You make the judgment, part II.

My original intention was to gather a bunch of results from my poll, but I got impatient... Anyway, as the "part II" suggests, this makes sense only if you've read part I.

So, let's review what I did. I found a slight security hole, messed around for a bit, caused no harm, and told the principal everything (including even how to finish fixing it) when I was asked. I spent an hour trying to point out that the above does not merit my a) being banned from their computers for the rest of the semester, and b) subsequently having to change, halfway through the semester, out of both of my electives. They disagreed.


As an aside: It seems the authority in question knows less about the system than I do. You may think I'm just saying that out of spite, but I can actually back that up with proof.

The principal wrote, in a letter to my mom:
"He used a 'hacker's code' to gain access to the system, and admits to it. This is not my opinion, but that of several experts in the field."

Here's what actually happened: Jokingly/stupidly, I wrote the word "h4xx0r1n9" on my task list, and explained to them about 1337, hackers' slang. No one who knows a thing about computers would believe that you hack into servers by misspelling words. Especially not "experts".

Another example: The letter also said that I "violated the Internet policy by signing onto a bunch of accounts without authorization". Incorrect. I said several times during that meeting, and at least once on the previous post, that I used my own account (which, by the way, no malicious hacker would ever do) to get where there was no security.

I conclude from this that a) the principal has a highly inaccurate idea of what I did, and b) either she didn't communicate at all well with her experts, or these are some astonishingly stupid "experts". I'm not sure which one it is...


Their reasoning seems to be:
1. I broke school rules.
2. Therefore, I must be punished.
3. We have to follow the rules here. (We who make the rules. Even when it's counterproductive to do so.)
4. Of COURSE it's serious, otherwise we wouldn't have called you in. (Of COURSE we called you in, otherwise it wouldn't be serious. Of COURSE we're good at circular logic.)
5. Therefore, I must be punished in an extremely serious manner.


My rebuttal:
1. Arguably, I did not in fact break any rules. They outlaw the following, according to the "binder reminder" thingy:
- Maliciously doing stuff. (At first I had good intentions, then I had neutral intentions. Never malicious.)
- Using unauthorized accounts. (As I've said, the only account I used was my own. I'm pretty sure that's legal.)
- Altering the system. (I technically used the system, not altered it. Hey, if they follow the letter of the law and not the spirit to punish me, then I can do the same to avoid punishment.)
- Disrupting the network. (The only disruption was them blocking me.)
From the other source of rules (a "computer contract" thingy):
- "Students may not break into computer systems or [stuff like that]..." (Again, I used my own account, and I don't know how to hack into systems.)
- "...nor may they attempt to bypass any security settings." (As before, if they use technicalities, then I can too. What I did depended on the fact that there WAS no security to bypass.)

2. No, you don't have to punish me. Think: Why do we lock up murderers? Two reasons.

One, they can't commit crimes while in jail. This doesn't apply for so many reasons it's not even unfunny: a) I could use my computer at home like I am right now, so that doesn't prevent me from doing anything. b) Now that I know they don't want help with their security system, I won't try to mess around in the first place. c) They blocked me, and I told them how to fix the remaining holes, so I physically couldn't do anything.

The other reason to punish people is to teach would-be criminals not to do it. Now that you've heard what I did and the punishment, what is that really going to do? If they punish people for helping them, what lessons are you actually going to learn (other than the obvious "The school is being bureaucratically evil and dumbassed")? I think it's less along the lines of "Don't commit computer crimes" (we already know that), more like "Don't help people unless they ask for it. Don't show boldness or confidence in your own decisions or any type of individuality. Just keep your head down and avoid rocking the boat." Since this whole effing COUNTRY was founded on the principle of disobeying unjust authority, and the school has an entire week devoted to "Random Acts of Kindness", I'd say this other reason also does not apply.

I fail to see why it's right for me to be punished in this way.

3. Firstly, that's a great example to set for your students. Obey the rules even when they don't make sense. Just do what you're told. That's the kind of reasoning that leads to "Sorry, Jews, but Mr. Hitler orders me to kill you." Secondly, since the principal is the highest authority in disciplinary matters, she does not, in fact, have to follow any orders. Thirdly, the rules don't actually specify this punishment.

