Finding plagiarism when it comes to coding is mainly a matter of style. Students should be encouraged to talk to each other about doing their homework. That doesn't mean that they should copy whole problems verbatim from one another though.
Look at the whole rangecheck(...) debacle. The algorithm wasn't secret by any means. The whole issue came about because the same coder wrote both functions. He has his own programming style that becomes immediately apparent when comparing small snippets of code like the function in question.
Even when there are style guidelines, each person will implement them slightly differently. It might not be as ingrained in newer students but eventually they will choose something like one of these examples for their functions.
Tools like this basically do: (step 1) build abstract representation of text - (step 2) rebuild it into a new text using random substitutions.
Plagiarism detection tool will just have to do step 1 and then compare it with database of saved essays in same abstract form.
How would that help if the plagiarism detection tool only has the randomized outcome of step 2?
Simple plagiarism detection tools just use string matching. If a person used popular quotes and phrases in an essay, it is entirely possible for the software to give a high plagiarism percentage. That's why all the good software packages use highlighting with a link what it thinks was plagiarized.
More advanced tools can detect things like a student using a thesaurus for one to one word replacement. I do not know how much they can do in this regard though. String matching still works as long as the matching algorithms is willing to allow one or more words to not match. The problem is, doing this causes the false positive rate to jump even higher.
Going over every possible thesaurus based permutation of every word is a O(n!) hard problem. If all text in the database was normalized, then we're back to a basic string compare. Normalized in this context means changing a word in all works to a common synonym. For instance, change ever occurrence of the word proper with correct in the last paragraph.
It's possible to do more complicated things involving the actual meaning of a sentence, paragraph, or work. Unfortunately, I have no clue to go about doing so. The rules of English grammar are hard. Worse still, both professional writers and amateurs violate them all the time.
Remember kids, there's a huge difference between knowing the proper way to do something and still doing it improperly versus not knowing the correct way to begin with.
Isn't it interesting how easily people are manipulated? For some it's terrorism, for some child porn. I wonder what it would be for me that I'd consider more important than my freedom.
Still taking suggestions.
Money. It's the politician's answer. Especially if you call it a campaign contribution.
Great, which city is working on "Ascent to Transcendence?" Dammit, It was Detroit wasn't it. Lets hope solar activity stays low. Otherwise a certain city is going to get nerve stapled.
"Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there."
My irony meter is pegged. Now the EFF is using the same logic that the government is using. If we hadn't been watching out for your interests, who knows what bad things might have happened.
Donations cheerfully accepted.
Everyone uses that line. It's hyperbole, but there's still some truth to it. Here are a few examples. Who knows what would have happened if we had not removed that cancer. Who knows what would have happened if we had not provided lawyers free of charge to someone who otherwise couldn't afford one. Who knows what would have happened if we had not illegally wiretapped everyone in the world.
Here a little side note for the day. If you live above the poverty threshold then that whole "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning, if you wish." means you have to pay for your lawyer. It's no wonder so many people settle with the government when the alternative is having to sell everything they own just to pay their attorney.
"Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with."
Of course, he then said "And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments."
Basically, politicians tend to buy "friends." This tends to end badly for them when they really need help. That's when knowing where the metaphorical bodies are buried comes in handy.
This is how Terry Childs caused so much damage. The city paid people a ridiculous amount of money to audit everything. That's mega corps and government for you. Spend millions of dollars on after the fact security and blame it all on one person.
On the other hand, I have no problems with someone who is being payed $400/hr. It's the people that are crazy enough to pay them that much I have a problem with.
The issue is that half of the charges were a copy of the other half with "using a computer" tacked on the end.
He was charged with stealing information. Then he was charged with stealing information using a computer. So, he was convicted of both and is facing double the jail time.
That's not a function of the router, it's a function of the firewall.
We wish. In reality, almost no home routers have a firewall. An unfortunate side effect of NAT is that it looks like a firewall that allows outbound traffic. That's the scary thing about IpV6. Most vendors just don't care.
Plus, if the router doesn't work out of the box then plenty of users will just return it to the store. A firewall by its very nature is designed to prevent certain things from working. On a personal note, I can't wait to not have to worry about NAT traversal for VoIP.
Another trend to watch is consolidation. No home owner buys a purely wired router any more. Also, plenty of new routers are built into the cable/dsl modem. Face it, the trend is for one box that does everything.
Ehh, you're missing the point. Besides, stanlyb was talking about an absolute ratio, not mass or volume.
