How about instructions for making pipe boms/molotov cocktails: http://www.linkbase.org/make-pipe-bomb /
I can't really come up with a good generalization without any holes. Bottom line is that I think creating destructive tools shouldn't be illegal. Using them should be though.
Even if he's just written some DoS tools, that shouldn't be illegal. It's like suing gun manufacturers for marketing stuff that can be used to kill people. Using DoS tools should be illegal. Writing them should not. Using guns to kill people is illegal. Building them is not.
I was kind of disappointed not to see CMU ranking high there, since I do have some school pride. Then I went to read the questions, and I was really disappointed. I think anybody who did decent in 15-212 (sophomore-level CS class) should have no trouble solving these problems. They are all pretty straight-forward, and I consider them pretty boring. When I mentioned this to a friend he said that in higher levels of such competitions it usually comes down to who can write the same code faster. I guess that interests some people, but I'm not surprised now that none of the "good" schools ranked high, since it's just not interesting. (For interesting problems, see http://members.tripod.com/~POTM/) Tim
I was gonna post this but you beat me to it. Just wanna say that I completely agree. As someone who took OS at CMU (copy-on-write fork, yeah!) I can say that it _really_ taught me how stuff works under the hood. You can't code it unless you really know what's going on. If you don't think your students can hack it (and if they're not coding at least 20 hours a week then they can do more >:->) have 'em write a scheduler/program loader from scratch. I think the from scratch part is important because it teaches you the only real magic that goes on in an OS: how it takes control from other programs.
Great, now distributed.net has done what that company wanted them to. According to the CS Group, this shows: a.that the only possible attack against CS-Cipher is exhaustive key search (brute force attack). b.the extreme robustness of CS-Cipher. (http://www.cie-signaux.fr/security/challeng.htm )
Anybody with any crypto clue will be able to tell you it shows neither. I think it's really sad that distributed.net wasted its time on this marketing crap.
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Sure. A line must be drawn. But drawing it at the point where a company and some of its customers are inconvenienced seems unnecessary.
Tim
How about instructions for making pipe boms/molotov cocktails:b /
http://www.linkbase.org/make-pipe-bom
I can't really come up with a good generalization without any holes. Bottom line is that I think creating destructive tools shouldn't be illegal. Using them should be though.
Even if he's just written some DoS tools, that shouldn't be illegal. It's like suing gun manufacturers for marketing stuff that can be used to kill people. Using DoS tools should be illegal. Writing them should not.
Using guns to kill people is illegal. Building them is not.
Parfait may be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet.
Do you have a towel or something, because I'm drooling.
What music player is that?
I was kind of disappointed not to see CMU ranking high there, since I do have some school pride. Then I went to read the questions, and I was really disappointed. I think anybody who did decent in 15-212 (sophomore-level CS class) should have no trouble solving these problems. They are all pretty straight-forward, and I consider them pretty boring. When I mentioned this to a friend he said that in higher levels of such competitions it usually comes down to who can write the same code faster. I guess that interests some people, but I'm not surprised now that none of the "good" schools ranked high, since it's just not interesting. (For interesting problems, see http://members.tripod.com/~POTM/) Tim
I was gonna post this but you beat me to it. Just wanna say that I completely agree. As someone who took OS at CMU (copy-on-write fork, yeah!) I can say that it _really_ taught me how stuff works under the hood. You can't code it unless you really know what's going on. If you don't think your students can hack it (and if they're not coding at least 20 hours a week then they can do more >:->) have 'em write a scheduler/program loader from scratch. I think the from scratch part is important because it teaches you the only real magic that goes on in an OS: how it takes control from other programs.
Great, now distributed.net has done what that company wanted them to. According to the CS Group, this shows:m )
a.that the only possible attack against CS-Cipher is exhaustive key search (brute force attack).
b.the extreme robustness of CS-Cipher.
(http://www.cie-signaux.fr/security/challeng.ht
Anybody with any crypto clue will be able to tell you it shows neither. I think it's really sad that distributed.net wasted its time on this marketing crap.