Let's assume we do have to follow the rules to the letter, let's take a look at what they actually say.

"Punishment may range from revocation of internet privileges and/or computer privileges to really bad stuff like suspension."

It says nothing about how long the privileges may be revoked. So no, you are not required in any way to make it that bad.

4. Explain to me how something can be serious if it has no real-world effects, other than my getting bragging rights ("Look, my course page is weird!") and a temporary fright for the people who made the system (who then verified that I didn't and couldn't do anything serious). Especially if it takes twenty seconds, maximum, to add a line of code that says "Check whether he's actually logged in."

5. So, let's see what's left of their argument:
"I might have broken school rules. It would cause much harm and no good whatsoever to punish me. The punishment or lack thereof is completely up to the principal. And the infraction, by all intelligent standards, was not serious. Therefore, the principal should and must give me a very severe punishment."
I think that argument's absurdity speaks for itself.


To summarize: There is no reason - moral or legal - for me to be punished in this way. An error of this magnitude must be corrected. If students in general learn that nothing has been done about such injustice, then the school is likely to lose their trust, to some degree at least. That may sound like a threat, but it's more like a fact of life. The principal should be held responsible for her decisions, especially when one of the school's major buzzwords is "Responsibility", and the people under her jurisdiction have a right to know what's really happening. Such is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, and that's why I'm writing about it.

Just in case, I'm taking the precaution of using no names whatsoever, so they can't demand that I delete my blog. (sticks tongue out at them) If you want to aid my little campaign against injustice, I recommend telling people to read this and posting your poll comment. Can't hurt to be able to tell the principal "Either you're wrong, or [a bunch of people, including all the "experts"] are wrong. Which do you think is more likely?"

Poll question: Do you think their decision was correct? (Or, more accurately, "How incorrect would you say they are?")



UPDATE: You know what's so friggen ironic? A year later, they added a course catalog that does exactly what I was doing, minus the part that added me as a guest.

You make the judgment.

Let's take a hypothetical situation. Not really hypothetical, but bear with me.

Let's say I'm exploring the school's online system, looking for something I can do. At some point, it occurs to me how cool it would be if I found a security hole and helped the adults fix it. Using a bit of ingenuity, I figure out how to get to the blank page of a course that I'm not taking (I simply look at the address bar, find where it says "courseid=[numbers]", and enter a different number). I click around and find there is indeed something I can use without logging in. Specifically, a sort of private message board (called the "blackboard"), which only I and the teacher can see. I write something to the effect of "You got hacked! Well, not really. You'll be glad to know that a) I'm not trying to do anything bad, and b) your system is good enough that I (and everyone else) actually CAN'T do anything bad."

As an aside, I'm not even accessing anyone's accounts. I don't KNOW how to hack into people's accounts. (What, use mind-reading skillz to get their password?) I'm using my own account to get to where they didn't put up any security. So, arguably, I haven't technically broken a rule. Anyway, back to the story.

I then discover that leaving that post adds myself as a guest to that course. Not, you understand, to the actual class; just on the list shown on my student page. I try this a few more times, confirming this. Then I tell a few friends about it. They advise me to stop doing the above, because schools don't take kindly to hacking, even when it's harmless and/or done to help them. I use Google to find several instances of something like this happening: a kid finds a security hole, does a bit of tinkering to be sure about the details, tells the school, and gets suspended or something. Therefore, I conclude, I shouldn't even tell them about this little "hack" (if it can be called that, which I doubt), and I delete the message I wrote. However, I can't get the course off my course list. Since this "damage" has already been done - I can't fix that part of what I did - I decide it won't make a difference if I continue doing more of the same (in retrospect, that was probably a misjudgment).

Eventually, the school finds out. I'm called in to the principal's office, along with the webmaster. I immediately tell them everything I've done and why, and actually a bit more: where the hole hasn't been completely filled up. See, they've blocked my account from getting to those courses, but anyone else could still get there (in fact, I myself could log in as a guest and do that). So I help them fix that little bit as well.

