Exactly. To look for the weakness in any of these schemes look for the bit that is "secret" or "proprietary". This is getting to be a tiring trend. Maybe/.'s editors could do us a favor and research some of these stories before they post them.
The client generates a series of random numbers to use as an encryption key. This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient, the server uses it to encrypt any information it sends back to the client,
This is where the action is. The rest of the press release is smoke and mirrors.
You can chose not to pay the US Post Office if you send it by one of the commercial shippers like UPS or FedEx. How would a government infrastructure for email be different to that?
We're moving toward a situation of large private monopolies providing our hitherto "free" POP-abble email. Of course as private companies they are able to change their terms of service. And, as they no longer have to make themselves as attractive due to reduced competition we have to accept that we'll be paying for Spam in the near future.
All this is so that speculative investors can make a profit on the service that we all need.
Here's a crazy idea: divert some of our taxes from military expenditure, slap some more taxes on speculative investment, and divert that revenue into providing a free, POP3 accesible , low memory account for every citizen.
Don't like that idea? Don't like government providing public goods? Want to let the "Market" sort things out with its sweaty invisible hand?
Then don't complain about Yahoo charging, that's exactly what's happening.
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 2
the behavior of protein molecules of known sequence is not ab initio predictable in practice for sequences of any useful length.
Exactly. Even if one is able to use a method like threading, or multiple-alignment to find similarities or shared motifs the behaviour of the protein depends upon the complement of other molecules in its vicinity. If anything the whole deal is much closer to an analog system than a digital one.
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Surely both examples you give are excellent analogies of each other.Viruses parasitically use the machinery of their hosts to spread themselves... and so do computer viruses (well, worms at least.)
Computer viruses do not physically dis-assemble the host computer (or its OS), chopping it up into pieces that are re-assembled to from new infections computer viruses. A big difference.
And DNA is a digital series of instructions that are interpreted to express something... and so is computer code.
Digital series indeed!! DNA is more like a recipe as S.J.Gould and others never tire of pointing out (evidently for a good reason). If it were a program it would be the buggiest, crappiest program that had been maintained for years with different compatability layers added to it. If it were a program it would be as though COBOL had been kept and had new libraries added to it, some of which worked sort-of, and others were completely b0rken.
The point of this is that the analogies/metaphors/comparisons are not really useful beyond a simple level. Interesting analogies or metaphors are ones that reveal _unexpected_ details about the analogised subject. The code/DNA one does not. It is just two cool things lumped together with superficial similarity.
What "usability" is added by PGP? I'm actually interested having never used anything except commandline PGPi on Linux and GPG. I never found any usability problems with it once I understood what the ideas behind it were (took about a day of reading as I had absolutely no clue about encryption).
Ah, thanks for the repsonse and an answer to my question as opposed to the weird moderation of my question as a "Troll". I'd never used the Windows version and had only ever used PGP and GPG on linux. I had several problems using later versions of keys generated by PGP with GPG and wondered if there were something like "better" or other encryption algorithms included with PGP. What is it that needs to be interfaced with exchange? I was doing everything through Emacs and it was very nice and easy. Cheers, Crush
specifically what does it add over GPG? Would it not be better for GPG if PGP were to die?
I actually have no objections to it being presevered and developed, especially if it were Free Software, what I'm asking for is reasons for it to be preseved from the point of view of Free Software advocates.
I appreciate your response. I ask the question because I have been both a hard-ass looking for and rooting out plagiarism and also a "cheaters will screw themselves in the long run" advocate. In the latter role I received teaching awards. I'm not saying that I didn't catch a few people who were egregious, it's just that I didn't make it a priority. I consider the quality of my lectures to have been the same in both situations (actually my first award came as a newbie TA and the next year when I was cracking down I got much lower evaluations), so I suspect (anecdotally of course) that there is a built-in disincentive for TAs and professors to discourage plagiarism.
As it stands right now plagiarism is a good risk in many universities. The worst punishments are an automatic F for the course.
