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!"
If you could pay $56,767 to wiretap a 900 number, imagine how much cash you could save!
Fight Spammers!
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.
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.
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
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..
"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.
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.
56767 looks more like someone typing a series of five digits with three fingers.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
The total cost is always going to be higher, due to the fact that
;)
a) You'll need a team of people to do it to ensure that they don't get caught doing it... (People watching the house for a while, to work out when the suspect tends to be out... lookouts etc. All of this costs money)
b) The cost of getting the warrant in the first place (Judge's time is hardly cheap - there's also the cost of the other court personnel who are involved)
c) The cost of the detectives preparing the case to get the warrant
etcetera...
All of this is a good thing. You wouldn't want wiretaps to be cheap, or they'd use them a lot more...