Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Cheaters, Spammers, Chessmen
GA Tech TAs not given credit for program exposing those who don't give credit. zorba1 writes: "Chalk another one to the 'TAs get no credit' department. CNN is running an article on how on how Georgia Tech's College of Computing professors wrote a cheat-finder program that discovered 186 Intro to Computing cheaters. As a former CS TA at GaTech, some clarification points:
- The app was developed by TAs, not by professors.
- It doesn't detect 'exact duplications of computer code.' It removes variable names and examines duplication in code structure.
- The only reason it's in the news is that GaTech recently required nearly all students to take one or two introductory CS courses."
The stench whiffed 'round the world ... Kelsevinal writes "A look at this article on the Chicago Tribune website reveals that our good friend Bernie Shifman is getting a little publicity... Think what you want about the situation, but I think it's funny as hell. I bet Shifman likes it too ... think of all the human resources depts. who might see this!"
After all, not everything is Free. xueexueg writes: "I just noticed that the Free Software Foundation has finally gotten around to setting up secure servers for orders and donations. For ages you actually had to print out and mail an order form to them, but now, at last, you can give them money for goods or charity, in your proverbial underwear."
And let's face it, there aren't that many places in the world where you can order T-shirts adorned with a levitating gnu.
Does this remind you of Gorman Seedling's electric collars? koganuts writes: "Updating a story posted by Slashdot on January 9th, according to The Los Angeles Times, "Gov. Gray Davis' proposal to let state and local police obtain roving wiretaps on suspected criminals was dropped from the legislation containing it Tuesday after the legislative counsel's office concluded that it was illegal." There were also provisions in the proposed bill which extended wiretapping to e-mail and the Internet. One thing I never knew was that "...wiretaps cost an average of $56,767.""
Have you learned your lesson? Eblis writes: "The Learning Machine Challenged hosted by AI has finally ground to a halt, with results available at lmw.a-i.com. Congratulations to the winners and to AI for hosting such a successful contest!"
The only reason it's in the news is that GaTech recently required nearly all students to take one or two introductory CS courses.
...
And people are complaining about this? No one forced them to go to a technical school or anything
I live under the bridge, in a pile of feces.
And here I thought we might have some new software to detect CounterStrike cheaters...
If you could pay $56,767 to wiretap a 900 number, imagine how much cash you could save!
Aw crud! I thought you mean't CounterStrike... :(
So...who'se going to write something to find all of those damn wallhackers and aimbotters?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
how can somoene without electricity watch the Dukes of Hazzard, troll?
Look out the window?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Okay, who else thought they were referring to CounterStrike cheaters?
Fight Spammers!
how can somoene without electricity watch the Dukes of Hazzard, troll?
Obviously you don't know there was a successful "Dukes of Hazzard" musical.
"I just noticed that the Free Software Foundation has finally gotten around to setting up secure servers for orders and donations."
I wonder why they didn't previously use a service like PayPal for donations. It's used by many sites for secure transactions, for example ebay.com.
$56,767 per wire trap?
Is this just another made up number that if repeated enough people will assume that it is true?
What does this include...
FBI Agents pay check? Judges? Infrastruture cost in the FBI, that would cost the same if there were 2 wiretaps vs 20? DA's paycheck? Is this offset by any bribe money?
Did they take the entire FBI budget and divide by the number of wiretaps and come out with a number that way? Which if were true then not issuing 2 wiretaps would save 100k+ a year..
Well, I'm glad they finally take that online (though I'd like to hear how) 'cause the Postal Service was really getting peeved at me for trying to send all that underwear through snail mail.
7.2's worked flawlessly for me. More than I can say for Mandrake 7.
I was pretty surprised that Counterstrike had made it to a Slashback -- I knew the cheating was terrible, but didn't think there was a Linux client.
:-)
Turns out it was actually unimportant... just real life. Pfaugh.
Potato battery for all those redneck farmboys, I guess.
I would say that the newspaper article has about trashed his odds for a regular job.
Hopefully he will leave the country, and move to Brazil. I understand there is an area down there the government is trying to turn into the Silicon valley of South America.
They are bound to need a few good consultants.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
haha! ok, didn't think of that!
A teacher of mine told me they were using a program such as the one mentioned here to check for cheaters in one of my programing class's at the University of Calgary.
Slashback brings you more words tonight on catching CS cheaters
Damn! I thought I was finally going to be able to start playing Counterstrike again without all the freakin cheating! Turns out it's just some school thingie... Sigh.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
i was hoping you guys would have news about catching COUNTERSTRIKE cheaters, not COMPUTER SCIENCE cheaters.
*sigh*
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had similar cheating catching software running on all the programming assignment since before 94. This is nothing new. I remember in 96 they caught 2/3 of the intro CS class (those silly non-CS/CompE majors) copying code from each other.
