Hackers Forced Announcement of 10th Planet Find

JCY2K writes "According to The Inquirer, hackers gained access to the secure server where the data about the new planet was being held and threatened to reveal it. Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis."

Comments

Supports the Hacker Creed

[WebHostingGuy]

That information wants to be set free.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Swamii]

No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Open-source software advocates want information to be free, as do civil liberty groups and other political organizations that fall near the Slashdot line of thinking.

But to say information wants to be free is like saying my computer monitor wants to be plugged into a high-end video card: it may be better for all parties, but in the end, the monitor is just a monitor. Likewise, information is just information.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[deathcloset]

well, yes.

But that information doesn't want to be used as fodder for extortion.

if the hacker had just made the find publicly available that would have been one thing. but, rather, the hacker choose to use his find to threaten the researchers.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[EccentricAnomaly]

more from here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

Dr. Brown had still hoped to hold back announcements of 2003 UB313 and another large Kuiper Belt object, 2005 FY9, until October, but his hand was tipped by Brian Marsden, director of the Minor Planet Center, who said that he was worried about hanky panky.

Dr. Marsden said that it was possible by looking on the Internet at the logs of one of the telescopes Dr. Brown's team had been using to find out where they had been pointed. He had evidence, he said, that someone had done that and computed crude orbits of the two unannounced planetoids, "presumably" in preparation for their own observations.

perhaps we should call the planet P4w-N3d :)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Yeah, it hates it when you do that.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[nickptar]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance. What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anne_Nonymous]

I sure wish beer just wanted to be free half as much as information does.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Golias]

But that information doesn't want to be used as fodder for extortion.

Won't somebody think of the information!?!?!?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[suitepotato]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.

Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way.

What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist. It may be true, but information is a concept relative to those holding it as such. This is why 1984 is so relevant to information technology. What people consider to be true or factual is dependent upon information as recorded or held in the minds of others and transmitted to them. 1984 tells you why hackers can be dangerous. Should information not be held in the mind and be changed in some database and it not exist in anyone's mind until it is read after the changes, it is assumed to be right and it becomes "information" at that point.

Information doesn't want to be at all. People insist on it being. The fewer the people with it, the closer it gets to its ephemeral basis of nonexistance, just waiting for some entity to come along and encompass it back into being.

You may now return to not-so-deep end of the /. world.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[MooseByte]

"For example, you do not know my Driver's License number. Unless I tell you right now, you will die not knowing it."

D00d, we flipped that database months ago.

PS- That haircut isn't you at all. Experiment!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Savantissimo]

That is not what happened.

Michael E. Brown, a Caltech professor and one of the original observers of the planetwrites:

As has been widely reported in the press, the announcement of the new planet was made in a rather hasty manner because of fears that our discovery was going to be made public by someone who had hacked a web site and gained access to information about where the object is. The details are a little more complicated than this, the terminology can be debated ("hacked?" "sleuthed?" "stole?" "stumbled across?") and not all are 100% clear to me, but here is a reconstruction of the events that lead to the announcement as best I can discern them. Some aspects remain mysterious.

In mid-July short abstracts of scientific talks to be given at a meeting in September became available on the web (for example, here). We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting. In these abstracts we call the object a name that our software automatically assigned is, K40506A (the first Kuiper belt object we discovered in data from 2004/05/06, May 6th). Using this name was a very very bad idea on our part! Unbeknownst to us, some of the telescopes that we had been using to study this object keep open logs of who has been observing, where they have been observing, and what they have been observing. A two-second Google search of "K40506A" immediately reveals these observing logs. Ouch. Bad news for us. From the moment the abstracts became public anyone on the planet with a web connection and a little curiosity about this "K40506A" object could have found out where it was. Anyone on the planet with even a modest-sized telescope could then go find the object and claim a discovery as their own.

Interestingly, this is not what we then happened. The Spanish group headed by J.-L. Ortiz legitimately discovered the object on their own in data from 2 and 3 years ago. The fact that this discovery happened days after the data were potentially available on the web is, I believe, a coincidence. At the time, however, some in the community privately expressed their concerns to me that this coincidence was too good to be true and wanted to know if there was any possible way that anyone could have found out the location of our object. I insisted it was impossible. I was wrong. I myself went to Google late on the night after the Spanish announcement, typed K40506A into Google, and let out a gasp. Even though I don't believe the Spanish group did this, I realized anyone could have found our object with very little effort. To be very clear, from the first day I have very publicly stated that the official discovery credit goes to Ortiz et al. and no one else.