"I will give you an honest and earnest presentation of my knowledge, and you will give me an honest and earnest demonstration of your mastery of that knowledge." It's a relationship of trust. Simple as that. I think a logical corollary of that contract is "and I won't run your work through an automated cheating detector, and you won't run my lectures through an automated bullshit detector."
The fact that you are advocating that TAs should do something as mistrustful and cynical as comparing notebooks across labs and against texts indicates that you are not living up to the trust reposed in you by the innocent students when they submit their work to you. Hell, the idea that you should be checking their work at all is a breaching of the sacred relationship between teacher and taught!
I have also taught at high-school level and seen lots of cheating there. My partner also teaches at university level and has ensured that topics for papers are sufficienlty unique that there are no off-the-shelf solutions. Guess what? When one is marking many, many papers and trying to understand the half-assed, garbled grammar and inchoate ideas it becomes longer and harder to catch cheaters. However with a nice little client that I scripted for her she can perform google and dogpile searches on selected phrases from suspiciously well-written or awkward papers.
Please note: those are only the papers that attract her attention. Most of those display rampant, deliberate cut-n-paste. The cheaters are wasting her time which should be going into teaching the kids that are trying. She and her colleagues are lobbying the university for mandatory electronic submission of assignments and easy automated searching. Otherwise the honest kids get screwed both ways: their profs and TAs waste time proving that some jerk is cheating, and/or other cheaters get away with it and devalue the grade that the honest kid receives.
But they didn't know. Surely you are not going to punish them for that? I think that they should be given a chance to rewrite the website. Furthermore I suggest that your litigious suggestion would destroy the delicate fabric of honor and trust that exists between a university professor and his automated cheating detection system. It would be much better to sit down and work out what we feel about the situation and explain to them how it hurts others.
Thank you. I have been a TA at a US university and at a British university and I am afraid that TA'ing undergraduate humanities courses was painful. I would very quickly and easily identify candidates because they would:
Move between eloquence and complete gibberish
Switch tense between paragraphs
Produce ideas which were complex and displayed a deep knowledge of the field
Have a dearth of attribution in the paper
Catching them was as easy as falling off a log. I would follow up the initial noting of a suspicious paper with a couple of different web searches. It was rare that some dumbass hadn't taken massive chunks of someone else's work and tried to pass if off as his/her own.
I am very happy that I caught these people whom I would otherwise have declared to the University were the equivalent of the majority of my students who were working damn hard to make their grades. Some people that were busting their balls were only making C's and if some cheating, dishonest little swine was able to get the same or superior mark by lying then that would be wrong.
I don't know if you've read some of the comments further down the page from "tiri" et al, but you may be disheartened if you do.
I've received the university's highest teaching prize for grad students, so I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do.
Very probably you are, so don't take the following the wrong way: Is that a prize awarded on the basis of student evaluations? How does the mean and mode of grade-distributions of instructors that receive this prize measure up to that of people that do not?
Academic integrity ought to be assumed, unless explicitly demonstrated otherwise. To screen all work for dishonesty presumes a probability of guilt. And while that may in fact be the reality (that is, probably, someone did cheat) you can't run a classroom that way. At least not a classroom where you hope to teach by establishing rapport, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility.
Given that there has been a high level of plagiarism revealed wherever automated detection has been employed I think that to not screen work is to facilitate corruption. Ultimately I believe that the choice ought to lie with the students taking the class. They should be given a majority vote as to whether or not automated detection is employed. Then natural selection will go to work on Universities and if the majority are cheaters we get a cheater society.
All the above is irrelevant to the specific problems of the "turnitin" system which sounds like it has IP issues that make it unusable.
In spite of the problems I have with the idea of plagiarism-hunting by faculty and administration (a pastime that seems rampant on my campus), I do find that there are pedagogically and ethically defensible uses of sites such as this. For example, I have submitted papers that I thought were plagiarized when I could not locate the original source material in a reasonable period of time. In all but one case, the papers were plagiarized in the technical sense of the word. Instead of treating this discovery as cause to call out the plagiarism police and begin formal proceedings, I began from the premise that the student did not intentionally plagiarize
Well, that sounds all fine'n'dandy and liberal of you, but it means that you are contributing to the encouragement of plagiarism. Basically you are setting up an incentive structure for cheating: students know that it is worth taking a risk because they won't always be caught, and if they are caught then all they have to do is to listen to your spiel about citation and sources and do a re-write.