The Chicago Tribune seems to represent Shifman as a guy who's been persecuted by the devilish anti-spam community. Um, hello? Read the log of emails sent back and forth. Shifman is abusive, insulting and, quite frankly, stupid. He seems ignorant of any legal knowledge whatsoever; threatening to sue all involved in critisising him for simply reporting a piece of spam _he_ wrote.
PunkBuster (www.punkbuster.com), Paladin (http://www.paladin-anticheat.com/), and Cheating-Death (http://www.cheating-death.com)
:)
There are also others, but they're all Server Side, and you'd have to look for Servers that have them.
www.immortalrealm.org
Knights of the Immortal Realm
avatar.immortalrealm.org:27015 -- our CS Server running CSGuard.
Punkbuster
Paladin
I may have forgotten some, but these are the main ones.
What ? Offtopic ? Surely sire you jest !
...more than I can say for MS-Windows, from 3.0 until XP, at least. Never tried windoze 1 or 2, can't say anything about those.
Did anyone else read catching CS cheaters and think of the newest software going around to catch counter-strike cheaters? seems to detect everything but ogc6 and later.
Cool, the Chicago Trib has a poll, just like slashdot and cNet.
Is Bernard Shifman a "moron spammer?"
Yes. Hundreds of complaints can't be wrong.
No. Give the guy a break. He's looking for a job.
Please stop and vote for this moron spammer.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
For a moment I was wondering why everyone at Georgia Tech's Computer Science department was playing CounterStrike. Coz of this statement:
"Slashback brings you more words tonight on catching CS cheaters..."
After all, EVERYONE playing CounterStrike cheats, right?
-- Mojo Tooth : exploring our world as only an idiot can.
Not even "tricky dicky" Nixon could buy that old fart Sirica, for instance. I would guess FBI agents come pretty cheap, though...
I'm interested in this GA tech program....
I have alot of hours in as a helper in undergrad CS labs. If you were to remove the variable names in intro to CS assignments, most correct assignments should appear identical without cheating, especially given the simplicity of such projects. Are thirty classmates supposed to come up with thirty completely different and original programs to calculate a fibonacci series? Is that even possible? Does anyone have any information about false positives?
I was very impressed that the people who cheat at Counterstrike were finally going to be caught! (As opposed to those people who use Punkbuster, where the cheating may only be averted) I figured it's about time since the latest version of Half-Life features Opaque Walls (Finally!).
To think that I was wrong, this was about people cheating the people who wrote the program that caught cheaters! heh ;)
-- Dan
Once upon a time, I was a member of a mailing list and I posted a rather controversial message. Someone replied telling me how much of an idiot I was. I responded privately to him, attempting to explain why I felt I was right and based it on my own personal (yet somewhat embarrasing) history. I kept it off the group primarily because I mentioned issues I felt I really didn't want the whole world knowing about and also I didn't feel like carrying on a public flamewar.
Needless to say, he decided to post a reply to it on the mailing list, complete with my message fully quoted. NOT what I wanted to happen. Of course, the response was less than friendly. I could have decided at this point to reply again, either to him or to the group (same thing really) and continue the war, but instead I just dropped it. Completely. A few people responded once, but in a day the thread was dead and I doubt anyone remembered it.
Bernie started out by doing a stupid thing. He spammed a bunch of people trying to advertise his "services" through what he STILL seems to believe is a reasonable method and when confronted chose to reply and carry on the problem by REALLY making a name for himself.
What if he just let the issue drop? If he just quit spamming and never said another word about it? In a matter of a couple days nobody would ever recognize him. Whatever little damage was caused by a letter to his isp would have been the extent of his embarrasment. He could have EASILY picked up the pieces from that debacle and avoided further problems. Now, its getting to the point where he may very well be unemployable in his industry of choice because not only has he made a professional ass out of himself, he is causing people to look VERY carefully at the type of work he supposively has experience with and relating it to his behavior in this matter and creating the (probably correct) impression that he is most unqualified for the very positions he seeks.
If only he had shut his mouth and walked away while he had the chance to do so gracefully. The world is a big place. You have to screw up pretty badly to make a name for yourself. I despise spammers as much as the next guy, but its a foolish mistake he could have recovered from easily. Now he won't live it down for a LONG time.
I hope fame was what you sought dear Bernie. For you have found it.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Heh, did anyone else see "CS Cheaters" and automatically think "Counter-Strike cheaters?" Maybe a sign I've been out of school for a while...or maybe there are some of you currently in school who thought the same thing. ;-)
For those of you who may not have heard of it, PunkBuster is one of the leaders in trying to stop online cheating. It first gained popularity for Counter-Strike use, but it seems that id is going to work with the guys for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Interview here
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Hey, most spammers are severely non-bright. Why else would they think spam is an effective way to advertise? (Actually, it is an effective way to sell spam software, since there are so many clueless people out there. But that's the exception that proves the rule!) So, obnoxious as they are, it's a little silly to get mad at spammers. Stupidity is a fact of life -- and I've got the scars to prove it.