By Friday morning it occurred to me that once someone knew about the web site where the information on where the telescopes we had been using had been pointing it would take only a little more effort to carefully peruse this web site to see if we had been looking at anything else moving in the sky. At this point I contacted Brian Marsden at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) by email, told him confidentially about the two objects that we had not yet announced (now known as 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9), expressed my concerns that someone may be able to nefariously find our data and attempt to claim credit for discovering these objects, and sought his advice. His chilling response came less than an hour later: someone had already used a web service of the MPC to use past observations of an object to predict locations for tonight. The past observations were precisely the logs from the telescope we had used! The culprit and not even bothered to change the names that we used (K31021C for 2003 UB313 and K50331A for 2005 FY9). At this point we had no choice but to hastily pull together a press

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[SparafucileMan]

the path of least resistence is steady deterioration. without constant effort/energy keeping information free, it becomes not free, as thermodynamics clearly states.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[keraneuology]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist.

Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it. It will always exist: a single atom of hydrogen at coordinates 5.28E25, 1.92883E18E298, 42 contains information and, some might argue, is information itself. It not only contains the information of where it is, but the information of where it is not. Watch its path and it will tell you what has influenced it in the past.

"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.

Personally, I'm on the information-should-freely-flow side of things. With the exception of anything that requires massive quantities of money and very expensive machines and large collections of disciplined manpower there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[nickptar]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist.

I said "the absence of measures taken to prevent it from [becoming free]."

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[abborren]

How can information become "information"?

Information is just information. Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom. The distinction is important. Your senses pick up information, you are the judge in what becomes knowledge.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Hope Thelps]

I agree that impressionable young minds shouldn't be exposed to this fallacy

Yes, if we expose people to figures of speech at an early age then we run the risk of raising a generation that can use language effectively. This could be the end of the internet as we know it.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[NitsujTPU]

The ground is contributing to the mass of the planet, thereby increasing the earth's gravitational pull, correct?

IE, if I annihilated half of the Earth, the Earth would have half as much gravity. This means that the ground plays a role in this process.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[oasisbob]

Nice point about anthropomorphizing.

I'd be surprised if many people on Slashdot have even heard the original quote:

"Information wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

--Stewart Brand, writing in 1984

Makes a lot more sense in context, doesn't it? I find it surprising how old this quote is and how perfectly it is proven by the Internet and modern file sharing.

It is also obvious that he is talking about free "as in beer."

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[STrinity]

The ground is contributing to the mass of the planet, thereby increasing the earth's gravitational pull, correct?

No, the ground is the surface; it's the stuff under the ground that contributes to the mass. If I dug a hole to the center of the Earth, you would keep falling towards the center of mass even while you're below ground level.

A bad thing?

[ect5150]

while they waited for full analysis

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

Re:A bad thing?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

In America, sure. Think if we had waited for a full analysis of Iraq's WMD's, or if they had anything at all to do with 9/11. Then we never would have had an excuse to go to war.

Re:A bad thing?

[pyrrhonist]

Also, how come no one is asking the question why it took 2 years before such analysis was done.

Explained here. There's no conspiracy - they didn't discover it until January:

Because the new planet is so far away it is moving slower than most of the objects that we find. It is movng so slowly, in fact, that our computers didn't notice it the first time around! We began a special reanalysis a year later to specifically look for very distant objects. This reanalysis found the new planet on January 8th 2005, almost 1 1/2 years after the initial data were obtained.

Re:A bad thing?

[hexi]

He hasn't explicitly said that 9/11 and Iraq were connected but he has implied so on many occassions. Also you can't forget Powell's speech before the UN.

The least you can say is that Bush hasn't been very clear on the issue.

Re:A bad thing?

[blamanj]

That statement is literally true, in the same lawyerly, weaseling way that Bill Clinton didn't have sex with Monical Lewinsky, if you define having sex specifically as intercourse.

However, take for example, this quote from Bush in 2003, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained." Now you can't say the average person wouldn't read an implied link between SH and 9/11 there. But, he's safe on the technicality.

Actually, I'm not sure you're correct and that he hasn't slipped up once or twice. Cheney certainly has directly made that link.

Re:A bad thing?