What does this "liberal" policy of yours do to students that have worked hard and honestly in the competitive system that is undergraduate education? I'll spell it out for you: it cheats them. You are colluding with dis-honest reprobates and calling it pedagogy.
that they were unable to use source material correctly because they didn't know how Puh-leeze! Are you by any chance one of the TA's that let George W. Bush get through college? People like you are what make a university education more worthless than a high-school education of 20 years ago.
Isn't that what the colonists said when they arrived in the "New World"? Obviously you "bio-hackers" don't take the bio part very seriously. Do some due diligence the next time you're organizing something...please.
Perhaps, perhaps. At least we both enjoy it in our preferred versions and they are powerful enough to stimulate strong emotions in us both! Each to his own! Cheers crush
original version left some things to your imagination, not spoonfeeding and helping you to see Deckard as a replicant.
No, no no!! The original version had an intrusive irritating voice-over that spoon-fed the audience and ruined the mystery and ambience of the story. It also left out the "unicorn scene" which/might/ have indicated that Deckard was a replicant.
As far as being JAFHAF it is still miles better in atmosphere than most of the genre, mainly due to the great Vangelis soundtrack.....but also due to the wonderful cinematography. I can't get enough of the "do you like our owl?" scene with the huge bars of sunlight slanting into the massive, almost Mayan room.
He obviously doesn't address what you point out, but I think the argument against the VM-ized version is valid. The benefits of Free Software obviously do not apply when the underlying system is closed.
On the other hand some people will tell you that a small in-house team of hire'n'fire developers can make better progress on some things (like Intel's C compiler) than "Open Source" projects. Contrary to the mantra that "Open" development is always better for performance issues the advantage of Free Software have to do with Freedom: improved performance is a frequent desirable epiphenomenon.
I wonder if Linux still suffers the horrible performance issues when running natively verses when running on top of a VM (or atleast, the issues pointed out in the article).
The same general problem would still occur. However LPARed S/390 definitely doesn't suffer the same performance hits as you would expect.
Ps: Before anyone flames me I consider Free Software to be wonderful and desirable, but I don't believe that it is always more efficient or accurate or perfect as a result of that development process: it/can/ be, but it is not an immutable outcome
OK, I get your point. I wasn't accusing you of doing any bashing mate! I just thought that you were saying that you had tested in the exact situation that Khan is describing: VM hosting as opposed to LPARs. I've used LPAR'ed Red Hat on S/390 for FP number crunching and found it to be great. But, I didn't do extensive testing or comparisons with Enterprise boxes.
Yeah, but I think the difference is that IBM is suggesting co-ordinating a whole load of different images of Linux using their z/VM, whereas Sun is talking about using some form of SMP.
Linux on mainframes is still running on top of a properitery VM. This kills the whole Free Software argument for using Linux.
I appreciate most of what you're saying, but it's just not true that GNU/Linux is running on top of a VM on mainframes. Yes, that is the case that Khan is criticising here, but there is the option of running GNU/Linux natively without the VM. This had already been addressed by Caiman, Think Blue, SuSE, LinuxKorea and others and the installation on big iron is explicitly discussed in IBM's RedBook on the subject.
It seems to me that all that Khan is done has to throw into question the idea that "high availability" is not a problem with a "server farm in a box". But this was not explicitly argued as being the major advantage for the multiple image VM-hosting by IBM. They argued that it allowed ease of administration.
You are talking about a different deployment than the one that is being attacked in the Sun article. What the latter is discussing are multiple images of Linux being hosted on top of a VM.
There is no reason why you should have been doing that in your case: you should have dispensed with the VM layer and just used Linux "native".
Basically the article is Sun bashing (perhaps righlty or wrongly, I don't know) the concept of "server farm in a box", which is completely different from your task!
