Slashdot Mirror
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."
while they waited for full analysis
So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Hack the planet?
Long signatures suck.
The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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.
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.
No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.
Yeah, it hates it when you do that.
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.
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.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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.
This claim has been extensively discussed in the Minor Planet Mailing List, in particular in this thread, where the "hacker" tells the whole story.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
/. world.
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
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
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!
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2