Just search Slashdot for Dihydrogen Monoxide. People were considering arresting a DJ because he said that DHMO was coming out of the taps. Though, that was Florida, so it's not that surprising.
The TV isn't bad when hooked up to my modified version of the PS3 media server project.
That's why. I'd love to hack one of these just for the hell of it. It might not have much internal storage, but other than that It would probably make a neat HTPC.
Remember kids, there is no difference between a jailbreak and a security vulnerability.
It's unlimited in that they drop him to Edge speeds if he goes over. It costs $20/line for unlimited 4G. Which is still the best deal going. Sprint probably just cuts users off, and other carriers start charging per MiB.
It sounds harsh, but this whole injunction and others like it are why so many people are against responsible disclosure. If you put it on the internet, then by the time someone could issue an injunction it's too late.
Expect to see this leaked/rediscovered, and then the court to blame the researcher.
Many conferences have you submit at least a rough draft of your slides/paper early in the process. So, it's already been distributed to at least a few people. I wonder what the ramifications would be for the other authors to present anyways. Or if the conference CDs will contain the slide regardless.
But, as I understand it, nobody actually wants a 3D printed gun - they're just trying to bait the gun-grabbers into attempting to restrain free trade and stifle free speech for their agenda, to make the gun-grabbers look even worse.
And it's working quite well. Here in the United States home made firearms are mostly legal as long as you don't sell them. Mainly because it's too hard to regulate, and most of them blow up anyways. The only restriction is an old law saying guns have to be detected by metal detectors.
Now you have all these states and cities that are passing laws banning 3d printed weapons. Side note, I can't wait until someone is arrested because they used a 3d printed toy as a "weapon." Then the US said it might be an export violation and told Defense Distributed to pull all the files. Boom, instant free speech violation.
What I'm curious about is the correlation between gun-grabbers and people who want to Censor the internet. Since they both use the same language about "protecting children" or for "public safety" I imagine it's the same people. Has anyone done a study on this?
Interesting things about "favoring and discriminating." The cost difference is all because of the way that Gamefly ships vs Netflix. That's discriminating based on package weight.
Everything else the arstechnica article is talking about refers to the likelihood of breakage and the time to deliver. Gamefly uses only a few shipping facilities while Netflix has many. If you don't have to ship cross county then things are going to be faster, and thus have less of a chance of breakage.
The other trick is that Netflix has highly identifiable mailers that are all the same. The post office employees immediately know that the contents of these mailers are fragile. I would expect the post office to group similar items together. Especially if they're breakable. Gamefly decided that it wasn't worth the trouble since most post office employees aren't familiar with them, and they had too many disks stolen.
An option is for the post office to create a special DVD mailer that all companies can use. Allow some customization, but make it immediately apparent to the handlers that what's being shipped is a DVD. By standardizing the packaging they can give everyone the same quality of service while potentially allowing for more mail to be automatically sorted by a machine.
The USPS has their own police force. If they think you've been sending non time sensitive things through anyone but USPS then they're legally allowed to fine a company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In theory the Post Office gets regulated by congress because congress has granted it a monopoly on certain kinds of mail.
Ahh, but you can sign those packets the GPS satellites are sending. The US military uses encrypted GPS to prevent precisely this kind of attack. It also allows them to use their selective denial system to cut off part of the world without affecting their own systems. Ask the Russians about what their latest trip into Georgia taught them about their reliance on GPS.
So, yes the US can fix it, and should. Every country that is working on their own GPS alternative should as well.
Software defined radio is changing the world. It's bringing the price to capture signals down to a $20 USB TV tuner, and the price to send signals to a few thousand dollars. Not bad for something that used to require millions in fab costs to build transmitter ASICS.
Except if you RTFA it's not that simple. These support companies are using the login credentials of their customers to download the updates for their customers. So, they're acting as the end user's agents when doing all this. They even have the paperwork to prove it.
This lawsuit would be the same as Red Hat suing Linux support companies because their techs used `yum update`. It only makes sense in a weird twisted world of copyright. Even then, it's mainly just corporate bullying. An injunction would mean they can't patch any client's systems. From a business standpoint they lose then and there. Just like the US did to Megaupload.
Ah, you've never had the joy of working with Cisco gear have you?
There are so many different models out there, with different firmware. Each firmware supporting a lightly different feature set. Going from telnet to SSH can be a pain, and if you're on an older router and want to use private keys then you're sol. Add to that the fun command syntax ('no shutdown' is the same as ifconfig up) and you have a winner.
