Observations on Cyber Patriot V Changes

[a2capt]

This year, they say that they're going to release the passwords for the target images "5 minutes" before the chosen six hour window that your team has pre-selected to compete in.

Last year it took nearly 45 minutes to unzip the image, and a bit longer to make a copy in place so that there was an untouched backup incase things went south. In which the second round things did where the image had all kinds of issues with starting up, where I ended up getting it to boot on a Mac, and saved it in the booted up state before moving it to the competition machine. The Mac that started it wasn't as strong of a CPU to run VMWare efficiently.

So if they do this 5 minutes ahead, it's going to take almost 20% of the time you've got to compete. Last year they gave out the information to everyone at the beginning of the two day period.

This time, the servers will shut each day at 2359 Eastern time, which means the west coast people who can only compete on Friday have to start ridiculously early to be done by zero hour, where as last year, the servers were open the entire time and we could start at 1800 and run for six hours. Saturday isn't an option due to other commitments across various members, and earlier on Friday clashes with school. Kinda funny, since this is a school age targeting activity.

The changes seem to be that they are using their own back end instead of the SAIC infrastructure, and probably don't want to man it all night, and don't want people having the password ahead of time and snooping out the image. But if you give everyone the same advantage, then there is no advantage.

They seemed to listen when people wanted the practice round to run through two weekends, and that ran for the entire 24 hour period of the several days it was open. So why can't they do the competition round time the same?

[NC Hokie]

This year, they say that they're going to release the passwords for the target images "5 minutes" before the chosen six hour window that your team has pre-selected to compete in.

This isn't correct according to the email I received today: "You need only select the day with the 15 to 16-hour competition window in which you plan to compete. During your competition window, you will be free to select your six continuous-hour competition period during which to compete."

As I read it, you tell them which day you want, and they send the password to you five minutes before that day's 15 to 16 hour competition window starts.

[a2capt]

Seems to be today, the detail level in the 18-Oct. email was much greater, talking of both a day selection, and an hour selection, prompting me to ask them about it.

Receiving it 5 minutes before the game opens is fine. That gives plenty of time to setup and be able to utilize the entire time allotted for the competition.  This is essentially what they did previously.

But late last week I got a reply saying "we know it takes some time to unzip, but we've not heard of it taking 45 minutes" .. "and your not going to get it any sooner", which if the plan is to send it to you on a pre-defined time to open the image, then you're going to lose a bit of that window of opportunity.

I'm still curious to see what the response is going to be with the Friday evening thing, since for the previous 4 years, a full 24 hour period was available that worked well for both Eastern and Pacific time. For teams in Hawaii, it's the worse. Since it regulates them pretty much to the Saturday time slot since the Friday one would be mostly before school even started, and ending about the time they get home.