The internet has become sentient and has taken the only sane course; it hawks crap PC cleanup tools. It sounds insane, but just think: How would you know? We all expect sentient AI to diagnose cancer and drive cars safely and run governments fairly and do all our work for us. Because that's what the run-of-the-mill sentient intelligence is like, right?

Flattered. Well flattered.

Kim Dotcom's main business seems to be publicity for Kim Dotcom, with the evidence postponed to a future date. On the other hand, somehow, in some way I can't quite put my finger on, this sort of thing is just that little bit more believable this week. Not sure why.

No it's bloody not. Honestly people have some weird ideas about arithmetic. If your average PC uses 100W then the difference in browser power usage, 1W, is 1% of that usage. It doesn't somehow magically become 50% if you're running 10,000 PCs - it's still 1%.

But, for the same of argument, let's do the math. A company with 10,000 PCs each consuming 100W during work hours is using 1,950 MWhr (100W * 37.5 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 10000 PCs / 1000000 W per MW = 1950) per year to power those PCs. Retail electricity is around 12.86 p/kWhr, so they're spending £250k (1950 kWhr * 12.86 p/kWhr * 1000 kW per MW / 100 p per £) on electricity to power their PCs.

A company with 10,000 PCs presumably has 10,000 employees to use those PCs. Suppose they all earn the minimum wage full time, costing £12,000 each (£6.19 per hour x 37.5 hours per week * 52 weeks = £12,070.50 per year - call it £12k). Those 10,000 employees cost the company £120 million per year.

So our company with 10,000 PCs is spending £250k on electricity and £120m on wages. But wait! All those savings will add up! Suppose those users spend every working hour browsing the web. That means they would each save 1950 Whr per year (37.5 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 1W). Retail electricity is 12.86 p/kWhr, so each employee saves a whacking great... um... 25p per year (1950 Whr * 12.86 p/kWhr / 1000 W per kW). Yes, all those savings add up to £2,500 across the whole company. That's 0.0021% of your combined staff and electricity costs.

Now suppose you live in the real world and not all your employees work in front of a PC all the time and they only spend about 75% of their time browsing the web when they do and some of them, God forbid, take a holiday every now and then. How much do those savings add up to? Sweet. Bugger. All.

Yes, though maybe not corporate desperation. More like some idiot in marketing commissioned some idiot study then desperately had to have something to show for the money.

No.

1, there was no passcode. He retrieved the data in exactly the way it was intended, just on a much larger scale than was intended.

2, "Every school system" is perhaps an exaggeration, but many education systems do deliberately manipulate scores to fit a distribution. It's justified in various ways. For instance, suppose that in one particular year the physics exam was unusually difficult. That would disadvantage everyone who took physics compared to everyone else. So you might choose to redistribute scores to some pattern on the assumption that the distribution of ability over a large sample will be about the same from year to year and that any movement of the distribution of grades from year to year is because of differences in the assessment method, not in the students.

I'm getting the impression that this practice of redistributing grades is pretty uncommon in the USA. It's bog standard in Australia (where I went to school) and most of Western Europe. For other areas, I can't say.

From that point, whether your system produces the particular patterns this guy is observing depends on how weird and wonderful your system is.

I'm not saying that there is definitely nothing to see here; I'm saying there are perfectly reasonable, rational explanations and that this guy has jumped a long way to arrive at "tampering" and "fraud". See my comment a few up for an example of a system that deliberately reproduces some of the effects.

Of course, it's also very easy to imagine software defects that would produce some of these effects - it looks like about 90% of the numbers have been through a system that truncates them to integer percentage points...

I've read the original. Whether your policy can produce that sort of distribution depends entirely on what the policy is, no?

As an example of a system that produces exactly this sort of pattern, at my university the pass grade was 50%. Anyone who scored at least 45% but less than 50% in the exam could apply to sit a supplementary exam a few weeks later. The supplementary exam score would then be your final score, but the maximum mark available in the supplementary exam is 50%. If this results in you scoring 50% then the subject is recorded as a "conceded pass". You can only take one conceded pass in a year and many degree programs also limit how many conceded passes you can count towards your degree.

It's a system that lets you have another go if you had a bad day in an exam and, yes, in many subjects it produces this pattern of no-one receiving 45, 46, 47, 48 or 49 and a big lump of people receiving 50.

Of course there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for it: The grades are deliberately manipulated to fit some preconceived distribution. Lots of school systems do it very openly. The only surprising there here is that either the school system didn't disclose that they do it or that some idiot wrote an article without checking first. I don't know which: TL;DR.

"Hacked" means "retrieved from a web server in the way they were intended to be retrieved." The fact the webserver was completely unsecured is, however, worrying.

"Widespread grade tampering" means "statistical evidence that the final grades are not the raw grades, but have been adjusted according to some system as yet unidentified." The nature of the adjustment is as yet unidentified - it could be nefarious, or is much more likely to be according to policy. Pretty much every school system in existence does this.

So the headline should really read, "Student stumbles across results on unsecured website and doesn't understand the grading system." It's not really news.

Now to hook this up to my flying car...

Come on, the original comment has been modded -2 Flamebait. I don't think relevance was ever a goal.

That hardly answers the question. Why does he think he'd be in so much more danger in Sweden? Why is being in the UK, where extradition is easy, better than being in Sweden, where extradition is hard? Why is being in Ecuador, where the CIA doesn't mind sending in assassins, better than being in Sweden? And it's not me that says assassination might happen in Ecuador - it's the president of the country that's just granted him asylum.

Calling the rape charges theatre directed by the US makes no sense. It would have been terribly easy for the USA to extradite him directly from Britain. Going to Sweden makes it much harder. The only way it makes sense is if it is Julian directing the theatre - all this rubbish about US conspiracies is diverting attention from the sex charges against him.

"Idiot." Both derived from the common Greek idios (I'd put it in here in Greek, but /. hasn't discovered Unicode yet) meaning "of or pertaining to one's self." Hence the English terms "Idiom" meaning a figure of speech peculiar to a person or group of people and "Idiot" meaning (originally) someone whose behaviour is very peculiar to themselves, since developed to mean, well, idiot. You see? The have very similar etymology, making them etymologically similar. What did you think it meant?

Any more questions?

Bah. He "did" two girls in Sweden and doesn't want to face the music. Let's look at his options:

1. He could be in Sweden, where there is absolutely zero chance he'll be extradited to the US. Sweden's law doesn't allow extradition if there is a chance of the death penalty and even without it extradition looks legally unlikely. But he'd have to face up to charges about those girls.
2. He decided he'd rather stay in the UK, which has an extradition treaty with the USA so one-sided it makes the Gestapo look balanced.
3. When the UK looked like extraditing him to Sweden, he went to Ecuador for asylum, a country whose president says he thinks the CIA are going to try to assassinate him.

So, what do you think he's really afraid of? Persecution by the USA? Or facing charges in Sweden? If he's really worried about the USA, Sweden is about the safest place he could be. A hell of a lot better than either the UK or Ecuador.