People buy Cisco because it's well known with good but expensive support contracts. No one got fired for buying Cisco gear. In this case, the buyers probably had a support contract with the reseller instead of Cisco directly. If something didn't work then the reseller would fix it.
Also, don't forget all the talks about ghost shift work in china. It's the same factory and the same workers building the same product. If you offered them twice as much money you could still undercut the "official" devices and still make a tidy profit. Hell, you could probably even afford the QA checks.
They pretty much admitted that Pacific Rim was deliberately made that way.
Why were the politicians so stupid? Why did they run that first drift with the weapons systems online? Why didn't the just put a nuke at the rift and blow every Kaiju that comes through to smithereens? Because, those are classic tropes of the genera.
The thing about that movie is that they were upfront in exactly what it was going to be. There was some romance, but the story was about fighting giant monsters, and it showed.
If you've watched the gsm/gprs stuff that this guy and others have done you would know that it takes under a $1,000 dollars worth of equipment to emulate a cell tower. As soon as you do that, sending the binary SMS is easy. This enables a literal drive by attack. Furthermore, my guess is that cell providers which are using vulnerable SIM cards are also running vulnerable networks. The second link talks about some networks allowing anyone who knows how to send binary SMS.
My question is how easy is it to configure a rooted Android phone to block and warn me about these binary text messages.
It's like the difference between Microsoft's research division and the rest of that company. Totally different groups, with totally different goals. Aside from sharing some IP* they could be completely different companies.
My largest worry about this device is the lawyers. It's a neat concept, but they're going to patent it up the wazoo. Not the specific tech mind you, but the idea. Now no one can "Use an air pulse to provide haptic feedback" without getting their pants sued off by Disney.
*IP="Intellectual Property" (also known as a government granted monopoly on an idea, thought, or expression)
Slashdot Mirror
Finding plagiarism when it comes to coding is mainly a matter of style. Students should be encouraged to talk to each other about doing their homework. That doesn't mean that they should copy whole problems verbatim from one another though.
Look at the whole rangecheck(...) debacle. The algorithm wasn't secret by any means. The whole issue came about because the same coder wrote both functions. He has his own programming style that becomes immediately apparent when comparing small snippets of code like the function in question.
Even when there are style guidelines, each person will implement them slightly differently. It might not be as ingrained in newer students but eventually they will choose something like one of these examples for their functions.
Examples: ... ) {
void foo(...){
}
void foo (
}
void foo (...)
{
}
Let the flame war about which is better begin.
Tools like this basically do: (step 1) build abstract representation of text - (step 2) rebuild it into a new text using random substitutions.
Plagiarism detection tool will just have to do step 1 and then compare it with database of saved essays in same abstract form.
How would that help if the plagiarism detection tool only has the randomized outcome of step 2?
Simple plagiarism detection tools just use string matching. If a person used popular quotes and phrases in an essay, it is entirely possible for the software to give a high plagiarism percentage. That's why all the good software packages use highlighting with a link what it thinks was plagiarized.
More advanced tools can detect things like a student using a thesaurus for one to one word replacement. I do not know how much they can do in this regard though. String matching still works as long as the matching algorithms is willing to allow one or more words to not match. The problem is, doing this causes the false positive rate to jump even higher.
Going over every possible thesaurus based permutation of every word is a O(n!) hard problem. If all text in the database was normalized, then we're back to a basic string compare. Normalized in this context means changing a word in all works to a common synonym. For instance, change ever occurrence of the word proper with correct in the last paragraph.
It's possible to do more complicated things involving the actual meaning of a sentence, paragraph, or work. Unfortunately, I have no clue to go about doing so. The rules of English grammar are hard. Worse still, both professional writers and amateurs violate them all the time.
Remember kids, there's a huge difference between knowing the proper way to do something and still doing it improperly versus not knowing the correct way to begin with.
Isn't it interesting how easily people are manipulated? For some it's terrorism, for some child porn. I wonder what it would be for me that I'd consider more important than my freedom.
Still taking suggestions.
Money. It's the politician's answer. Especially if you call it a campaign contribution.
Great, which city is working on "Ascent to Transcendence?" Dammit, It was Detroit wasn't it. Lets hope solar activity stays low. Otherwise a certain city is going to get nerve stapled.
"Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there."
My irony meter is pegged.
Now the EFF is using the same logic that the government is using. If we hadn't been watching out for your interests, who knows what bad things might have happened.
