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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 24 2013 @ 10:22 AM EST |
This was a couple years ago.... maybe longer. And I'm not so good with
googling historical news - too much current day news overpowering the search -
so it could take me some time.
From vague recollection it was a challenge
to break an encryption method.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: artp on Thursday, January 24 2013 @ 01:11 PM EST |
I remember one of those in about that time frame. I thought it was a teenager
who had won a contest or coding challenge where the conditions required him to
sign his work over to the sponsor.
It could have been Microsoft. They have played Big Bad Wolf so often that it is
usually safe to assume that they are doing it again. Specific cases may vary.
;-)
---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Zartan on Thursday, January 24 2013 @ 02:58 PM EST |
I don't know about RAS, but I immediately thought about Dr. Edward Felten and
the
SDMI challenge.
Here's Wikipedia's intro on it:
As part of a
contest in 2000, SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) invited researchers and
others to try to break the digital audio watermark technologies that they had
devised. In a series of individual challenges, the participants were given a
sample audio piece, with one of the watermarks embedded. If the participants
sent back the sample with the watermark removed (and with less than an
acceptable amount of signal loss, though this condition was not stated by SDMI),
they would win that particular challenge.
Felten was an initial participant
of the contest. He chose to opt out of confidentiality agreements that would
have made his team eligible for the cash prize. Despite being given very little
or no information about the watermarking technologies other than the audio
samples and having only three weeks to work with them, Felten and his team
managed to modify the files sufficiently that SDMI's automated judging system
declared the watermark removed.
SDMI did not accept that Felten had
successfully broken the watermark according to the rules of the contest, noting
that there was a requirement for files to lose no sound quality. SDMI claimed
that the automated judging result was inconclusive, as a submission which simply
wiped all the sounds off the file would have successfully removed the watermark
but would not meet the quality requirement.
SDMI
lawsuits
Felten's team developed a scientific paper explaining the
methods used by his team in defeating the SDMI watermarks. Planning to present
the paper at the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop of 2001 in
Pittsburgh, Felten was threatened with legal action by SDMI,[6] the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA), and Verance Corporation, under the terms
of the DMCA, on the argument that one of the technologies his team had broken
was currently in use in the market. Felten withdrew the presentation from the
workshop, reading a brief statement about the threats instead. SDMI and other
copyright holders denied that they had ever threatened to sue Felten. However,
SDMI appears to have threatened legal action when spokesman Matt Oppenheim
warned Felten in a letter that "any disclosure of information gained from
participating in the Public Challenge....could subject you and your research
team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.".
Dr.
Felten and the EFF went on to win the day and a declaration from the DoJ that
his work did not violate the DMCA. So, I think that qualifies as a corporate
consortium holding an open hacking contest, using bait-and-switch gagging NDAs
to try and stifle the results, then following with legal threats when the NDAs
didn't silence people.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Thank You! - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, January 24 2013 @ 03:34 PM EST
- Another than you - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 25 2013 @ 02:30 AM EST
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