So, here's the effect of my actions: My student page looks weird, because I suddenly have a bunch of extra courses; the administrators got temporarily freaked out, afraid I had actually gotten into their system (which, of course, I hadn't, couldn't, and wouldn't anyway); and their system, with a bit of help from me, has been improved.

Now, you decide: What punishment, if any, do you think I should get? I vote for the punishment "Getting a ten-minute lecture on why I shouldn't mess with stuff."

By the way, if you think I should be banned from the computers for a time, you should factor this into your decision: Both of my electives are computer classes. If, say, I get banned for a month, then I'll have to either make up a month's work at home (a total of 32 hours of class time), or change classes halfway through the semester.

Post your opinion in the comments page, if possible. Then examine part II, in which I tell you what they decided to do.

A Way to Nullify Irritatingly Small Change

According to a recent article, if memory serves (I'm too lazy to actually look up minor details like whether I'm correct), it now costs more money for the U.S. Treasury to produce a penny than the penny is actually worth.

Let's consider this: Is it actually worth the time to mess around with pennies? Let's say it takes 5 seconds to pick up a penny and put it somewhere like your wallet. If that were your job, you'd make (calculatory skillz...) $7.20 per hour. This is less than minimum wage. Therefore, it actually saves money to just leave the penny on the counter.

However, this solution loses you a bit of cash. Let's try to figure out how to keep your cents (if discarding sense, ha ha ha; that needed saying) without using pennies. How can you pay someone 1/5 of the smallest denomination possible, if we junkify pennies and just use nickels? Here's where you get to use your probability skillz (or lack thereof): What if you give someone a 1/5 chance that they win a nickel? The expected value of that is 1 cent. Idea!

Now, the question is, how can one make a really fast coinflip that both the customer and the cashier consider fair? If you put a randomization function into the cash register, the customer might get suspicious. Therefore, try this functional randomizer (repetition!).

Whenever someone doesn't feel like getting small change, he adds that amount to a display that counts unused change. If that amount exceeds 5 cents, then he gets a nickel and the count is reduced by 5. Otherwise, the counter remains in place for the next customer. This does indeed give you the right probability for getting a nickel, if you assume all numbers 0-4 are equally likely. In fact, this lets you customize your level of accuracy; if you don't give a cheese about anything less than a quarter, you can just not collect that. If enough people do this, then it speeds up cash transactions AND it gives you the right expected payoff. It seems to work for everyone. Skillziness!

Comment if you think this is brilliant or numbskulled, or if you have a suggestion. I can edit this thing to include your ideas...

Or mine. It just occurred to me: Couldn't someone exchange $10,000,000 for a billion pennies from the Treasury, then melt it all together and sell them the metal for $10,100,000 (or whatever the exact number is)? It'd be funny, at any rate...

To John's comment: By strategically waiting in line, you're getting yourself 4 cents, max. Not even that, in fact. Let's assume everyone else's purchases have randomly distributed costs (meaning, 0-4 extra cents is random). Letting someone go ahead of you when the counter is at 0 (the best case) is then going to get you, on average, 2 cents. If we use my "minimum wage" cost-effectiveness model, we find that line-waiting pays minimum wage when it takes less than 10 seconds for the person in front of you to do business. I don't recall it ever taking less than 30 seconds. So, no rational person would do that. Insane people could be doing far worse things than cheating you out of 4 cents. The possibility is therefore negligible.

The Holocaust, according to me

This is an essay that I randomly wrote in seventh grade in about 45 minutes, with varying degrees of edits, depending on when you read it. Currently I've fixed a typo and a bit of information.


So, I agree it’s important to know what happened in the Holocaust, but at least as important to know how and why it happened, too. Once you know that, you can recognize a modern-day Holocaust before it’s too late to prevent it.

For background: WWI. Germany was building up a big military, France said "Uh-oh" and built up a bigger military, Germany said "Darn it" and allied itself with Austria and built a bigger military, France said "Oh cheese" and allied itself with England, and basically war broke out at some point. Towards the end, Germany was somewhat ahead because Russia collapsed, but then America got annoyed at the Germans’ sinking one cruise liner too many with their U-boats, so we joined the western dudes and whacked the Germans.