[d34thm0nk3y]

Some of the choice quotes from the timeframe. Make your own opinion...

President Bush:
We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

Oct. 14, 2002: "After September the 11th, we've entered into a new era and a new war. This is a man [Hussein] that we know has had connections with Al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use Al Qaeda as a forward army."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
Sept. 26, 2002: "Yes, there is a linkage between Al Qaeda and Iraq."

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
Sept. 25, 2002: There "have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time."

Dick Cheney
"If we're successful in Iraq then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11,"

Colin Powell
We know that there had been connections and there had been exchanges between al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime. And those have been pursued and looked at

So, did they...

[John Napkintosh]

Hack the planet?

Security through Obscurity

[Natchswing]

When will corporations ever learn? Obscuring the knowledge of the 10th planet will not keep us safe from their eventual attempt to take over Earth.

Bad typo, that:

[el-spectre]

The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".

Oh noes! Hackers!

[Dirtside]

I traced through the friendly articles, and I'm not sure where the Sunday Independent got the info that a hacker "forced" them to announce their findings. Brown isn't quoted as saying anything about a hacker, and they didn't source that info.

Of course, what's even stupider is how both the Independent and, to an even stupider degree, the Inquirer make it sound all ominous and elitist that the scientists didn't release the info as soon as they found it. Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Ingolfke]

The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!

No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated. The public doesn't track or care about retracted or falsified scientific studies, so to come out with unchecked data would end up confusing most people if the conclusion made based on that data was proven to be incorrect. And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.

Info was not withheld since 2003

[YoDave]

From a BBC article: The object was first observed on 21 October 2003, but the team did not see it move in the sky until looking at the same area 15 months later on 8 January 2005.

Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good science

[Listen Up]

Congratulations and Thank You to the Astronomers/Researchers involved with this discovery. Thank You for discovering something and then waiting for a full peer review and analysis before presenting your data to the public. WAAAAY too much today that process does not occur, because of bad scientists, and gives a bad name to good science and scientists.

Fuck you to the hackers who feel that something like this needed to be public without review. If it was 'revealed' and then found to be false, nobody would have remembered some script kiddie illegally, immorally, and unethically published the data before it was reviewed. Everyone would have jumped on the Astronomers/Researchers and science in general like a bunch of ignorant cattle (like they always do) and the true facts would have been buried in the mess.

sorry, fixed link...

[EccentricAnomaly]

teach me not to preview my comments :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

You lack a basic understanding of how the scientific process works. Confirmation of an observation, analysis of the resulting data, peer reviewing of those data, and replication of the original observation ALL ensure the accuracy of the scientific find.

Ban them!?! The scientists were clearly planning on releasing their discovery but were forced to do it prematurely. They were abiding by scientific principles.

Name One

[SteveM]

There are 'planetoids' that are bigger than pluto that are considered simple KBO even though some consider them to be planets.

Really, name one.

You cannot, as this is the first KBO discovered that is larger than Pluto.

SteveM

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[pyrrhonist]

Brown isn't quoted as saying anything about a hacker, and they didn't source that info.

It's on this page. But, yeah, it wasn't really hacking, it was just using Google well.

Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?

Also, the computers they use for analysis didn't see it because it moves so slowly. They found it on reanalysis a year and a half after they imaged it. They weren't actually sitting on the discovery for two years - just since January.

Mod TFA Flamebait

[rdwald]

Seriously, I've seen less biased articles from the RIAA's anti-piracy campaigns. The reason Brown held onto the information was so he could get all the data before making an announcement. He wanted to be able to say, "New object is 2.73 times as large as Pluto," not "New object is probably bigger than Pluto." Is the existence of another Kupier Belt object really going to affect anyone? It's not like this was cancer research.

There was no hacker

[tricaric]

This claim has been extensively discussed in the Minor Planet Mailing List, in particular in this thread, where the "hacker" tells the whole story.

My Horoscope ick FUBAR!

[Henriok]

Bah! My horoscope was beaten to a pulp when NASA shot Deep Impact into Tempel 1. now they are withholding info that will be of immense importance in my future. I'll sue their asses!

Re:Full disclosure?

[fishbowl]

"This method of using intrusions to force 'full disclosure' by scientists is interesting, and begs why this information can be kept out of the public eye, where it would benefit the scientific community at large, and is instead held back to bolster the reputations of those who make the initial discovery."