I'll assume you're not actually using it, then. The kernel that it comes with (2.4.7-10) seems to explode quite nicely when doing a __pollwait(). [This is what was in the oops reports.] It also had some nasty problems with an ext2_...() function which I can't remember completely. I just installed the newest kernel, see what breaks this time.
Again, a pile of shit. Flaming, in fact.
Oh, man, I thought they were talking about catching Counter-Strike cheaters...
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Is Bernard Shifman a "moron spammer?"
91.6% -- Yes. Hundreds of complaints can't be wrong. (456 responses)
8.4% -- No. Give the guy a break. He's looking for a job. (42 responses)
498 total responses
I moderate at +3, Highest Scores, and I always mod down.
If you don't like it, vote me off the island.
I will personally kill the next person who posts some stupid "CS? You mean counterstrike?" and then I will kill the person that laughs at it.
Am I the only idiot that thought Taco meant Counter-strike when he said CS cheating..
Quite honestly, it doesn't matter about his 'consulting' as much any more. Consulting could still be arranged through friends of friends, with nary a party the wiser. Assuming you have friends to begin with.
But what's dumb, is giving the guy legitimacy... let's say Bill Maher has a show on Politically Incorrect, talking about spamming laws. Could Shifman be considered as a guest? He's part of the scene (as much as a target is on an archery range.) Sure, the whole thing is funny - but to who? And to the generic newspaper audience, it will be merely words about that internet thing, anyways.
I hope all parties receive what is deserved, not just what they ask for.
-Jimmer
Check out this snippet at the end:
New on chicagotribune.com
Get Office suite tools without having to pay for them! Jason Abate of Hostway Corp. explains how the open-source operating system Linux can help at chicagotribune.com/linux.
I'd release a new OGC with a trojan installed that fuxored the users Cstrike on a certain date.
But I'm not like that.
-M
I got all excited about this software that catches Counterstrike cheaters. Something really needs to be done about those bastards.
When I browse to the order page, Mozilla tells me their certificate is self-issued. I assume they are in the process of getting a real certificate, and they're using the self-issued one until then? Maybe the order page wasn't ready for human (or browser) consumption yet.
I almost started in my chair. Something about catching Counter Strike cheaters! Finaly!
Such a program would be more useful to me than the GA thingie
Honestly, everyone should pay attention! About 60% of the posts so far have been this lame CS shit. I'm getting really tired of the idiots in EVERY STORY who get modded up to (+5, Funny) by saying "Did anyone else misread the title 'New Winamp Version' and think it said 'Goatse Man Elected President'?" The gag's worn out, kids.
That swings both ways.
I am quite a skilled CS player, and whenever I play on public servers, I get accused of cheating allthough I am not.
I even get banned sometimes.
If you don't play like the average player, people automatically think you cheat.
Clanfights with non-cheating clans is the only fun that's left. Cheating is destroying online games.
Levitating Gnuru
(this was for an assembly language course)
We had no false positives.
...but not really, since 95% of the people who read this thought CS == Counter Strike.
:-/
The first time I noticed the "Counterstrike for Dummies" cheat (OGChook something) was when a guy came onto the server I was on and went 12-0 within the first round. His alias was mpcheats.com... so I visited that site. It had the CS cheat that everyone is now using (and it boasted that the author was always a step-ahead of valve/punkbuster/paladin/etc). Now the site seems to be down, but here's the google cache of it:
Google cache of MPCHEATS.COM
I find it amazing that sites such as zeroping.com actually link to this cheat. It doesn't really help the anti-cheat solution much
Copying code is a WORSE offense in a beginner's class, because these are people who are for the most part never going to progress beyond this in programming, so won't have opportunity later on to learn the lessons they should be learning now.
By copying each other's code...or more likely everyone copying one person's code, they are making it less likely that most people will learn the basic concepts of how a program works, even on a high level of abstraction.
They'll just be Lusers who can say they completed CS coursework.
A CS senior should already know what functions and variables and whatnot are. A freshman biology (or whatever) will not, and they won't learn later.
And don't think for a second that this doesn't help a person understand better how to be a better end-user.
OH, I thought he meant Counter-Strike cheaters...I eagerly clicked and read the post before I realized what was meant.
I amazes me at the amount of coding that's done just to cheat at that game. It's not even worth playing anymore.
