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EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

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Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#121

Post by sireat »

mkl wrote: post #72
sireat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a lector at a University and would never force my students to install something that is so privacy invading as Proctorio on student's own computers. If you absolutely need this type of monitoring it should be done at some sort of testing center on cleanly imaged computers. I could see it being done for something absolutely crucial such as a bar exam. Proctorio and its ilk should not be used for simple mid-terms…

If you have a testing centre you don't need this kind of software, and if your students are scattered across the world due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, you can't have a testing centre for them. I consider invigilation absolutely crucial in a professional engineering degree in mid-terms and finals (engineers are more likely to hurt more people than lawyers). I don't think this kind of software is a crutch for the…

We will have to agree to disagree then. The whole term invigilation is a bit dystopian.

It is a huge slippery slope because this privacy invasive software ends up being used for such mundane things like weekly quizzes.

Do you really want to live in the future/present where we have to submit ourselves to daily monitoring?

How about adding some monitoring via sensors of performance boosting substances?

My answer is that such monitoring software should be only used under exceptional circumstances on neutral computers - my example was a testing center with insufficient human supervision.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#122

Post by necovek »

mkl wrote: post #85
necovek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which does not make tracking everyone a solution to the problem of cheating in exams. Higher level education is largely voluntary, and it's up to the person taking it up to decide what they gain from it. If they are only in it for a diploma, they'd get there one way or another. To me, focusing on finding "cheaters" makes education a competition. I never felt cheaters got anything over me in my studies, and I never fe…

When your institution's reputation is at risk, you want to prevent it. Honest students don't get a lesser grade; that's not the problem. If the cheaters want to cheat their way through life, that's their problem. My problem is to make sure the rest of my students end up with a well-respected degree. I.e. the problem is being solved for the honest students, the ones I want to spend my time on.

I get what you are getting at, but I'd rephrase it as "cheaters should remain a minority". When we phrase it like that, a number of other solutions might pop up to discourage cheaters from enrolling in the first place (eg. lots of custom projects through which students learn anyway, potentially invalidating the need for a final exam too).

And suddenly, privacy invasion gets off the table quickly (as soon as you are not aiming for 100% non-cheaters, the cost becomes obviously too high for everybody else).

As far as reputation, I'd rather see schools focus on the successful students, which is somewhat done with all those research-paper-grading systems (not a perfect system by any means because of gamification, but at least idea in the right direction), but mostly done with bragging about scientific break-throughts to come out of their students and staff.

Still, what is the purpose of a reputation or "well-respected degree"? The goal should be knowledge and applicability of that knowledge to actual problems in life (known as "jobs"): it's not like anyone accepts any graduate without interviewing them first, which is to say that nobody trusts any school to have done a proper job of evaluating them. Most of those schools don't trust themselves, so they hold interviews for post-graduate studies too! :D

Nobody looks at the "lemons" coming out of a school to consider it a bad school (I am sure you can find plenty from "top" universities too), but on the successful ones. Do the successful ones change with more cheaters at all? (Sure, there is a turning point, but catching all of them is meaningless)

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#123

Post by xtracto »

Proctorio did a sort of IAMA two years ago in reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/augdmo/ask_proctorio_a...

As a technologist I've worked in "online bullet loans", payments and other controversial verticals but for the life of me , I would never work in such a dirty business (as Proctorio). I'd rather tell people I work in porn-tech (where people are literally f*d) than this asinine proctoring systems.

Just... no.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#124

Post by jbarberu »

geoduck14 wrote: post #50
initplus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your software is ethical, why smear your own name by bringing a spurious lawsuit against a singled out individual like this? There are real concerns around privacy with software like this - what will happen if some criminal finds an exploit in Proctorio's software? This kind of monitoring software is often designed to be hard to detect or bypass, and installs itself in ways that are challenging to remove. Developm…

Isn't Dominion suing Ted Cruz?

As far as I know they're suing Fox News, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for defamation.

Not sure what your point is, but the difference between "dead president Hugo Chavez flipped votes for Biden" vs "Here is how the software works, I don't think it's right" is quite important.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#125

Post by koonsolo »

ayewo wrote: post #86
koonsolo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and because it's in US.

Small correction: he’s being sued (by a US company) in Canada, under a new Canadian law.

Aha, that might change it indeed. Do they have the "loser pays the costs" policy or not?

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#126

Post by vanviegen »

DocTomoe wrote: post #89
koonsolo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is a consequence of the Covid pandemic, where such a thing is not allowed at the moment.

