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Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

alistair.blog

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Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#11

Post by thomastay »

Wow that's amazing! The best part is that you managed to get their entire database, that must have taken a lot of work. How did that burner account thing work?

My favorite experience with "hacking" in school involves wifi. My school had free wifi, but you had to log in with your student password. Well, the login step involved a GET request in which the password was sent in plain text as a URL parameter... so if you had your friend's laptop, it was a simple matter of looking at his browser history to see his password!

Never did anything with it, but always wondered what someone seriously motivated could have done with it

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#12

Post by aabbccsmith »

thomastay wrote: post #11

Wow that's amazing! The best part is that you managed to get their entire database, that must have taken a lot of work. How did that burner account thing work? My favorite experience with "hacking" in school involves wifi. My school had free wifi, but you had to log in with your student password. Well, the login step involved a GET request in which the password was sent in plain text as a URL parameter... so if you h…

Burner account was really just a friend of ours, it wasn't something you could just sign up for and join a class. The teacher had to create your user account for you and give you a login, and assign you to a class.

He ended up getting his account reset a lot of times, but it was funny having him answer the entire dataset of questions in literally about 1m30s...

School security always seems to be a funny weak point, it seems common that a school's budget never seems to reach the IT department... and yet everybody is shocked when a vuln is discovered like that :p

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#13

Post by cercatrova »

Awesome story, and good response by Hegarty. It reminds me of something similar (but with an opposite response), where an intern who worked at Replit built a basic repl site (not even a clone) but was threatened by the CEO that he'd be sued.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#14

Post by aabbccsmith »

alexarena wrote: post #7

Honestly kind of impressed that the HegartyMaths guy independently found this and then handled it without (explicitly) threatening to sue you.

They were champs! We even connected on LinkedIn with Colin afterwards and he actually offered us summer work but that fell through unfortunately.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#15

Post by cercatrova »

mynegation wrote: post #6

Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves. I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to…

Heh, I still use game trainers for games that have annoying grinds. The Assassin's Creed games come to mind. There is no way I'm spending 150 hours on grinding just to progress through a level gated region of the map.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#16

Post by aabbccsmith »

mynegation wrote: post #6

Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves. I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to…

That's a good point, you're definitely on to something I think. Reversing classes at a young age would be super engaging for kids as it's "not something you're supposed to do"

My mother is a teacher for ages 7-11 and I help out with her IT curricula sometimes. I think I might do some reversing with her next time I am with them!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#17

Post by shitcoder »

University was my playground for this sort of this sort of thing (because my high school was all paper). One subject used an Online Platform called Wiley which stored the answer in the page, a weekend writing up the script to solve it, fake a realistic completed percentage and take a realistic amount of time to solve. I used a greasemonkey script, just like this post as well!

Countless subjects also distributed questions and answers from Textbooks in a PDF format. One OCR run later and a script to clean text I had a database of questions and answers I could share with my friends to practice for the exam (which helpfully used the exact same questions). https://www.rytek.me/archive/projects/epmquiz-webapp/

I never did flex my cheating like you did haha for fear of the repercussions.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#19

Post by primitivesuave »

This is a really heartwarming tale of having good intentions and assuming it of others. There was a similar situation in my high school days where someone's college path to computer science was taken away for something even less malevolent than described in this post, he ended up becoming a pretty wild startup founder and a defrauder of millions.
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