-----------
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
Since there seems to be a large amount of confusion in the use of the abbreviation "CS", I propose that "CS" should generally mean Computer Science and that "C-S" should be the general abbreviation for the half-life mod counter-strike.
So:
CS == Computer Science
&
C-S == Counter-Strike
Thoughts?
Folks, there's a time and a place for compression, and that image of the GNU is a classic example of when NOT to use lossy compression (like JPEG).
JPEG is great for pictures of people.
JPEG sucks at things like maps, cartoons, and text, and actually winds up creating a larger file.
For things like cartoon art, cartoons, line art, maps, text, and anything similar (where run-length encoding would work), use GIF or PNG.
+2 informative. +1 interesting.
I know that at least one university (the one I am still enrolled at, hence the anonymous coward...) intentionally looks the other way when students send in copies. Why? Two reasons.
1. It makes the university money.Alot of the computer science freshmen turn in 'very similar' coding assignments. They pass a class or two in this manner, but later fail a couple project oriented classes that they can't fake. Then they change majors once or twice, taking that many more classes at the university. More classes = more money for the university. (note: a professor told me this- if this reason is BS then it his his BS, not mine.)
2. If you punish one cheater, you have to punish them all. Look at the stats they are giving - 2/3 of the students cought? The school is chucking it's reputation. It also takes extra work punish these students, the professors have to attend boards of inquiry and such. (This explanation also came from the same professor, but seems like a more sane responce than number 1.)
A professor at my university once helped a student in the tutor lab with part of his c-string project for the freshman cs class. The professor later told the class that he saw that same bit of code that he wrote in over 20 of the turned in assignments.
:P
Someone must have alot of guts (or a small mind) to be handing around code that was already handled by the professor.
I would like to have a picture of every woman naked. I would masturbate to the ones I like, and I would try voodoo on all the one I don't like. Then I would give all the pictures of the dirty devil worshipping pagan Islamic women to the CIA and FBI and ask that they be killed for my protection. I would then proceed to pleasure myself with large shampoo bottles in my ass while my girlfriend give me head. Nothing like being close to God.
My friend is a pretty bright fellow and a TA at UIUC. He wrote a cheat detector for one of the classes that turned out to be pretty effective.
The class requires you to write specific functions with specific names. His perl script would take a student's code, rearrange the functions in a predetermined manner, cut out whitespace, rename variables, etc.
It would then do pairwise comparisons with the class.
Typically, if people are cheating, it's rather blatant. If more than some % of the class has the same function implemented in a very similar way, he throws it out as a comparison factor because the function is probably too small or too obvious to implement any other way.
Really ot:
But you should try tactical ops for a while ( tacticalops.to ), a mod for unreal tournament, the cheating issue has been resolved. It's quite simular to counter strike. But I must warn you because of the addiction factor.
Dude, but you forgot to say 'I thought he meant Counterstrike when he said 'CS'', so you fucking lose. Too bad.
That's precisely what struck me as so irritating about this whole epsiode. There are two possibilities here. One is that Shifman suffers from some combination of stupidity and emotional disability that's causing him to behave so foolishly. In that case, I find him a lot less distasteful than the mob of nerds who are ridiculing and provoking him, like some dweeby version of the kind of abuse Jon Katz used as a springboard for his new career.
The other possibility is that the whole thing is a masterful troll, exploiting the bullying mob mentality of a lot of "anti-spam activists". I would get a huge kick of out of that turning out to be the case.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
> We had no false positives.
But how could you tell?
That is a low return for giving up civil liberties.
And what might those civil liberties be? The right to safely and securely traffic drugs? No thank you, I'd rather have the wire taps. After all, they aren't tapping YOU. - or are they?
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Alright, I could understand if somebody got busted for cheating if their programs were identical or if they have very similar programs to other people for multiple assignments but not if it is just one here and there. I'm assuming they would ignore it if it was a one time occurence because sure it isn't probable that 2 programs could be very similar but it isn't impossible either. Great minds think alike :).
1.4 fixes the problem, don't worry :)
:)
~Anon Valve tester
Here is the URL:
/ ch i-0201210012jan21.story
http://chicagotribune.com/business/printedition
Okay, now I've got a whole new reason for opposing wiretaps: they're not cost effective.
For $56K, you can pay someone to follow a suspect around for about six months. Time for the cops to give up their big-brother fantasies, and realize that they're going to have to do some good, old-fashioned police work.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe these geniuses could write a program that'd catch all the cheaters playing Counter Strike
:P
Off Topic, -5
of course, if these people are only taking these calsses because they are required to do so, they probably won't ever use what they would (normally) learn
Such a good game, ruined by cheaters.
That's not true, it's also ruined by the outdated/bastardized quake1 engine.
