I had to laugh when I saw this. Apparently someone decided to create a giant donut-waving Homer Simpson which is only visible from the air right next to a giant ancient pagan symbol. Now the pagans are all up in arms over it.
Whatever.
Last I heard, druids and shamans didn’t have a monopoly on giant aerial-view only idols.
Ok. Please note this story has NOT been posted under ’satire’. If it had, it would have been very funny, since it’s not, it’s just sad and perhaps a bit scarey.
I have a new theory. I think there is a single source of all the cynicism that exists in the world today, and that this source is Disney. I can’t remember the last original idea this company has had. They continually leech and recycle ideas from other sources (i.e. snow white, beauty and the beast, etc), and then turn around and claim these ideas as their own and protect them with draconian copyright lobbying and policies.
I can’t imagine ANYONE over the age of 30 walking away from this with the feeling there is actually good left in this world. Sad. Very very sad.
This story caught my attention a few days ago. In short, Michael W. Stone, a Canton high school senior, put a link to his high school’s website on his own personal webpage. He also placed instructions to try and crash the school’s server by hitting F5 once you got there.
Hitting the ‘F5′ key on a webpage causes the browser to reload the page. It forces the server to resend all the data on that page to the browser. If the webpage is being run on an extremely under-powered server and enough people do this at once, in theory the server could bog down and crash due to not being able to handle the load.
So, guess what? Yup, enough people managed to be hitting F5 on the school’s page simultaniously that the school’s server crashed. No big surprise there….well other than the fact this actually worked. Any modern server would need several thousands of people all hitting F5 repeatedly at the sametime for any chance of this crashing it. Serving webpages is what a webserver is *supposed* to do…and when you hit the F5 key, this is all that happens, your browser requests that the server serve you the page again.
Anyway, so the school server goes down, the school calls in help to figure out why, and the tech traces the traffic back to the kids website. At this point in a sane world, the kid would get suspended or reprimanded and hopefully grounded by his parents. End of story. Well this is not a sane world.
In steps City Prosecutor Frank Forchione. He charges the kid with a felony for commiting a computer crime. The quote of the story: “Michael said it was a joke,” Forchione said. “We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke.”
Huh? Am I missing something? It WAS a joke. It was a STUPID joke, but a joke nonetheless, and this Prosecuter thinks the mature and proper response to this is to charge an 18 year old kid with a felony.
What ‘crime’ was commited? Is it a crime to hit F5 to refresh a browser page? Is it a crime to tell people to visit a particular website? Is it a crime to tell someone to visit a website and then refresh the page? I’d have to say ‘No’ on all three accounts.
What bothers me most is the fact that the server went down in the first place by this method. This leads me to believe it is a vastly underpowered server and the student could have achieved the same thing by simply asking everyone to visit the webpage at a particular time.
So anyway, a few hours later Slashdot picks up the story. Slashdot is an extremely popular community site for ‘nerd’ news, and by popular I mean VERY popular. Slashdot attracks 100,000’s of people per day. In the comments section after the story, several slashdot readers tracked down and posted a link to the high school’s website. This results in the website promply going down again…NOT because people are going there and hitting F5, but rather because of the sheer number of people now visiting the site, that the server can’t handle the load. This is not uncommon when a site is linked to from Slashdot. There is even a term for it: ‘Slashdotting’, or to be ’slashdotted’. Both of which basically means, no one can reach your site because too many people are trying to view it at once. Also, once a story appears on slashdot, it inevitably get’s picked up by other major news sources and sites. This means if your server is underpowered…expect to be down awhile…because the increase in traffic to your site won’t be slowing down anytime soon.
The school’s website is still down today as I write this, a full 6 days after the story broke. I have little doubt this is due to the story now perculating throughout the internet and newly curious people still trying to get to the website.
So, why is this kid being charged with a felony? The only reason I can come up with is that the City prosecuter simply has no clue regarding computer technology.
Is what the kid did wrong? Yes. I could see the argument that he incited (or at least instructed) people to crash a server. But is it a felony level type of crime? Absolutely not. There is NO argument you can make that this should be a felony.
What is the difference between the server going down the first time with people repeatedly hit F5 and the site going down a second time when it was posted on slashdot and people started going there out of curiosity?
The only answer is intent. I not saying what the kid did was OK. But I am saying it’s not a felony. How is what this kid did any different from someone telling everyone in an apartment building to flush their toliets at the same time to see if they can cause the sewer to overflow? It might work in theory, but it shouldn’t work in practice, and if it does, shouldn’t the city be held partially responsible for negligence…for building a sewer system that couldn’t handle flushed toliets?
This is an extremely ineffecient, and frankly stupid method to try and crash a server. In the DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack world, this is most akin to my flushing toliets analogy. It shouldn’t work in 99% of the cases. Most modern servers can handle thousands of hits per second quite easily. Unless this kids website was already hugely popular, the only way this could have worked was that the school’s server was vastly underpowered, or poorly maintained. The fact that their site is still down is further evidence for this.
Finally, I wish the City Prosecuter could be charged in this as well. If he would have took the time to understand how this ‘crime’ actually worked, instead of trying to make a knee-jerk statement about ‘computer crimes’, the school’s website would probably be back up today. Now half-the world is trying to hit the site and who knows when interest will die down enough for the server to be able handle the load.
Well maybe there is some hope for us yet. As much as I hate to admit it, I was actually worried this ruling might go the other way.
Judge rules against ‘intelligent design’
You can say all you want about evolution being a theory and not a fact, and I’d agree with you. Evolution IS just a theory; however, it is a scientific theory and Intelligent Design is not. ID is a hypothesis at best. To become a scientific theory you need evidence to support your hypothesis, and ID offers no evidence at all to support it.
For something to become a scientific theory, it must be falsible. It must also be testable. You can falsify evolution. If we were to find a fossil of a homo sapiens that dates back to the dinosaurs, that would offer pretty compelling proof evolution is false. Likewise evolution is testable and allows for prediction. Over time, new species should evolve. Granted this may not happen over a single lifetime, but over several human generations we should be able to see evolution occur. Compare this to ID ‘theory’. How would one falsify ID? What test or prediction does it offer? The answer of course, is none.
ID is a philosophy. It is not science. Period. Huzzah for the judge, and this ruling.
I’m not against teaching ID as philosophy, or as religious subtext. Nor would I be opposed to it being taught as science IF any evidence is ever found to support it (i.e. ancient texts with DNA designs in them, little green men leaving blue prints on life in a crashed spaceship, etc). But until a single shred of evidence can be found to support it, it simply is not science and has no business being taught as such.
UPDATE: I finally was able to get a copy of the actual ruling. Wow. This is a huge blow to the ID camp.
The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID. We will also issue a declaratory judgment that Plaintiffs’ rights under the Constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have been violated by Defendants’ actions.
Defendants’ actions in violation of Plaintiffs’ civil rights as guaranteed to them by the Constitution of the United States and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 subject Defendants to liability with respect to injunctive and declaratory relief, but also for nominal damages and the reasonable value of Plaintiffs’ attorneys’ services and costs incurred in vindicating Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.
John E. Jones III
United States District Judge
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