Unfortunately it's not on line, but you can check out a pretty damning set of reviews of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" in Scientific American, January 2002. Those reviews not only back up what you say but also make very strong claims that he has extensively mis-interpreted the evidence and displays a wide-ranging lack of expertise. I concur completely with your suspicions about the rules of debate.
Slashdot Mirror
is incorrect. (10x+6)/(10x+4) != 1
Exactly. To look for the weakness in any of these schemes look for the bit that is "secret" or "proprietary". This is getting to be a tiring trend. Maybe /.'s editors could do us a favor and research some of these stories before they post them.
You can chose not to pay the US Post Office if you send it by one of the commercial shippers like UPS or FedEx. How would a government infrastructure for email be different to that?
We're moving toward a situation of large private monopolies providing our hitherto "free" POP-abble email. Of course as private companies they are able to change their terms of service. And, as they no longer have to make themselves as attractive due to reduced competition we have to accept that we'll be paying for Spam in the near future.
All this is so that speculative investors can make a profit on the service that we all need.
Here's a crazy idea: divert some of our taxes from military expenditure, slap some more taxes on speculative investment, and divert that revenue into providing a free, POP3 accesible , low memory account for every citizen.
Don't like that idea? Don't like government providing public goods? Want to let the "Market" sort things out with its sweaty invisible hand?
Then don't complain about Yahoo charging, that's exactly what's happening.
the behavior of protein molecules of known sequence is not ab initio predictable in practice for sequences of any useful length.
Exactly. Even if one is able to use a method like threading, or multiple-alignment to find similarities or shared motifs the behaviour of the protein depends upon the complement of other molecules in its vicinity. If anything the whole deal is much closer to an analog system than a digital one.
Surely both examples you give are excellent analogies of each other.Viruses parasitically use the machinery of their hosts to spread themselves... and so do computer viruses (well, worms at least.)
Computer viruses do not physically dis-assemble the host computer (or its OS), chopping it up into pieces that are re-assembled to from new infections computer viruses. A big difference.
And DNA is a digital series of instructions that are interpreted to express something... and so is computer code.
Digital series indeed!! DNA is more like a recipe as S.J.Gould and others never tire of pointing out (evidently for a good reason). If it were a program it would be the buggiest, crappiest program that had been maintained for years with different compatability layers added to it. If it were a program it would be as though COBOL had been kept and had new libraries added to it, some of which worked sort-of, and others were completely b0rken.
The point of this is that the analogies/metaphors/comparisons are not really useful beyond a simple level. Interesting analogies or metaphors are ones that reveal _unexpected_ details about the analogised subject. The code/DNA one does not. It is just two cool things lumped together with superficial similarity.
What "usability" is added by PGP? I'm actually interested having never used anything except commandline PGPi on Linux and GPG. I never found any usability problems with it once I understood what the ideas behind it were (took about a day of reading as I had absolutely no clue about encryption).
Ah, thanks for the repsonse and an answer to my question as opposed to the weird moderation of my question as a "Troll". I'd never used the Windows version and had only ever used PGP and GPG on linux. I had several problems using later versions of keys generated by PGP with GPG and wondered if there were something like "better" or other encryption algorithms included with PGP. What is it that needs to be interfaced with exchange? I was doing everything through Emacs and it was very nice and easy.
Cheers,
Crush
I actually have no objections to it being presevered and developed, especially if it were Free Software, what I'm asking for is reasons for it to be preseved from the point of view of Free Software advocates.
As it stands right now plagiarism is a good risk in many universities. The worst punishments are an automatic F for the course.
"I will give you an honest and earnest presentation of my knowledge, and you will give me an honest and earnest demonstration of your mastery of that knowledge." It's a relationship of trust. Simple as that. I think a logical corollary of that contract is "and I won't run your work through an automated cheating detector, and you won't run my lectures through an automated bullshit detector."
The fact that you are advocating that TAs should do something as mistrustful and cynical as comparing notebooks across labs and against texts indicates that you are not living up to the trust reposed in you by the innocent students when they submit their work to you. Hell, the idea that you should be checking their work at all is a breaching of the sacred relationship between teacher and taught!