Check out Reaction Quake3 if you want something a little more up to date, for an engine that's hard to cheat with. True, rq3 isn't functionally complete yet, but they have a good base, and it won't be long before it is. It's actually a clone of action quake2 (old pre-counterstrike mod).
Maybe not! He could still end up on the positive side of things, just because some people like to take pity on someone who they think is being unfairly abused. I think it would be screamingly funny if he managed to turn his 15 minutes of fame (and top 15 Yahoo ranking!) into some high profile career. Hey, Monica Lewinsky landed a gig as a talk show hostess, or something like that, which just goes to show you that not all bad publicity ends up being bad. Hell, maybe Dubya will appoint him as the National Spam Czar or something. He certainly is well-qualified, and the Cabinet can always use another idiot.
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton
For one of the classes I TAed at GT, we were too lazy at the time to get the cheatfinder working
under our conditions... We told the students
we were using cheatfinder, but we never did.
We still caught many [lazy/stupid] cheaters.
There was one time they had to write some
sockets code and turn in their interactions
with our test server.
Bob turned in "Congratulations, gt1234a [Bob's uid] has correctly communicated with the server. You get a 100!"
Sam turned in "Congratulations, gt1234a [still Bob's uid] has correctly communicated with the server. You get a 100!"
[names changed to protect the moronic]
P.S. Zorba... wassup! long time no see!
I think that the professors should let sleeping dogs lie. Many students struggle with the workload here at Tech, and they need help from other students. They expect no collaboration to happen when everyone lives together in friendly dorms and houses? They need to encourage it!
Ideally, I believe that the problem lies in the professors' lack of faith in the students. We have an "honor code" that we are supposed to follow, but apparently, we aren't expected to follow it. Why else would they introduce doubt at the introductory lectures? Sometimes it seems they downright don't expect us to learn it. How can someone learn with that?
Here at UCD, one of my fav professors, Sean Davis, uses a program called "MOSS" to do the same. It's not open-source, and will probably remain "security-through-obscurity." He said it was based on a fuzzy matching system that basically did a "diff" on all programs and ran them against each other and possibly other databases of code.
also check out: EVE2
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
A few years back, the Dean Boyd even
came to us [TAs] complaining that we weren't
doing enough to prevent cheating -- she was
getting sick and tired of handling all the
cases we passed to her. We were pissed off
that she was yelling at us, so we proposed
having a mock "cheat bust" where we pull an
actor out of lecture, accuse him of cheating,
and haul him away handcuffed in front of
everyone else... she got even more mad...
Avoid the Boyd! w00t!
Anyway, more seriously, I feel proud having
gone to a school which would rather go through
the pains of prosecuting cheaters rather than
let them slide by... and would not water down
grades... heh, 3.55 GPA required to get
highest honors.
Yes, we KNOW you thought it was Counter Strike. Yes, that was VERY CONFUSING (TM). Please GO AWAY now.
Software to catch students copying the code of others has been in place at the university I am at for quite some time. When I was in second year (2000), all our code (in Pascal) was checked against each others using some sort of comparison system. I'm also currently tutoring a first-year introductory programming paper (in Java) where a similar system has just been put in place to check the students code. This is significantly more effective than having us try to spot people who we think are copying, and allows us to pinpoint people early, before it becomes to the harder labs, so giving those who are cheating a chance to stop, and actually learn the material themselves.
Am I the last one in the world who hasn't received his resume? I feel totally left out.
Use the spatula, Luke
And I was hoping to find a new prog to run on my Counter Striker server! People need to get their priorities straight.
Yes, that's computer science. Not Craptacular-Strike.
Feh. Back in my day, weapons were actually accurate - when you aimed at someone, you'd darn well hit them!
Where's my old school maps? Wherez the old school ultraviolence being meted out by my homies Ratzo and RedDeath?
Behold my salty balt nuts and stow your lines of cheating crap - cuz I'll nail your AWP camping ass with an AK from across the map!
Actually, I think I'll just go play Day of Defeat.
When I saw "CS" cheaters on the little blurb describing the article on the frontpage, my mind went to "Counterstrike cheaters" and not computer science.
I'm addicted, man, and it's not healthy. Heh.
That's too confusing.. I and everyone I know have always used CS for counterstrike and COSC for comp sci...
;P
of course then some morons will be wondering how you can cheat in Cosco...
I don't post my thoughts very often, but this spam article has be riled!!
... he sends me his resume on the off chance I might have a job ... so I don't .. and I am not the sort of person who would either, so I delete the email (or politely respond to him saying that I am not interested, and am not ever likely to have anything for him). But what RIGHT would I have to complain to his ISP about him, over a single incident (without ever approaching him first!!)?????? IMHO, None whatsoever!!
