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Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Thu, May 27, 1999 From: ulTRAX@webtv.net What Makes for Proof? When I was a kid I was clueless about math. I used to be bullshit when I'd come up with the correct answer but it was based on initution or some personal method of figuring out a problem. To me getting the correct answer was all that mattered. I did not know that math is just as much about the logical process of getting to the answer as the answer itself. If one does not understand that process, then one can not build on those rules. By it's nature much of the cutting edge exploration of WTV is difficult to document. The browser malfunctions and someone gets a weird code... Someone blunders into a place called Flash and no one can get back there for 8 months. Someone reports getting into a place called Weekly or the Burn-in facility. Someone claims to have hacked accounts or have been hacked. How do we get to the correct answer about whether something's true? The recent Arena hoax brings up the question what do we consider sufficient proof for something that's difficult to document? The hoax was well done,... but could have been better. The creators were not prepared for the suspicious questions and their weak answers only raised more questions. In the end their inabiliy to keep up the hoax did them in. But some people dismissed Arena before having valid reasons to. Some felt that since they could not access any wtv-arena URL that was proof. In fact dismissing it on those grounds without considering that our show services IP list did not have any arena IPs was premature. The question then was did those who claimed they could access these URL have a different IP list with arena IPs? Given the new upgrade this was not an unreasonable question. This was the best process to get to the truth. Those who dismissed Arena early on were making a logical error as great as those still wanting to believe it despite the perps inability to prove it. So... when faced with something like the Caller ID logs... where only one person so far has reported finding them... how do we know whether it's another Arena hoax or another case of Flash? My own feeling is that some things are too important to dismiss out of hand. While I may not be totally satified with the current level of evidence to say I can take an oath in a court of law... I'm not ready to say something does NOT exist. I can live with doubt as long as I know I'm systemmatically trying to get to the bottom of an issue. It may be better at times to err on the side of uncertainity than be wrong in a conclusion. Sometimes ya just gotta know what ya don't know. Such was the case with whether accounts could be hacked a year ago. It was a debate filled with bullshit. Gangs claimed they could hack. WTV said it was impossible. How was one to get to the truth? Just because no one could prove in April 98 they could hack, did that mean an account had NEVER been hacked? What of a WTV Tech... could they hack an account even if we could not? Could accounts have been hacked but someone was afraid to post proof knowing it would encourage the malicious creeps to redouble their efforts? Even if no one had been able to and no one thought it possible... did that mean it could not be done next week? Given these questions any jumping to a conclusion would have been foolish. And even if someone had guessed correctly without having the evidence... in the end, all it was was a guess. It's like getting the correct answer to a math question but it was based on faulty thinking. The only way I could think of to get to the truth was to create a fair test... and provide people with any information they needed. I wanted to create the best conditions for success. I also said I would not ask how it twas done. As an added motivator I was pretty merciless in my taunts of anyone who had claimed they could hack and now could not prove it. I wa also pretty merciless with those who said hacking was impossible when they had not proof that was the case... as if one can ever disprove a negative. In the end this approach worked.... even though it took a month. A person was able to get into the test account and forward me material left there. (I then wondered if he wa a night watchman in the store where I had set up the test LOL) The simple truth is the verdict is not in on the Caller ID logs. It's not as if we have instant access to everyone's box and can peer into their files. We have maybe 10 people of the 500+ who read about this stuff who may both have caller ID, call waiting, has the ability to access these files, and who is able to focus long enough to work on a systemmatic project. There are possible reasons why other serious people can't find them... they don't have caller ID for example... or WTV shut off the logs. Maybe those with the upgrade don't know how to access these URLs. My point is that jumping to conclusions in either direction is never the best way to get to the truth. Living for a while in a rational state of doubt is sometimes the only logical course.
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Thu, May 27, 1999 From: psychosoull@webtv.net (Psycho 3ą/˛) Re: What Makes for Proof? well said i never discount anything that is said..., even if it was made up, there is always the possibility of it or something similar being there
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Thu, May 27, 1999 From: PaCMaN-@webtv.net (/^PâC`MâN^\) Re: What Makes for Proof? i agree with you 100% uLTRAX i once accessed the flash acct that was 2 months ago. i never seen it again. the arena had me believing but now i see its a hoax. what does one say that we should believe it. is it in are minds. its like UFO's they may be real they may not. maybe are minds(when it comes to webtv) act like that when we think of ufos when it comes to wni. what is real and what is not. all i say is keep searching . Agent Mulder of the X-Files been searching 5 yrs.( i know its a show but its a point) theres people who have been searching for one thing or another. weither it be realitives, ufos, sunken ships, treasures, lost cities. all i say is keep searching my fellow people. if one stopped now its would be all for nothing. we came this far why not go the rest of the way if we were to get in trouble for this why stop now we could already be in trouble, but why stop. exactly no reason lets keep this going so its passed down when we are gone from webtv. Note: i know this really has nothing to do with it but i got carried away please dont flame. its just a opinion and opinions are like assholes evryone got one well at least majority.
