I dunno, I've followed this saga on and off for years, I'm pretty familiar with the case. But maybe there are other people, new to Perl, who don't know what this is all about. Do you have a link to a web page that explains the issue?

Maybe if people knew the whole story, they would be less inclined to downvote you on this...

g r i n d e r
just another bofh

print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u';

As a relative newbie, I asked the same question to Dragonfly a little while ago, and I've kept his CB reply ... Anyway, the detail can be found here

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the case, there's a good summary here (sans.org)

I'm sorry to hear the court declined to hear your case. It's always a terrible thing to hear about the law being used to punish someone frivolously.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

I have lived for the past eight years in the hope that the legal system was truly a justice system, but that hope has now faded, and I'm older and wiser, but permanently battle-scarred.

Chin up, shoulders back. The legal system just is. I did a single year of law once upon a once upon before I saw the light. I was continuously chastised for my idiotic notions of justice - this was law afterall - what did justice have to do with it? The two may have been related at some time in the dim and distant past but....

The sun will rise tomorrow and it will be a new day. With that thought compliments of the season to you.

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

I wish you a quiet, merry Christmas despite all this, and all the Best for the new year.

--cs

Interesting to see this case mentioned in Maximum Security, 3rd edition (In chapter 14 - the password cracking process):

The problem with distributed cracking is that it makes a lot of noise. Remember the Randal Schwartz case? Mr. Schwartz probably would never have been discovered if he were not distributing the CPU load. Another system administrator noticed the heavy processor power being eaten. (He also noted that one process had been running for more than a day.) Distributed cracking really isn't viable for a cracker unless he is the administrator of a site or he has a net work at home...

Unfortunately it doesn't appear the publicity helped to reverse Intel's or the justice department's position. Hopefully other people did learn something from the case though, I know I did.

It's also incorrect. I was not "distributing the CPU load". I was using the shared server that we had just installed but not yet deployed for its designated task, partially as a test of the new server, and partially as a test of the new Crack version which I had not used. And it was the only server on which I was running crack. There's no "distributing" there.

While I appreciate that my case has been written up in at least half a dozen books, I do wish some of them had come to me for a bit of fact-checking first.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Doesn't surprise me, almost half the statements in that book are flawed in some way.