The software - problematic as it is - is older than the pandemic. Also, maybe if you cannot reliably proctor exams, the solution should not be to use a highly-invasive, potentially problem-causing software, but to cancel the exams and the academic year until the pandemic is over. After all, if you cannot give exams, students also were not able to take part in studies to the same extend as before (e.g. library and/or…

The software is indeed older than Covid, but its common usage by widely respected schools is not.

So your preferred solution would be to just stop all education for the duration of the pandemic? Although online education sucks, I'm not sure if most students would agree with you.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#127

Post by mkl »

sireat wrote: post #121
mkl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a testing centre you don't need this kind of software, and if your students are scattered across the world due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, you can't have a testing centre for them. I consider invigilation absolutely crucial in a professional engineering degree in mid-terms and finals (engineers are more likely to hurt more people than lawyers). I don't think this kind of software is a crutch for the…

We will have to agree to disagree then. The whole term invigilation is a bit dystopian. It is a huge slippery slope because this privacy invasive software ends up being used for such mundane things like weekly quizzes. Do you really want to live in the future/present where we have to submit ourselves to daily monitoring? How about adding some monitoring via sensors of performance boosting substances? My answer is tha…

I think you're extrapolating way too far, and hence your arguments aren't hitting the mark. The total amount of invigilation in the entirety of each course I'm involved in is 3-5 hours. This has been the case for many decades. This year, for some students, it is aided by software, due to the fact that they're unavoidably thousands of kilometres away. It is not a slippery slope, and none of your dystopian ideas seem like they could result from it.

This kind of software does not monitor computer use outside of the test. It monitors the student during the test, like a human invigilator (yes, it's recorded, so not identical). During the test, the student is only working on the test, which is not private or secret. When the test is finished, the software exits.

I don't see how you could have the resources for an infrequently used testing centre, but not enough to pay one person for an hour or two. That is not what this kind of software is useful for.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#128

Post by mkl »

moistbar wrote: post #117
mkl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this may well be the only year that course is offered online. They are not getting a bad deal out of it. The fully new online courses are first year, and the expectation is that students will come to study in person for the remaining years of their degree. The other course I'm talking about is second year, but those 10 students can't get into the country at present -…

> The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this may well be the only year that course is offered online. So instead you'd rather waste money on a barely-functional piece of software that actively invades your students' privacy?

It seems to function just fine (I'm not talking about Proctorio), and it doesn't invade privacy any more than the Zoom-based tutorials, which is barely at all. It is also better than any other alternative I know of, many of which have been tried already and found wanting. Privacy is not a god to whom all things must be sacrificed. All education involves losing a little privacy (in person people will know what you look like, where you're from, and many other things that are hidden for remote students; really they have more privacy than any others), and the fact that software is involved doesn't suddenly make things worse.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#129

Post by wheelinsupial »

distances wrote: post #110
devenblake wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I personally chose not to go to college (I'm graduating HS this year) because of things like Proctorio and Zoom becoming more common.

Honestly, it's fine to not choose higher education but IMHO use of surveillance methods should affect where you apply, not whether you apply.

It’s possible that some institutions are dictating blanket use of software, but where I am studying that’s not the case.

It’s basically up to the instructor on how to run the class.

Some require proctorio, some are on Zoom with lots of TAs to watch the screen, some issue an exam on your own time where the browser monitors what you do / visit, and others just offer take home projects.

Re: EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

#130

Post by oxylibrium »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #88
sireat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a lector at a University and would never force my students to install something that is so privacy invading as Proctorio on student's own computers. If you absolutely need this type of monitoring it should be done at some sort of testing center on cleanly imaged computers. I could see it being done for something absolutely crucial such as a bar exam. Proctorio and its ilk should not be used for simple mid-terms…

I hope that some security researchers investigate this software more closely and at the same time suspect that this lawsuit is primarily intended to scare away people from doing precisely that.

"Security researcher" here: Proctorio's "zero-knowledge encryption" claims were in name only, pretty much.

TL;DR Canvas and Moodle use incrementing integers for both user ID and quiz ID. Proctorio's "zero-knowledge encryption" has a shared key derived from the two IDs; they store the user ID, so that's effectively a single PIN. With their older settings, you can brute force a quiz ID in a couple hours at most.

They increased the time cost for the brute force to now take days/weeks, but that's still peanuts and the attack scales really well, because most exams take place at the same time (students start/end at similar times), so once you crack the quiz ID for one record, that's tens-hundreds of records; and since IDs are just increasing numbers, once you find the lower bound, working your way upwards is much easier.

They also added an option for universities to use PGP keys - but that involves training faculty, or manual setup.

For more details, here's my blog article: https://proctor.ninja/wave-rake-proctorio

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