The war took a huge amount of resources from all sides. The victorious Allies decided it was Germany’s fault, so the Versailles treaty asked for a huge wad of cash and land and soldiers to repair the damage. Germany was already deep in the red from the war, so the government went bankrupt and started printing money like crazy. Inflation was at 10,000,000%/day, so all the Germans were suffering extreme poverty.

Whose fault? France. The German people wanted revenge.

Then comes Mr. Hitler. He was a soldier in WWI and was recovering from temporary poison gas-induced blindness when Germany lost. He really hated Jews. In fact, he blamed Germany's loss on them. Germany was absolutely flawless, so the only explanation was that the Jews betrayed them, right? NOTHING to do with declaring war on one country too many.

Anyway, that's what Hitler decided. The public, predictably, was pretty happy with this idea, because then it wasn't their fault. Hitler was also a really good public speaker, and he simplified a lot of things to where the people could understand him. (A paraphrased quote: "You must repeat the message to the idiotic masses several billion times so they absorb the idea.") He actually tried to cause a revolution in an incident called the "Beer Hall Putsch", in which he was arrested and thrown into jail. While he was in there, he wrote a book called "My Struggle", which talked about his views. I'm guessing a lot of people read it, adding to Hitler's support. Also, he gave out random propaganda, like a poster in which he's leading a bunch of soldiers, raising a German flag while a ray of sunlight peeks through the clouds; it basically presented him as a messiah or something. Anyway, with this sort of stuff, he got the public to join him and his Nazi party. That's how he got to power...

To understand the other half, I must give this backround: A guy named Francis Galton came up with the idea of eugenics in the 1870s or so. Basically, he said, if we evolved because inferior humans were much less likely to reproduce, what if we duplicate natural factors today? Viz., tell smart and/or strong people to have a lot of children, and do the opposite for weak and/or stupid people. That would slowly improve the human race (if you could be sure whether someone’s genius is due to genes or environment, which you can’t). Hitler took the above idea and applied all the anti-Semitism he could think of.

Hitler said the Jews were an inferior race. We Aryans are superior, and we must keep their genes from contaminating ours. We must create a "master race" that will rule the world. Make sure we don't interbreed with anyone who doesn't fit the definition of "smart strong white xenophobic racist". Not just the Jews, you understand, also Gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents (after all, if you don’t obey numbskulled orders, you must be diseased in some way, riiiight?), and those with disabilities of any kind. But Jews got the worst treatment. Hitler actually made his men gather detailed family trees, and a non-Jew with Jewish parents was considered “just as bad”, because he carried Jewish genes.

Now, how do you prevent several million people from reproducing? Killing them is simple and effective. So Hitler told his men to get every Jew they could find and send them into concentration camps. He made them work their butts off, literally – work till you die of exhaustion. Or he just flat out killed them. He tried to figure out the most efficient way to kill people; line them up, so a bullet went through more than one person? Lock a dozen in a car and wait for them to suffocate? Whatever happened, these people were definitely not going to be able to breed with anyone else.

He “purified” the gene pool the positive way, too: encouraging the "superior" people to reproduce more. When a couple got married, they got a big loan from the government, my guess is the equivalent of $200,000. If they had a child in the first year of marriage, they only had to pay back 3/4 of the loan. If they had another child, they only had to pay back half. 4 children, they could keep the money.

Hitler also thought about where to put all these people. That was one of his reasons for conquering Europe, to get "living space" for them. He was vindictive, too. When France surrendered, Hitler made the king (or president, or whatever) sign the truce in the same railroad car that Kaiser William II surrendered in at the end of WWI.

And, of course, Hitler's campaign had its ironic aspects. Among the Jews getting the heck out of Germany before he found them were Messrs. Einstein, Oppenheimer, and a few others that Hitler could have used for making the atomic bomb. An inferior race, eh?

Anyway, that's my story of the Holocaust. In my opinion, it shows the more important aspects of it. You see, I think the main lesson we should learn is how it happened, so we can prevent it, rather than (pardon the callous term) spooky stories about the atrocities. But that’s just me.