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."

Info was not withheld since 2003

[YoDave]

From a BBC article [bbc.co.uk]: 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.

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 [caltech.edu] 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.

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 [caltech.edu]. 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.

There was no hacker

[tricaric]

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

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: [caltech.edu]

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

[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: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

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 [whitehouse.gov] 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: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.

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 [c-span.org]