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Thu, May 27, 1999 From: ulTRAX@webtv.net Re: What Makes for Proof? There is a danger in dismissing things too quickly. I have repeatedly debated a user who is adament accounts could NEVER have been hacked. He listed all his reasons. Since I was one of two people who had been able to hack accounts, his assurances ot the contrary were meaningless. Now this person probably never cared to hack accounts... but likes to think of himself as a WTV expert. But say he had been interested in WTV security. In pigheadedly dismissing the truth... any other security work he might have done with WTV would have been fatally flawed... based on incorrect information. Why anyone wants a head filled with bad data is beyond me.
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Sun, May 30, 1999, 8:44pm From: get-by-path@webtv.net (wtv-flashrom:/ willie) Re: What Makes for Proof? I told Jazmat he was full of shit about arena Ultrax because of the Facts! Not speculation. A little research showed, him and wtv-help and killerwillie@hotmail where all from the same box. Jazmat is also the one who posted in a.d.w.secrets that he found a notebook in a phone booth in las vegas with 5000 wtv urls, and that he took the notebook to webtv "headquarters" in Nevada. Can you do the math from there?
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Mon, May 31, 1999 From: ulTRAX@webtv.net Re: What Makes for Proof? get-by-path wrote: "I told Jazmat he was full of shit about arena Ultrax because of the Facts! Not speculation." You may know who the perps were better than I.... but guilt by association does still not constitute proof in any scientific sense. "A little research showed, him and wtv-help and killerwillie@hotmail where all from the same box." I confess I did not pay all that much attention to this arguement since it seemed more a bluff to get someone to confess. Unless you got their box's SSID number the best you could do is get the IP from the mailservers. But why would a web-based mailservice that we access though a different service IP and port at WTV even have anything to do with a WTV mail server? Even if you were able to get a Client IP showing the town they called in from there may be several thousand subscribers sharing that dialup. Even then we do not always get the same mailservers from the same dialup. We are assigned new mails IPs with each logging on to an account. There's a high likeihood of getting the same mailserver but there's no guarantee. "Jazmat is also the one who posted in a.d.w.secrets that he found a notebook in a phone booth in las vegas with 5000 wtv urls, and that he took the notebook to webtv "headquarters" in Nevada." Wow.... that's pathetic beyond belief.. "Can you do the math from there?" Your citing of Math implies that what follows was a scientific process. In reality, it's the boy who cried wolf situation... even a known liar and a fraud can still be telling the truth on occasion. Having the odds be against that likeihood is a matter of statistical probability not proof.
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Mon, May 31, 1999 From: ulTRAX@webtv.net Re: What Makes for Proof? My intent on posting on this subject is not to start a pissing war about who know what about Arena when and why. Arena is merely an example of a situation where getting to the truth was difficult. We encounter such situations everyday trying to understand the complexities of WTV. I have high standards for what I consider proof. Other's may be comfortable with lower standards. Some have no standards or their personal baggage gets in the way of recognizing truth even when it smacks them on the head. Maybe it was in my expanded post on this topic in the hacking NG that I brought up my early school years. I never really had a clue about math. I might get the correct answer but it was not by doing the work.... I got there by counting on my fingers, of some other intuitive process. When my correct answers were marked wrong because I did not have the work I was bullshit. To me math was getting to the right answer. But it's not... it's about the logical PROCESS of getting to the right answer. All too often people get to the right answer for the wrong reasons... making it essentially an accident. The problem I just wanted to highlight is that if one's standards are not high... one faces two dangers. One is accepting an idea as true and running the risk of going down a deadend... or missing the truth because it was offhandedly dismissed. None of these errors is fatal.... but unless is aware of the process by which they judge evidence and their methods to get around obstacles.... they run the risk of repeating such errors.
Group: alt.discuss.webtv.technical Date: Wed, Jun 2, 1999, 9:11pm (EDT-3) From: wtv_help@webtv.net (Dr. Evil) Re: What Makes for Proof? Great post ulTRAX... I do believe that we should first explore and try to find out what we can before jumping to conclusions too early. I'm in both h3 honors & Computer tech. skills classes, and earlier this month we were talking about errors caused by early judgement or not testing the possibilities enough, and your simile is great. Most of you probably know that I was involved in the "arena" prank and we were trying to make it as believable as possible but I even told the person that came up with this that it may not seem very real so he asked me to help him with the ip's and that "main arena" page and stuff. But I didn't really want to keep going because people might have really gotten into believing it and got real mad & upset when they found out it was a hoax. I noticed you called us "perps", are you saying perpitrators? I wish I wouldn't come across as that, the hoax was all supposed to be meant in good and to try to make it seem believable I guess to see how far we could go. Perhaps him who came uo with the idea was like a perpitrator and didn't want anyone to find out. But when things like this come up again in the future that seem like big news and may possibly be hoax maybe because one person or very few people claim it to be true, maybe we should investigate first if we can and ask them questions and if it doesn't seem like it was easily made up you should try to find out more info and search around or else just don't get involved and don't say "it's completely fake" without any searching sround unless you know 100% that it is false. I said to the people that were being told about arena that we should interrogate MrJam and start asking questions, because I wanted to see if he was totally prepared and knew what he was doing and ready for everything that would come at him & us like he said he was. But he wasn't totally ready, and he got a bit mad at me for that. But for some reason Mr. Jam continues to stand by his claims and post in ng's that he'll try again or something. Well I better get this over with, so, bye.