Donations cheerfully accepted.
Everyone uses that line. It's hyperbole, but there's still some truth to it. Here are a few examples. Who knows what would have happened if we had not removed that cancer. Who knows what would have happened if we had not provided lawyers free of charge to someone who otherwise couldn't afford one. Who knows what would have happened if we had not illegally wiretapped everyone in the world.
Here a little side note for the day. If you live above the poverty threshold then that whole "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning, if you wish." means you have to pay for your lawyer. It's no wonder so many people settle with the government when the alternative is having to sell everything they own just to pay their attorney.
If you can't be liked, be feared.
And you've pretty much summed up why most bullies exist.
On the other hand Machiavelli said it best:
"Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with."
Of course, he then said "And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments."
Basically, politicians tend to buy "friends." This tends to end badly for them when they really need help. That's when knowing where the metaphorical bodies are buried comes in handy.
This is how Terry Childs caused so much damage. The city paid people a ridiculous amount of money to audit everything. That's mega corps and government for you. Spend millions of dollars on after the fact security and blame it all on one person.
On the other hand, I have no problems with someone who is being payed $400/hr. It's the people that are crazy enough to pay them that much I have a problem with.
The issue is that half of the charges were a copy of the other half with "using a computer" tacked on the end.
He was charged with stealing information. Then he was charged with stealing information using a computer. So, he was convicted of both and is facing double the jail time.
That's not a function of the router, it's a function of the firewall.
We wish. In reality, almost no home routers have a firewall. An unfortunate side effect of NAT is that it looks like a firewall that allows outbound traffic. That's the scary thing about IpV6. Most vendors just don't care.
Plus, if the router doesn't work out of the box then plenty of users will just return it to the store. A firewall by its very nature is designed to prevent certain things from working. On a personal note, I can't wait to not have to worry about NAT traversal for VoIP.
Another trend to watch is consolidation. No home owner buys a purely wired router any more. Also, plenty of new routers are built into the cable/dsl modem. Face it, the trend is for one box that does everything.
Ehh, you're missing the point. Besides, stanlyb was talking about an absolute ratio, not mass or volume.
Just search Slashdot for Dihydrogen Monoxide. People were considering arresting a DJ because he said that DHMO was coming out of the taps. Though, that was Florida, so it's not that surprising.
The TV isn't bad when hooked up to my modified version of the PS3 media server project.
That's why. I'd love to hack one of these just for the hell of it. It might not have much internal storage, but other than that It would probably make a neat HTPC.
Remember kids, there is no difference between a jailbreak and a security vulnerability.
[offtopic]
Nice sig. What keywords do you put in your E-Mails to make sure they back them up?
It's unlimited in that they drop him to Edge speeds if he goes over. It costs $20/line for unlimited 4G. Which is still the best deal going. Sprint probably just cuts users off, and other carriers start charging per MiB.
https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans?cm_mmc_o=VzbpjmwzygtCjC-czywEwllCjCVzbpjmwzygtCjCVzbpjmwzygt
Do not announce !! SPiLL !! SPiLL !! SPiLL !!
Muw haha haha !!
It sounds harsh, but this whole injunction and others like it are why so many people are against responsible disclosure. If you put it on the internet, then by the time someone could issue an injunction it's too late.
Expect to see this leaked/rediscovered, and then the court to blame the researcher.
Now here's a thought.
Many conferences have you submit at least a rough draft of your slides/paper early in the process. So, it's already been distributed to at least a few people. I wonder what the ramifications would be for the other authors to present anyways. Or if the conference CDs will contain the slide regardless.
But, as I understand it, nobody actually wants a 3D printed gun - they're just trying to bait the gun-grabbers into attempting to restrain free trade and stifle free speech for their agenda, to make the gun-grabbers look even worse.
And it's working quite well. Here in the United States home made firearms are mostly legal as long as you don't sell them. Mainly because it's too hard to regulate, and most of them blow up anyways. The only restriction is an old law saying guns have to be detected by metal detectors.
Now you have all these states and cities that are passing laws banning 3d printed weapons. Side note, I can't wait until someone is arrested because they used a 3d printed toy as a "weapon." Then the US said it might be an export violation and told Defense Distributed to pull all the files. Boom, instant free speech violation.
What I'm curious about is the correlation between gun-grabbers and people who want to Censor the internet. Since they both use the same language about "protecting children" or for "public safety" I imagine it's the same people. Has anyone done a study on this?