I have also taught at high-school level and seen lots of cheating there. My partner also teaches at university level and has ensured that topics for papers are sufficienlty unique that there are no off-the-shelf solutions. Guess what? When one is marking many, many papers and trying to understand the half-assed, garbled grammar and inchoate ideas it becomes longer and harder to catch cheaters. However with a nice little client that I scripted for her she can perform google and dogpile searches on selected phrases from suspiciously well-written or awkward papers.
Please note: those are only the papers that attract her attention. Most of those display rampant, deliberate cut-n-paste. The cheaters are wasting her time which should be going into teaching the kids that are trying. She and her colleagues are lobbying the university for mandatory electronic submission of assignments and easy automated searching. Otherwise the honest kids get screwed both ways: their profs and TAs waste time proving that some jerk is cheating, and/or other cheaters get away with it and devalue the grade that the honest kid receives.
But they didn't know. Surely you are not going to punish them for that? I think that they should be given a chance to rewrite the website.
Furthermore I suggest that your litigious suggestion would destroy the delicate fabric of honor and trust that exists between a university professor and his automated cheating detection system.
It would be much better to sit down and work out what we feel about the situation and explain to them how it hurts others.
Thank you. I have been a TA at a US university and at a British university and I am afraid that TA'ing undergraduate humanities courses was painful. I would very quickly and easily identify candidates because they would:
Catching them was as easy as falling off a log. I would follow up the initial noting of a suspicious paper with a couple of different web searches. It was rare that some dumbass hadn't taken massive chunks of someone else's work and tried to pass if off as his/her own.
I am very happy that I caught these people whom I would otherwise have declared to the University were the equivalent of the majority of my students who were working damn hard to make their grades. Some people that were busting their balls were only making C's and if some cheating, dishonest little swine was able to get the same or superior mark by lying then that would be wrong.
I don't know if you've read some of the comments further down the page from "tiri" et al, but you may be disheartened if you do.
I've received the university's highest teaching prize for grad students, so I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do.
Very probably you are, so don't take the following the wrong way: Is that a prize awarded on the basis of student evaluations? How does the mean and mode of grade-distributions of instructors that receive this prize measure up to that of people that do not?
Academic integrity ought to be assumed, unless explicitly demonstrated otherwise. To screen all work for dishonesty presumes a probability of guilt. And while that may in fact be the reality (that is, probably, someone did cheat) you can't run a classroom that way. At least not a classroom where you hope to teach by establishing rapport, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility.
Given that there has been a high level of plagiarism revealed wherever automated detection has been employed I think that to not screen work is to facilitate corruption. Ultimately I believe that the choice ought to lie with the students taking the class. They should be given a majority vote as to whether or not automated detection is employed. Then natural selection will go to work on Universities and if the majority are cheaters we get a cheater society.
All the above is irrelevant to the specific problems of the "turnitin" system which sounds like it has IP issues that make it unusable.
In spite of the problems I have with the idea of plagiarism-hunting by faculty and administration (a pastime that seems rampant on my campus), I do find that there are pedagogically and ethically defensible uses of sites such as this. For example, I have submitted papers that I thought were plagiarized when I could not locate the original source material in a reasonable period of time. In all but one case, the papers were plagiarized in the technical sense of the word. Instead of treating this discovery as cause to call out the plagiarism police and begin formal proceedings, I began from the premise that the student did not intentionally plagiarize
Well, that sounds all fine'n'dandy and liberal of you, but it means that you are contributing to the encouragement of plagiarism.
Basically you are setting up an incentive structure for cheating: students know that it is worth taking a risk because they won't always be caught, and if they are caught then all they have to do is to listen to your spiel about citation and sources and do a re-write.
What does this "liberal" policy of yours do to students that have worked hard and honestly in the competitive system that is undergraduate education? I'll spell it out for you: it cheats them. You are colluding with dis-honest reprobates and calling it pedagogy.
that they were unable to use source material correctly because they didn't know how
Puh-leeze! Are you by any chance one of the TA's that let George W. Bush get through college? People like you are what make a university education more worthless than a high-school education of 20 years ago.
