect info in the team blast today for what that means
(IE) Right click the link and chose “Save Target As”. Sorry I’m using IE, it’s the browser on my home computer that I rarely use. Chrome/Firefox/Whatever should have similar options.