If you release an announcement before you're finished with your research or due diligence, you expose yourself and your institution to controversy.

When you're making a claim as ostentatious as a discovery of a 10th planet, you might not want to put your name on it before you are satisfied that you're ready to stake your career on the paper.
Also, you're going to expose yourself to other people usurping your work.

And what if it's a different type of research? What if you're in the process of doing patent searches or negotiating something of that nature?

Yes, a bad thing.

[ackthpt]

while they waited for full analysis

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

Please, that is so 2002.

Ask the Whitehouse and No. 10 Downing Street.

Star Trek

[AviLazar]

Dear 10th Planet,

After carefully reviewing your application to join the United Federation of Planets, we have determined that you are inelligible to join. We based this decision on the fact that we would have to re-write one-too many episodes. While we could do this with a time jaunt, we realize our viewers are sick and tired of time skipping ever since it was abused on Enterprise.

Sincerely Yours,

Admiral J.T.K.

P.S. Go to PriceLine where you can name your own price!

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Ingolfke]

The astronomer who made the discovery has more details on this website. It wasn't discovered 2 years ago, just around Christmas of 2004. And it sounds like he and his team had already released some initial abstracts to a scientific audience (so they weren't hiding anything).


I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy,

The press would have reported this using the following headlines:

Astronomer Claims 10th Planet Found
10th Planet Found?
New Planet Discovered

Because this sells advertisements. MAYBE, they would have commented about the fact that this was a preliminary discovery in the body of the article. All that said, if you read the astronomer's material on the website and the articles published by the press you see how horid their reporting actually is.

Releasing this information wouldn't have been a bad thing per se, but the original post I responded to specifically attacked them for NOT releasing the information, calling their behavior unethical. My position is that they did not act unethically.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[phlegmofdiscontent]

And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.

Hell, even if they (or any other researcher) were sitting on a cure for cancer, they would have to analyse and test and be damned sure of the discovery because getting it wrong could a. wreck their careers b. kill people (possibly through unforseen side effects, etc) or c. not work at all.

I've been reading the threads and there seem to be two camps: the "they're bad people for withholding this information, information wants to be free" camp and the "well, they're just trying to confirm what they think they know" camp. I fall on the side of the latter camp. If anyone was unethical, it was the "hackers" who threatened to go public with incomplete information.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[The_Wilschon]

I work at the CDF collaboration at Fermilab, owned and operated by US DOE (yes, that means public) funds. The DOE requires that any analysis (yes, I said requires) be thoroughly reviewed by all members of the collaboration. This is a process called "blessing" the analysis. Since there are over 700 collaborators, this can take quite a while. However, if you think this is unethical, and think it would be far better to publish raw, unanalysed data, well, write a letter to the government. If you think that access to this data is a right granted by being a taxpayer, complain to the government that owns said equipment. Because if those telescopes are anything like our accelerator, that government doesn't allow them to do anything as abysmally stupid as releasing results that haven't been carefully considered.

You sir, are a fool, and have no idea how the scientific community operates on a daily basis, nor how it should operate. Do us all a favor, and next time there is an article relating to science, keep your mouth firmly shut. Better yet, buy yourself a muzzle. Wear it.

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[lrucker]

At the rate school textbooks get replaced, even if this is confirmed schoolkids are going to be taught there are 9 planets for years to come.

I was a National Geographic space article junkie when I was in grade school (mid 70s) and knew my textbook was wrong when it claimed Jupiter had only 12 moons, but my teacher would not accept any answer other than what was in the book.

Also, signed statement to Congress

[michaelmalak]

Before Bush could go to war, Bush was obligated under the October, 2002 so-called war authorization by Congress to inform Congress that such action was "consistent" with "taking action against" the Sep. 11 terrorists. Leading up to the war, Bush was desperately pounding the CIA to come up with such evidence. They were unable to, so Bush simply issued a letter to Congress blandly asserting the completely unsupportable proposition anyway:

Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate

March 18, 2003

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

This letter, and the need for it, is the most underreported aspect of the entire war, in my opinion, and an article on it is one of the most viewed on my blogs -- I was the first to break the story, simply by reading the text of the war authorization act on thomas.loc.gov. Too bad the mass media couldn't have done the same.

Re:Also, signed statement to Congress

[AA1]

Here is Public Law 107-243 that parent post was referring to. You can see in the first few pages that it talks about the alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

PDF Format