Hackers Forced Announcement of 10th Planet Find 540
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."
Supports the Hacker Creed (Score:2, Insightful)
A bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
while they waited for full analysis
So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?
Bad typo, that: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A bad thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Supports the Hacker Creed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The Scientists Had No Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good science (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Supports the Hacker Creed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Scientists Had No Right... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Mod TFA Flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Full disclosure? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Supports the Hacker Creed (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:The Scientists Had No Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Supports the Hacker Creed (Score:4, Insightful)
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:The Scientists Had No Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:A bad thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Supports the Hacker Creed (Score:2, Insightful)
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:A bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.