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Slashback: Cheats, Entries, Loki
From the email I've gotten on it, it seems like a whole passel of schools have at least a homegrown solution to CS cheats.
Perhaps the cute dog will end up changing Sony's stance? CodeMonkey555 writes "Here is a story that chronicles Sony's little foray into the DMCA with a hacker who added software for the Aibo robot."
It's nice to see that publications like SciAm are following the results and consequences of the DMCA.
Care to help edit an online software reference? SteveMallett writes "We at Open Source Directory (OSD) have opened the directory to volunteer editors now that we've given app authors and maintainer's a good chance to start and/or maintain their own listings.
Those interested may wish to visit our volunteer page which outlines what we're looking for. Don't worry. We're not that picky. The outline includes guidelines and tips for being a volunteer. Unlike dmoz, which has volunteer editors, we _will_ delete unupdated or neglected editor work in accordance to our Social Contract.
We hope that editors will help fill in the missing apps, take over those listings that they can do a better job of or have become neglected, and find those diamonds in the rough."
See our earlier post about the project if you're not sure what this is about.
Yes, someone has to read all those emails. kcurtis writes "Boston.com's tech site has this AP article about the large response to the Court's request for comment on the MS case's proposed settlement."
Now all they need is a trowel with an emblazoned smiley. enigma48 writes "Looks like the C'T article a little while ago about Smoothwall prompted some changes after all. Juergen Schmidt even gets a little credit. Shadow passwords are now in, but it looks like the ppp secrets file is still open (they describe it as being a "non-vulnerability"). A-patchin' I will go, a-patchin' I will go..."
So you don't have to stop playing your games ... Scott Draeker of Loki has some encouraging words for those who thought the announced (upcoming) closure of Loki would mean the loss of Loki's code and community. Draeker sent word of this a few days ago, but here are more details.
He writes:
"We have prepared tarballs of the public CVS, FAQs, mailing list archives, demos and Loki_Update which will be available for people to host. That's exactly what's going on with icculus.org.The official repository will be hosted by the SEUL group at MIT. Once that site is set up we'll point the loki domains that direction. They'll also be adding some Loki projects to public CVS which were never completed."
It seems interesting to me that the DMCA allows no condition of fair use when it comes to breaking encryption on purchases - at least, this is how the article presents it.
Notice that Aibopet never actually uses the code within the Aibo to make a profit. Someone could argue, technically, that he uses it to make a name for himself, but he hardly even does that. I think it's interesting that Sony would choose to pursue legal action on the basis that the code was cracked, not that something illegal was done with the code.
This is something like purchasing a refrigerator, dismantling it, using the fan to cool yourself, and using the shelves inside to hold books. Sure, it wasn't the intended use of the product, but who's the seller to determine the intended use and then legally enforce that use? Encryption was brought about for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons wasn't to make sure that a product was used in a specific way - rather, it's primary ability is to keep other people from making a profit on someone else's ideas.
As long as Aibopet isn;t doing that, I don't really understand Sony's original position on the issue.
If the illegality is in breaking the encryption, could some secure 3rd party break the encryption and send me the results. Posetion of cracked data is not an offence, is it? Maybe some Ukranian crack-boy could make a living cracking the encryption on popular items and then selling the results back into the US. What is anybody going to do if I release some code for something, based on publicly available specs. (Even if those specs are the result of some work done elsewhere that couldn't be done here.) Isn't that how PC cloning got started with Clean Room reverse engineering?
Even if Loki donates all the code to the community. The community cannot port games. Since the game publisher needs a company to license the code under some contract.
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I hope another company picks up everything from Loki. Does all the contract/licensing stuff, but unlike Loki try and make use of volunteer work from the community to save money. I am willing to provide few hours of my time, for getting games on Linux and I sure hope there will be others.
I am aware of the issues of volunteer work vs full time employees. The contarct/licensing issues of closed source games. Maybe its all just wishfull thinking. Sigh
Without such a changelog, honest students are vulnerable to a situation where someone else gets their code by dumpster-diving for printouts -- then it's one person's word against the other as far as establishing who really wrote it.
This solution also has the benefit of showing that the issue is plagiarism (not giving credit where credit is due), not code sharing. Code sharing is ok -- it's the programming equivalent of using a properly attributed quote in an English paper. After all, nobody expects students to rewrite glibc from scratch for use with their class project!
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You don't hear of a cheat detection system for English papers
;-) I guess you could just do you own work, but defeating the cheat detect software might be a more interesting challange than many of the CS assignments I've seen...
No, they have those too. The prof requires all papers to be submitted by email, and the software searches through all of them to check for papers with long strings that are identical. Anything that shows up over the "similarity threshold" is flagged as possible plagerism. I hear on the first test of the software they found several students in a large class had copied papers or sections of papers off eachother. This software is useful because in a large class (200+) the papers won't all be read by the same grad students so the "human cheat detection" wouldn't always work.
The lesson is here if you plan to copy either someone's paper or their source code, make sure to make tiny modifications all through it so it doesn't get caught by the software.