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!"
Because they had to wait for RSA patents to expire. You can't very well use stuff you oppose if you want to be taken seriously.
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.
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?
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
"A recent report by the state Department of Justice showed that California law enforcement requested 88 wiretap orders in 2000. Judges granted every request. The wiretaps cost an average of $56,767 and resulted in the arrests of 271 people. Of those, 17 were convicted. Most were used in drug investigations and involved home phones, cellular phones and pagers. "
I'm just spitballing here, so bear with me...
88 wiretaps = 271 arrests = 17 convictions, 254 that were NOT convicted
88 wiretaps requested = 88 wiretaps granted (not a bad percentage)
88 wiretaps X $56,767 = $4,995,496
$56,767 / $40hr = 1419 "man" hours per case on average (OK... I just made up $40 for maintaining an employee with benefits, etc...)
That is a hell of a lot of time put into wiretaps. If taps are anything like most businesses, the real cost goes into employee time. I probably spend a total of 25 hrs./month on the phone (including work time... and one might assume criminals might consider crime as part of their job?). If an investigation takes 10 months, we are up to 250 hours. If we consider the ratio of 88 taps yielding 271 arrests, that is about 3 people per tap. If we multiply our 250 hours X 3 we are at 750 hours... and that is just real time phone monitoring. Add all the support staff and forensics- we'd have to double that staff time to bring it to 1500 hours per case. It might actually be plausible.
More significantly I find it disturbing that 100% taps are granted by the courts, but the conviction rate is about 19%. The arrest to conviction rate is 6%. That is a low return for giving up civil liberties.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
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 don't know if anyone can guarentee a cheat free server.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
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?
serious? wow, you know 300,000 people die from bad diets every year. compare that to the 26000 total deaths related to drugs. (half from murders due to gangs) HMMM I think we need a war on obesity, and start locking up those overweight people.
If drugs were legal, drug dealers would be out of business.
but not really, since 95% of the people who read this thought CS == Counter Strike.
I new the dumb ass quotient was high here, but 95%? Jeez...
I suspect he was talking about the rights of the 254 people who were arrested, but NOT convicted . Of course I'm sure they were all guilty of something, so let's lock them up anyway, just to be safe.
There's something seriously wrong when we arrest 271 people, but a judge/jury only convicts 17 of them. Would you remain employed if the quality of your work was so poor? This is exactly why you should be so uneasy with the way the USA PATRIOT Act undermines the checks and balances from our justice system.
Cops are paid to find the bad guys. That's their focus, that's what we pay them for, that's what we want them to do. The judiciary and our constitutional rights are are there to hold the reins on the police, to make sure they don't go too far, to make sure we as a society don't sacrifice the rights of the innocent too much in our zeal to get the crooks. You don't have to be dealing drugs to fear living in a police state.
Police are about law enforcement. The judiciary and our rights are about justice. There is an enormous difference between the two.
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.
Similar problems generally have similar solutions, expecially when every person producing that solution was taught by the same instructer. It is very likly that many of these programs would share a similar structure overall. Of course, the did not mention how similar it has to be, but I would not bet on this program only catch actuall cheaters, allot of dolphins probably get caught in that tuna net.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
The problem arises when there are too many students. Sure you'll catch the really dumb students who copy someone in their own class, or who has the same TA. But those students will fail the exam anyway and hence won't pass even if not caught...
You won't catch those students who copy someone in a different class with a different TA, since you won't see the other almost identical solution.
In my experience some of those students are found, because copying seems to spread, and usually a group of students have 'similar' solutions, so when you happen to get two of them, you can grep for whatever the magic phrase is that really gives the game away in the submissions of all the students and probably find a few more matches.
The last course I taught had ~650 students. I lectured the course (wrote the material, gave the lectures, wrote the assignment specs, did the machine marking, etc), but didn't take any of the tutes/labs and hence only did the hand marking of assignments which were late for whatever reason, or for students whom the enrollment database refused to believe were in a tute...
As always some students cheated and some of those were caught (some got away with it no doubt).
I think one tutor (I think our equivalent of a TA) reported students he suspected of copying, and only a couple at that. So the tutors didn't find many - since they only marked a small percentage after all...
A handful were caught because I happened to mark two assignments that used malloc (in a C++ course that never mentioned it even in passing) in identical wrong ways. And grepping for malloc found a few more *very* similar assignments.
The majority of those caught were found using two simple little programs called sig and comp. Sig takes the submission as input, splits it into chunks and outputs simple hashes of those chunks. Comp compares the hashes of a bunch of submissions and says which are similar.
Submissions that score high with sig/comp *always* look very much like they have been copied. Those that score low *always* look very much like they are different. Those that score in the middle consist of both. Hence it misses some cheats, but more importantly doesn't generate false positives very often.
sig/comp was actually an assignment for out Software Engineering course a few years ago. Rob Pike (on sabatical teaching in out dept for a semester) was annoyed enough at teh apparant cheating in one assignment, that he set writing them as the next assignment and used the previous assignments submissions as the sample data. This did seem to show students that cheating was easily discovered...