I’ll probably just put it on Dropbox with a public link.
Apparently the bandwidth limit is 10GB/day which is higher than I expected. I may do the same granted our bandwidth hit on kickoff was even higher than that.
FIRST should really torrent the manual files on the day of Kickoff, I think enough people would seed to take care of any server crashing issues.
-Clinton-
While that is probably a good idea, Torrents have such a bad reputation that it’d be nearly impossible to download them on a school’s network, as apposed to a simple PDF
If you have any Linux people on your team, Evince (the standard GNOME document viewer) (and probably others… maybe KDE’s one?) can print directly to PDF, thereby allowing you to save a decrypted copy of an encrypted PDF (you need the password, of course, and it increases the file size).
I’m not familiar with software for Windows that can do this, other than Adobe’s official PDF creation software. It shouldn’t be too hard to find something, though.
Then you can distribute the new PDF among your team (and other teams), removing the need for any form of internet access.
I thought we were on the safer side of a grey area. We never mentioned how one would “figure out” the encryption key, we were simply discussing the ethical implications of the READING the manual before it is release. At least that is where the conversation started.
^What Par_Wig said.
I can host game documents on our team website, like I did last year, too.
Part of the problem with teams hosting game documents is that they don’t always get updated in a timely manner when the GDC issues a revision. We found that last year, especially considering several major changes that came out regarding the minibots. But every year it’s something.
+1. I plan on doing this for my team.
I suppose if a group of people on CD upload and then publicly post their links, then we can get a nice, safe network to download things.
- Sunny G.
I think the idea is that it is hosted on a team’s website only for the initial manual, when FIRST’s servers can’t handle the traffic. Post that period, teams should not have a problem accessing updates.
[strike]I haven’t tested this on an encrypted file, but Mac OS X’s native print dialog allows saving the print output as a PDF as well. (And depending on your team makeup, there may be more Mac people than Linux people on your team.)[/strike]
Edit: See msimon785’s post below. Nevermind. 
I just tried it on the encrypted 2011 manual. It does not allow you to print an encrypted pdf to another pdf.
Remember you are dealing with copyrighted material, why hosting the manual won’t necessarily violate the terms of use I’m sure creating a torrent would.
It’s not a bad idea to have teams host the manual the first week but if you do, please commit to removing it after the first update.
Just to try to help those looking for less headaches on kickoff and after…
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I highly recommend at least one person on your team bring a laptop and write down the password on a note or word or something. very useful, especially for copy paste-ing.
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Google Sites or Google Docs would be a good free way to host the document. At the very least, you could host it for your team that way.
There’s zero legal distinction between the two methods. A torrent is just another way to share a document.
Whether or not anyone but FIRST legally can distribute it without their permission is up for debate, I fail to see how sharing it through torrents is any different than hosting it on a server for direct download.
EDIT
If you have Acrobat, it takes about 2 clicks to remove the security.
I posted links in a few places last year with the disclaimer: “After the first week these rules may no longer be entirely accurate, I hold no responsibility for not keeping up with rule updates.”
Last year over week 1 we went through 30GB of bandwidth with 30,000 page hits and 10,000 file transfers on the manual, so I think keehun & I will host it again this year.
The attached pictures are the data for kickoff day, the first is general data, the second picture is the number of times each file was downloaded
EDIT: I want to say save as in most pdf viewers can remove encryption too, if I host the documents on kickoff I will unencrypt them for ease of use, I would prefer you save them to a computer rather than repeatedly downloading.
I will put it up on my team’s site. We supposedly have unlimited bandwith for it so we can test it.
The link to the site page is:
http://nfraiderrobotics.com/frcmanual.html
Feel free to test with the other one and I will put up this years as soon as it comes out.
It’s not ideal, but I can get the decrypted manual up on Imgur next Saturday as soon as it comes out at:
It should also be unlimited. The “One Image” album will have the entire manual as a single image, the other will have every page as its own image.