The battle that wages between the Anti-apm activist and the pleb that sent his email to the wrong person is one of the most childish, male testosterone, playground beat-em up grudge matches I have ever witnessed on the net.
For someone to respond with so much force to something that is ultimately quite trivial is beyond my imagination and sense of reason. So Bernie is a tad agressive at margeting himself (by lets not forget that Coke/McDonalds/MS all thrust themselves down my throat with almost as much force!). Woopie
Ok, so I am on a bit of a RANT here, but I an insensed that this sort of thing escalated to a personal public all out assault, to which many people are jumping on the band wagon. Bloody oath, apologise (even if you don't feel you have to) and get on with living in a society filled with other people, no matter what you might think of them!
"One thing I never knew was that "...wiretaps cost an average of $56,767.""
LOL.
I can wire tap a phone with a pair of wire strippers and some alligator clips
It's about a $10 more job to put a transmitter in it so you can do it remotely
Typical government overspending.
I teach introductory physics, I wonder if I could apply something similar to the GAT thing
when i saw CS cheaters I thought this article was about Counter-Strike... boy was I disappointed
I very much doubt that the bulk of that money is accounted for by equipment. Instead, I'm pretty sure that the bulk of that money is spent on the effort. It takes time to get a warrant, it takes time to hook up the equipment, it takes time to monitor the data, it takes time to analyze the data, and it takes time to get another warrant and start the whole process over when the bad guys mobilize.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Just put the printouts on top of each other, and hold up to the light. On a 10-point assignment, if the program got say, 9 points, we gave each student 4.5 points. 'you shared the work, share the grade'
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
--AC
What Macrovision does is suppress the video signal automatic gain control (AGC). This causes the picture and color to flucuate in an annoying manner when the signal is recorded. The gadgets just regenerate the AGC. Best Buy has them too. They cost ~$50.
Duh.
For example, look at the dates on the articles in the Linux section... they went from every four weeks in 1999, to every six weeks, to all-but-never. Or consider their "Silicon Prairie" print magazine, which had a Ask The Linux Geeks column... until the whole project was dropped.
The unwritten corporate policy at Tribune is "No Linux". In some divisions, installing an unapproved operating system will get you fired, in others, you just get a stern talking to from the network people.
I believe that colleges should assign a CS project to their students, and after the projects are turned in, they should kick all those students out of school, permanently, on the grounds of doing the assignment, which automatically constitutes cheating. Students that don't do the assignment will immediately be kicked out of school for not doing the assignment, which also constitutes cheating. This will make life much easier for college professors because they won't have to prepare more than one lesson. I believe this is also more efficient financially.
** O ** ** H ** ** ** W ** ** E ** ** L ** ** L **
Oh well.
...is yet another sign of the United States ethical problem. The authors of the book for my accounting class dictate to me:
The three sound principles that form the foundation of ethics is:
1. Avoid small ethical lapses
2. Focus on your long term reputation
3. Expect to suffer adverse personal consequences for holding to an ethical position.
Yeah, right. Anyone who believes in this stuff is suffering from a serious ethical problem. And if the educators don't have this down, how can you expect those educated to.
*If* it comes out, it will probably fix the problem for 2 days. Then new cheats come out.
She claims to know anything that you don't already know. Even if you do accept her presentation on the commercials, she hasn't told them anything they don't already know to base her advice on.
If people admit once they're accussed, I think you can be pretty sure that its not a false positive.
If they don't, then you'd never really know although you could have a fairly good guess depending on how similar they were.
Anyone else get the feeling that Bernie Shifman is the Internet version of a prank call?
This would be the most elaborate hoax I have ever seen if it is.
Then again maybe this guy needs to be slapped upside his head.
Hammer of Truth
Afghanistan was never our enemy. It is now our friend... Heh.
I've never used one of the cheat detection scripts/programs before but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the smarter cheaters used a similar program to see how much they had to change the program in order for it to go undetected. But then again that will probably end up being just as much work as writing the damn thing themselves...
http://www.spea.indiana.edu/pdp/analyses/Research% 20Publications/Bicameralism_TB.htm
r ar y/990rp10.pdf
s C: www.legco.gov.hk/yr99-00/english/sec/library/990rp 10.pdf+representatives+senators+100+diet+japan&hl= en
Numbers of representatives of various countries:
http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr99-00/english/sec/lib
in html, via Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:R7E6Yl9ivh
Sadly, that doesn't always work. I say this as one of the fellows who makes some extra cash (and gets some kicks) "tutoring" computer science students at a local university... which is to say, doing their homework for a fee much higher than real tutoring pays (roughly on par per hour with my "real" programming job).