Isn't that what the colonists said when they arrived in the "New World"? Obviously you "bio-hackers" don't take the bio part very seriously. Do some due diligence the next time you're organizing something...please.
Perhaps, perhaps. At least we both enjoy it in our preferred versions and they are powerful enough to stimulate strong emotions in us both! Each to his own!
Cheers
crush
original version left some things to your imagination, not spoonfeeding and helping you to see Deckard as a replicant.
No, no no!! The original version had an intrusive irritating voice-over that spoon-fed the audience and ruined the mystery and ambience of the story. It also left out the "unicorn scene" which /might/ have indicated that Deckard was a replicant.
As far as being JAFHAF it is still miles better in atmosphere than most of the genre, mainly due to the great Vangelis soundtrack.....but also due to the wonderful cinematography. I can't get enough of the "do you like our owl?" scene with the huge bars of sunlight slanting into the massive, almost Mayan room.
- Do you realize that these are not games that will run on Linux?
- Do you realize that the site is mostly targetted towards Windows users?
- Do you realize that the site makes an effort to link to where you can BUY the games?
- Do you realize that many of these games cannot be bought because they failed in the marketing/distribution wars?
Either I've fallen for a troll, or else you are not thinking very clearlyHe obviously doesn't address what you point out, but I think the argument against the VM-ized version is valid. The benefits of Free Software obviously do not apply when the underlying system is closed.
On the other hand some people will tell you that a small in-house team of hire'n'fire developers can make better progress on some things (like Intel's C compiler) than "Open Source" projects. Contrary to the mantra that "Open" development is always better for performance issues the advantage of Free Software have to do with Freedom: improved performance is a frequent desirable epiphenomenon.
I wonder if Linux still suffers the horrible performance issues when running natively verses when running on top of a VM (or atleast, the issues pointed out in the article).
The same general problem would still occur. However LPARed S/390 definitely doesn't suffer the same performance hits as you would expect.
Ps: Before anyone flames me I consider Free Software to be wonderful and desirable, but I don't believe that it is always more efficient or accurate or perfect as a result of that development process: it /can/ be, but it is not an immutable outcome
OK, I get your point. I wasn't accusing you of doing any bashing mate! I just thought that you were saying that you had tested in the exact situation that Khan is describing: VM hosting as opposed to LPARs. I've used LPAR'ed Red Hat on S/390 for FP number crunching and found it to be great. But, I didn't do extensive testing or comparisons with Enterprise boxes.
Yeah, but I think the difference is that IBM is suggesting co-ordinating a whole load of different images of Linux using their z/VM, whereas Sun is talking about using some form of SMP.
Linux on mainframes is still running on top of a properitery VM. This kills the whole Free Software argument for using Linux.
I appreciate most of what you're saying, but it's just not true that GNU/Linux is running on top of a VM on mainframes. Yes, that is the case that Khan is criticising here, but there is the option of running GNU/Linux natively without the VM. This had already been addressed by Caiman, Think Blue, SuSE, LinuxKorea and others and the installation on big iron is explicitly discussed in IBM's RedBook on the subject.
It seems to me that all that Khan is done has to throw into question the idea that "high availability" is not a problem with a "server farm in a box". But this was not explicitly argued as being the major advantage for the multiple image VM-hosting by IBM. They argued that it allowed ease of administration.
You are talking about a different deployment than the one that is being attacked in the Sun article. What the latter is discussing are multiple images of Linux being hosted on top of a VM.
There is no reason why you should have been doing that in your case: you should have dispensed with the VM layer and just used Linux "native".
Basically the article is Sun bashing (perhaps righlty or wrongly, I don't know) the concept of "server farm in a box", which is completely different from your task!
Unfortunately it's not on line, but you can check out a pretty damning set of reviews of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" in Scientific American, January 2002. Those reviews not only back up what you say but also make very strong claims that he has extensively mis-interpreted the evidence and displays a wide-ranging lack of expertise.
I concur completely with your suspicions about the rules of debate.