Interesting things about "favoring and discriminating." The cost difference is all because of the way that Gamefly ships vs Netflix. That's discriminating based on package weight.
Everything else the arstechnica article is talking about refers to the likelihood of breakage and the time to deliver. Gamefly uses only a few shipping facilities while Netflix has many. If you don't have to ship cross county then things are going to be faster, and thus have less of a chance of breakage.
The other trick is that Netflix has highly identifiable mailers that are all the same. The post office employees immediately know that the contents of these mailers are fragile. I would expect the post office to group similar items together. Especially if they're breakable. Gamefly decided that it wasn't worth the trouble since most post office employees aren't familiar with them, and they had too many disks stolen.
An option is for the post office to create a special DVD mailer that all companies can use. Allow some customization, but make it immediately apparent to the handlers that what's being shipped is a DVD. By standardizing the packaging they can give everyone the same quality of service while potentially allowing for more mail to be automatically sorted by a machine.
The USPS has their own police force. If they think you've been sending non time sensitive things through anyone but USPS then they're legally allowed to fine a company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In theory the Post Office gets regulated by congress because congress has granted it a monopoly on certain kinds of mail.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
Nice sig. So sad, yet so true.
Ahh, but you can sign those packets the GPS satellites are sending. The US military uses encrypted GPS to prevent precisely this kind of attack. It also allows them to use their selective denial system to cut off part of the world without affecting their own systems. Ask the Russians about what their latest trip into Georgia taught them about their reliance on GPS.
So, yes the US can fix it, and should. Every country that is working on their own GPS alternative should as well.
Software defined radio is changing the world. It's bringing the price to capture signals down to a $20 USB TV tuner, and the price to send signals to a few thousand dollars. Not bad for something that used to require millions in fab costs to build transmitter ASICS.
Except if you RTFA it's not that simple. These support companies are using the login credentials of their customers to download the updates for their customers. So, they're acting as the end user's agents when doing all this. They even have the paperwork to prove it.
This lawsuit would be the same as Red Hat suing Linux support companies because their techs used `yum update`. It only makes sense in a weird twisted world of copyright. Even then, it's mainly just corporate bullying. An injunction would mean they can't patch any client's systems. From a business standpoint they lose then and there. Just like the US did to Megaupload.
Ah, you've never had the joy of working with Cisco gear have you?
There are so many different models out there, with different firmware. Each firmware supporting a lightly different feature set. Going from telnet to SSH can be a pain, and if you're on an older router and want to use private keys then you're sol. Add to that the fun command syntax ('no shutdown' is the same as ifconfig up) and you have a winner.
People buy Cisco because it's well known with good but expensive support contracts. No one got fired for buying Cisco gear. In this case, the buyers probably had a support contract with the reseller instead of Cisco directly. If something didn't work then the reseller would fix it.
Also, don't forget all the talks about ghost shift work in china. It's the same factory and the same workers building the same product. If you offered them twice as much money you could still undercut the "official" devices and still make a tidy profit. Hell, you could probably even afford the QA checks.
--Who needs mod points anyways.
They pretty much admitted that Pacific Rim was deliberately made that way.
Why were the politicians so stupid? Why did they run that first drift with the weapons systems online? Why didn't the just put a nuke at the rift and blow every Kaiju that comes through to smithereens? Because, those are classic tropes of the genera.
The thing about that movie is that they were upfront in exactly what it was going to be. There was some romance, but the story was about fighting giant monsters, and it showed.
Oh, and if you're bored: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/PacificRim
If you've watched the gsm/gprs stuff that this guy and others have done you would know that it takes under a $1,000 dollars worth of equipment to emulate a cell tower. As soon as you do that, sending the binary SMS is easy. This enables a literal drive by attack. Furthermore, my guess is that cell providers which are using vulnerable SIM cards are also running vulnerable networks. The second link talks about some networks allowing anyone who knows how to send binary SMS.
My question is how easy is it to configure a rooted Android phone to block and warn me about these binary text messages.
It's like the difference between Microsoft's research division and the rest of that company. Totally different groups, with totally different goals. Aside from sharing some IP* they could be completely different companies.
My largest worry about this device is the lawyers. It's a neat concept, but they're going to patent it up the wazoo. Not the specific tech mind you, but the idea. Now no one can "Use an air pulse to provide haptic feedback" without getting their pants sued off by Disney.
*IP="Intellectual Property" (also known as a government granted monopoly on an idea, thought, or expression)