Doing it right is real work -- it involves coming up with multiple versions of each involved algorithm, structuring the implementations differently (OO vs procedural; for loops vs while loops; storing data in fixed-length arrays vs linked lists vs stacks, &c), being sure that any subtle bugs found in one revision don't show up in all the others (and occasionally inserting bugs not serious enough to result in a grade reduction in one revision or another), &c. My clients comment the code themselves, so that's unique (and they come out with enough understanding to explain how it works to the prof), and the whole thing gets run through indent/beautify before being turned in.
Not one of my clients has been accused of cheating yet.
Now, they still have to study for the tests (and any help I give them studying is genuine, honest tutoring). I have no problem with selling such services -- if these folks fail to learn the skills they need, 'twill bite them in the end no matter how much they're willing to spend on such as me, and every one of them knows it.
Incidentally, one pair of folks I sold my services to during their freshman year ended up winning the local ACM programming contest the next year -- so taking the easy way out once doesn't necessarily mean that one can't learn.
I've been noticing a serious intellegence problem in these United States... There's been a run on courses in College like Basic Math that people should have gotten down in grade school. In my Physical Science class I did division longhand and still beat those using calculators in showing the instuctor my work, because they had no clue which equations to use.
You'd think FSF would be able to afford a real certificate. As it is right now, they just issued one for themselves. People placing orders are greeted with a nice security warning dialog box. Well done guys!
Easy! Just submit a working binary and claim that it is the solution. When the TA insists to see your source code, protest loudly that (s)he is violating your right to innovate!
Preventing someone from gainful employment isn't a tort in and of itself. Defamation, slander or libel are indeed torts (and lost business due to them could be found as specific damages by a reasonable court, in addition to general damages due to disgrace/dishonor/reputational damage/etc), but in order to be actionable, the statements made must be false.
The statements made on that site about Bernie strike me as either factual or otherwise non-actionable -- unless the large numbers of people who claim he's spammed them are making it up.
Quite likely the Sea World case was one in which the court found that the pot smoking claim wasn't based in fact -- if you could find the name of the plantiff (or some other source of additional info), I'd like to look it up.
IANAL, but civil law is an interest of mine, and I'm reading from West's Business Law (the chapter on torts) as I write this.
I have a passable knowledge of civil law (though IANAL), and I don't see a single tort being committed by those running the site so long as their claims are true.
If they're not true, then Mr. Shifman has himself a case (for both general and specific damages -- and if he can show a job he lost because of the site, those specific damages could be high indeed). However, being that there are a great number of people willing to testify that the allegations made against Bernie are in fact true, I'd be astonished if he had any sort of a case at all.
If you're familiar with a specific law which the operators of this site are violating, please refer me to it.
http://petemoss.com/spamflames/ShifmanIsAMoronSpam mer.html
look there, his resume is posted along with his spam
Next question: why block underline?
VX2, Audio Glaxy and onflow all working to track your every movement and form. Scary!
Yup, that's how it is here too (IIRC; once again IANAL) -- but that should be no problem to those defending against one of Bernie's supposed lawsuits; folks in the Boston area willing to testify that he did indeed spam them (and to the other claims on the site) should not at all be hard to come by.
Look all, just because a newspapers picks up this story doesn't make it real. Heck, CNN was covering the "Evil Bert/Bin Laden" story, and this paper isn't even in the same league.
How often can you be sure that news sources REALLY check out their sources. This whole thing stinks. Take a look at every single quote from this guy Bernie, they have no human qualitiy. Its like his dialogue is being written by a bad novelist.
Cheers,
me
All your base are belong to us!
Selling Everquest cheats, secret Everquest scripts, make your own platinum. Soon you will be
Uber with phat lootz you can by from other PCs.
Only 1 Million turkish lirba, email at bah_cr@woot.ding.com
Slashback time eh? That means it really is on-topic to bring up this thread. Can we now have a sensible discussion about the moderation system? Or shall I and all who answer me be mod'ed to oblivion? Well, I'll just say now that I don't care what happens to my karma- and we're away!
/. does claim to be a *user* moderated site, the readership is generally anti-censorship and pro-freedom of speech and the site claims to be built from it's community. While the /. editors waste no time in pointing out other censors on the net they have, hypocritically, maintained a complete silence on this issue. The thread's parent has now been mod'ed over 600 times, it is quite clear that there is a massive depth of feeling about this that needs attention, I don't imagine 'negativekarma now' has much karma but I imagine his friends list is longer than mosts following this. This Slashback should have had a part on the matter, the people whose paychecks are paid for by site impressions from the readership owe it to us.
,and to set AC's to -1. Additionally it is possible to set the threshold score, posts scoring less than that do not appear. I propose that in addition to these it be made possible to completly block, in effect setting to -2 perhaps, any post by a foe, anonymous coward or by modification keyword. Many people, myself included like to browse at -1. This isn't because I want to see page-lengthening posts or ascii goatse.cx, it's because some of the funniest posts are called trolls by the majority and because some of the most thought provoking are caled flamebait. By making this simply change it would be possible for people like myself to read what we want to from this site, and would in all probability kill off the real crap-flooders, as most everyone would foe list them and exlude them completely. This modification would have no effect on those people who are happy with the system in it's current state.
I present two opinions. Firstly, it is quite clear that the editors made a massive moderation to the thread mentioned above (all replies set to -1, on more than 1 occasion). There is nothing wrong with this per se- it is their site, however
Secondly- on moderation itself, as the original thread postulated, the system is not working. In many respects it is good and I propose only a minor tweak. Currently it is possible to mark up or down a post by up to 5 points on whether it is a friend's or foe's post or if it has been mod'ed as any particular type (troll, funny, flamebait, etc)
Discuss...
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
A Linux section. I was pleasently suprised to see this linked to from the Dumb-ass^h^h^h^h^h^h^hShifman story. Some good stuff too.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
And what if somebody was smart enough to submit a Trojan?
We checked correctness with our test cases.
Meaning that you won't judge style and clarity of the programs, items which will be important later in professional life (cleanly written programs are easyer to maintain).
Well, unless you'll also do a manual correction along with the automatic one. But then, why would you need the automatic correction?
Say no to software patents.
Have the class assignment be to write a cheat detector which processes the very same class assignment. Try to cheat *that*!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What a friggin' yawner. A CompSci professor of mine at UNC had a program to compare student's programming assignments in about 1982 or 83. It took him about one page of CLU (an AI language) to do it, too.
At the university I went to, about 12 years ago, we often had to hand in our CS assignments by stacking them in a big pile outside the secretary's office. This made it quite simple for anybody who hadn't done theirs to come along early in the morning, take a handful from the stack, copy what was needed and then replace them all. Some students didn't even bother trying to do the assignments because they knew they could just copy them, without the copyees :) knowing.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Good old Bernie MUST be a hoax. I have been browsing around, and can find no phone numbers for him or his company.
yp.yahoo.com
www.qwestdex.com
phone.people.yahoo.com
I can only surmise that this is somebody's elaborate hoax.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
this is cause for an all-out personal defamation?
No, it's not defamation.
Everything they're posting is TRUE.
If it really was defamation, Mr. Shifman would have a good case for a lawsuit.
... I thought he was talking about those punk-ass bitch 13 year olds who cheat in Counter-Strike.
My bad.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
I've read the whole list of emails between Bernie and everyone else. Yeah, I know, the guy's not very smart, and he *did* spam them, and he was pretty rude about it...
But, you know, the other side could've dropped it, too. They didn't have to goad him on. I mean, this guy could be trying to feed his kids or something. All they needed to do was forward (silently!) his email to his ISP, and put his address in their killfile.
I mean, this has gone way out of proportion, and I don't really like the malicious glee on the part of the anti-spam people in ruining this guy.
Even if he is an idiot.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
I think the cheatfinder is a good idea. When I was a freshman in college, I studied CS and the first two courses were LISP and APL. Both designed to quickly weed our class of 150 CS majors down to 50 or so.
It worked well, especially since most people had not had much CS work prior to freshman college. I had, and (I apologize and ask forgiveness here) I wrote a couple assignments for a pretty girl in my class. I admonished her and strongly suggested she change majors after the first semester as the work would get harder, and she did.
And I got a date!
I see... So that's $267 for the equipment and $56,500 for "operating expenses", right?
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
And which part of this is about chessmen?
This kind of software has been around since 1975. It has been routine for many computer assignments to be submitted to a program which labels which student turned in the homework and later compares all the stored versions of the assignment (including from previous years when the same assignment was given).
Saw Round Thing. Moved Nice. Invented One Also.
be huge farms owned by Corporations that payed little or no taxes, while deriving huge benefits from government handouts.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The Tribune has a poll entitled: "Is Bernard Shifman a 'moron spammer'"?
./ crowd hasn't cast a few thousand votes - there are only 2,659 total votes at this time.
96.1% voted for: Yes. Hundreds of complaints can't be wrong.
3.9% voted for: No. Give the guy a break. He's looking for a job.
What's surprising is that the
I can't remember laughing so hard as I have at this comic episode. However, I wonder how much punishment poor Bernie can take. I mean, I don't feel really sorry for him, yet I hope he doesn't take a Roman bath or anything over it.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
hm, professionals don't progam in assembly now do they?
It says 'the security cerificate was issued by a company you have chosen not to trust.' No problem on Nescape though. Must be one of those M$ attempts of killing free software.
You didn't give the email address to send my resume and cover letter to.