According to a BBC story, the recently announced "10th Planet" was hastly revealed to the public, because some un named hacker threatened to reveal it if they did not.....This story was full of the usual conspiratorial hints, and the usual charges.....I was wondering if this is the case, or if this is another whackamundo conspriacy story??? The story is on Whitley Streibers' web site, but I will not post a link here, as the site changes often..

Dale in Ala

__________________
"Ad astra per aspera"

Go to this page for the words of one of the discoverers. Scroll down to the hacking part. Basically, the information was in some observing logs that he didn't realize were public access. Anyone who knows what they are looking for could have found it. And obviously, they did. Doesn't seem to be a conspiracy at all. He admitted their own group's "dumbness" and "naivety" and the unethicalness of the other people who found the info, but said there was no breaking into any sites. All was public.

That's very interesting. Reading between the lines I had suspected there was a connection between the announcement of 2003 EL61 and 2003 UB313. Rule one when protecting information: Access is the key, and it can be surprising just how easy it can be to put pieces together if you understand the context and do a little searching.

This reminds me of something that happened at my last job, several years ago. We were putting together some quick images using some of the Mars Global Surveyor images for a proposed Mars education website or activity (I forget exactly), and as the only Geospatial Imagery expert on staff, I got to play with making some crude 3-D perspective views of one of the polar caps. The elevation data was from the MOLA instrument, and at that time the MOLA people had all kinds of public data on the site.

Well, I was poking around looking for various data, and found a file that I got curious about. I'm still not sure why I found it so interesting, but it was a raw raster file with no metadata. After playing around with various input parameters, I found out it was a first draft of a coarse resolution global mars shaded relief map from the MOLA data, and imported into my software. Well, I ended up e-mailing someone on the project to get more information about the file, so I could perhaps use it.

The next day, my supervisor called me into his office and said "when you read your e-mail today, there's going to be a nasty message from the head person for the MOLA instrument. I have already talked to her, so don't send anything back." Well, there WAS a nasty message, telling me basically to keep my dirty hands off their data! Well, my boss knew me all too well, because I DID reply, rather caustically, and said that if they didn't want people accessing their data, they shouldn't post it to a PUBLIC FTP folder.

I never got a response, and they soon reorganized all the data available. But I STILL have that image (trophy I guess, after that e-mail she sent). I never found out if we ever had a hand in the educational material either.

CJSF

__________________
Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants