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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!"
If you could pay $56,767 to wiretap a 900 number, imagine how much cash you could save!
Fight Spammers!
$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.
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"
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)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Punkbuster stopped supporting HL/CS several months ago. Paladin is a joke and was hacked within minutes of it being released.
What I run on my server is a combination of CSGuard And Cheating Death. Cheating Death is interesting in that it doesn't attempt to detect cheats, but just to hide the extra information used by the cheats to wallhack/aimbot, etc. It seems to work really well, and is going to be very much harder for the cheat coders to work around.
Result? My server is mostly cheater free. I can go on there and have a good game and not worry about cheating. I bust something like 10-20 people a day which makes me happy..
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.
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.
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.
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
How dare you repeat such lies?!? This is slander! this is libel! I'll sue you! I'll sue the Chicago Tribune! I'll sue all 456 respondants who answered 'yes'! I will also be suing Al Gore and Bill Gates for inventing the internet, and the moderators and editors on slashdot for violating my 1st ammendment rights! Please give me your address and phone number, as well as those of all of your co-conspirators mentioned above, so my lawyers can sue all of you.
Litigiously yours,
Bernie S.
(this was for an assembly language course)
We had no false positives.
I don't know if anyone can guarentee a cheat free server.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I was gonna say that.. now I can't, and no mod points so I can't even give you a +1 funny. Ho hum.
There isn't a Linux client but a variety of hackers have made it work under WINE.
[CoFR]BigLig
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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...
I graded an introductory scheme course once. You have no idea how easy it is to pick out cheating in an introductory programming course. You can actually pick out pretty much the whole solution history, much like a genetecist can track speciation through differences in DNA.
Beginning programmers make such a wide range of mistakes that it's obvious which people discussed the problem before hand, which people programmed their solutions sitting next to each other on different computers, and which people just made a copy of someone else's solution (while they were away from the computer, it is often claimed).
I'd say that all but the last of these scenarios is fine. What IS galling - nay insulting - is that they students think that the TA won't notice that two programs have exactly the same error epidology. I could understand if they thought they could get away with copying and modifying a working solution, but when the solution doesn't produce the required result, the TA HAS to grok the code. And you quickly notice when solutions are "similarly stupid". Strangely enogugh, the right solutions tended not to be copied. I'll spare you my specualtions on the social dynamic that results in that scenario.
So no program necessary, IMHO. Of course, I had a fairly small class. I would hope that bigger classes get a couple of TAs.
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."
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!
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.
CS cheaters (and whom to credit for the software that does so)
Darn, I thought CounterStrike too. The author of the cheat is lucky nobody knows his name!
-
I want my M-LIFE.
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.
"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 have to admin, the "light test"[1] worked for most of our CS1501 pseudocode submissions (that is, before we went to Scheme).
[1] 1. Place papers of suspected cheaters on top of each other.
2. Hold up to light.
3. Observe how everything overlaps *perfectly*, down to the whitespace, var names, etc.
PS: Hey Yngve! Not much - email me!
I haven't, either, but I'm still hopeful.
I really have to marvel at this guy's ability to totally destroy his own career. I mean, even my parents, who've never been online without my presence, know what spam is and how repulsive it is. Did this joker not have a clue, or did he delude himself into believing he'd actually get hired by someone? I've heard for a long time that spammers have this warped belief that there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. I've mostly written it off in favor of the view that they know what they're doing is wrong but just don't care. I still think most all of them are aware, but maybe there are a few true idiots out there who just don't get it. Well, we now know there's at least one of them. Either that, or he has a screw loose somewhere, as several folks theorized when this topic was originally posted. As messed up as that sounds, it could very well be the case. Whatever it is, I'd love to get his resume so I could tell him what I think of his qualifications. I'd also have the pleasure of passing it along to some friends at a few hardware and telecom companies, for their amusement.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
You make the mistake of assuming these people care. I've been in an intro CS course. Nobody wants to be there. The people who never bothered to test out don't want to be there because they know it all, the others don't want to know any of it. They just want a decent grade. Heck even many of the IS/IT students I know don't give a whit about programming. They find Java to be damned difficult.
Don't ask about some of the experiences I've had helping people in intro CS courses with linked lists/pointers/etc.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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!
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...
Hey Gary. What's up?
I had one student who was failing every single assignment, but then magically turned in a program which ran flawlessly, was multithreaded, and had network support. Needless to say, a few seconds on Google turned up the original -- and uncited -- source code.
What a dummy.
The AGC is a feature on your TV set. Older sets have a switch to turn it off. Macrovision generates signals that trip up the AGC on the TV if the signal has been recored. The device doesn't regnerate the AGC but takes the signals and removes the parts that mess up AGC.
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 couldn't agree more. Especially considering this was an INTRODUCTORY course (or did I mis-read?). Let's face it, intro programs tend to be SMALL; there are only so many ways you can write a recursive factorial function, and in a class of several hundred students, chances are 2 of them will duplicate a LOT.
A keen TA is worth a lot more than just accusing students of plagarism based on coincidental code. Case in point: my brother and I both wrote one of my 1st year assigments. The programming guidelines were rather strict (I guess this keeps the TA's from having to spend much time grokking weird code), so the basic framework was pretty much set out for us. Now, both of us come from the same school of thought regarding implementation/testing/debugging, but still...
Our programs had several lines that were identical. Not just close; IDENTICAL. This in what amounted to maybe a 50 line program. The rest was similar enough, that if you DIDN'T look for the differences, you wouldn't have seen them. Thankfully he wasn't enrolled in the class with me at the time...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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?
Seems to me hhat it's impossible to stop cheating in online games for the simple reason that you don't have control over the remote system -- it is, by definition, untrusted. Since the remote user has complete control over his computer, there's always the possibility that he can alter the client software. The only way to stop cheating would be to run everything on the server, and only send screenshots back to the client (via somthing like VNC). However, this requires too much CPU on the server side to be practical, and would require too much bandwidth to use on anything slower than a LAN (at least if you wanted a decent framerate).
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Assume the assignments that they're bothering to check are at least decently large ones, and not first day "Hello World" apps. In even a 200+ line program, there are enough different ways to structure a function, phrase an algorithm, manage a sort, etc. etc. that i think it would be doubtful that even in a class of several hundred people, two identically structured programs would emerge.
I don't see how this is news though. Other schools have had similar software for years. I know for a fact that the Columbia University CS department has it, and I'm assuming others do to; it's a fairly obvious measure.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
You still working out there in Hades?
I've got a nice cushy architecture job! w00t!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I'd just like to point out that those numbers mean nothing unless you compare them to the non-wiretap arrest to conviction ratio and the TOTAL arrest to conviction ratio.
I have no idea how many people are convicted of a crime, compared to the number of people arrested.
I don't even no where to go for a reliable source.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 ?
So your saying the US has a population of: 1.5billion?
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the population of California "34,818,000" As of January 1, 2001. So, we will assume for the sake of discussion an even distribution of wiretap costs across the US based on population. Lets see.. so, 300 million people as opposed to 30 million, so 880 wiretaps TOTAL for the United States. So 880 * 57,000 = 50,160,000; So, you owe $0.16 for Wiretaps in the US/year.
While I think extrapolating these numbers this far could be misleading, I think pointing out that you personally pay less than $0.20/year based on these numbers isn't...