EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by paulgb » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #339

batmaniam wrote: post #331

> This is a civil action seeking a declaratory judgment of noninfringement under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 106, 107, as well as injunctive relief and damages for misrepresentation of copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) Oh cool, so the EFF is gonna claim a false DMCA filing. I hope the student will be made whole financially after what he had to go through; app…

They need to go after the lawyers who signed off on the notice. That is the only way to get real accountability.

I agree, especially considering that filing a proper false DMCA takedown requires perjuring yourself:

> A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed.

In these situations, lawyers are renting out their credibility to bully people who can’t afford to go to court even if they’re in the right.

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

#412

Post by ModernMech » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #290

ModernMech wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my solution to this: 1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way that takes a lot of time and effort. 2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial differences will be lost in compilation. 3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has g…

These are awesome tips - thanks for sharing! Question: if (when) a student hands in an assignment without the periodic commits, what happens? How do you measure & set expectations for sufficient frequency of commits? (i.e., 1 single commit is too few, I assume that once a day is enough, but where's the threshold?) Thanks again for sharing - I'll be thinking about these for my own classes!

The first half of the class they are getting used to git and version control, so I don't enforce it too closely. Generally I decompose the assignments into a number of parts, and ask for at least one commit per part. e.g. Part 1, lay out your project directories. Part 2, stub out your functions. Part 3 implement function a, etc. My students are at a level where they need this granularity of direction. They get lost easily if assignments are too open-ended.

In terms of getting them to follow the commit guidelines, I give them a carrot and a stick. The carrot is, if they start N number of questions half way to the due date, they can get a penalty-free extension if they need more time to complete the assignment. This is to incentivize students to start early. I've found one of the biggest indicators of successful students is that they start assignments early. Students who start their assignment on the due date usually run into blocking issues (software not configured properly, computer not working right, network is down) that would be trivially overcome if they had started a day or two earlier. Students who have this habit quickly correct within an assignment or two.

The stick is by the midterm, I start requiring it more strictly by subtracting points for not following the guidelines. I think of it like a math assignment; if all you provide on a math exam is the solution, you'll get little to no credit for that. Showing your process is part of the work in math, and I treat it the same way in my classes.

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

#413

Post by crazygringo » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #337

crazygringo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless those ethical concerns directly impact your own team, then that's deeply unprofessional and unethical on your part, and you should reconsider your priorities. Who appointed you moral judge of others? You discriminating against candidates based on their moral views unrelated to their work is no different from discriminating based on religion or political party affiliation. It is legitimately within your purview…

> Unless those ethical concerns directly impact your own team Privacy issues impact every team. The threat of SLAPP lawsuits impacts every person willing to exercise their freedom of speech. If someone has worked for a company that does privacy invasive unethical things then it's reasonable to assume they'd be fine with doing privacy invasive unethical things somewhere else.

It's up to a company to set its own policies around privacy and ensure employees follow them.

The fact that an employee worked somewhere with different, or opposed, privacy policies, doesn't mean they're unable to follow yours, any more than the fact that working at a company that used a 4-space-width tab to indent code means they're unable to follow your guideline of two-space indents.

What does it matter if an employee would be fine doing what you consider to be privacy invasive things at another company? If they can do the job you expect them to, following your company's privacy policies, then that's all that matters. Otherwise, their personal moral compass is absolutely none of your business, and it's offensively paternalistic to suggest otherwise.

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

#414

Post by davrosthedalek » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #350

davrosthedalek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many courses, the grades are curved, so cheaters might really make the grades of honest students worse. While I am against these surveillance software, making sure that tests are fair is very hard, especially since everything is online now thanks to COVID.

I switched to online exams this year, no zoom, no special software, no checks at all. Grades were as usual. A couple of students cheated and were detected, all the others were very honest to the point that I wouldn't be myself if I were in their place. It can work, but you need to expect people to look up things.

One of my colleagues had an online exam. The exam was uploaded to chegg within minutes, by multiple people. Unfortunately, the tests were personalized, so the people could be identified.

I think cheating is quite common in the undergrad years, but gets less later.

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

#415

Post by hobs » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #345

hobs wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Superior Orders" has been a tried and tested excuse - it doesn't work. If your shitty software harms people you don't just get to throw up your arms and shrug.

There’s a huge gap between concentration camps and software that can be misused by administrators to wrongly punish students. If I had to feed my kids and had no other options, I wouldn’t shoot civilians, but I might well work for a software company where I had qualms about the output. In fact, it’s hard (probably impossible) to find any large company that doesn’t have some negative impact on the world.

Yes there is, just like there's a huge difference in the amount of disdain I would apply between those two activities.

Either way you dont get to eject your agency and involvement.

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

#416

Post by ModernMech » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #305

ModernMech wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my solution to this: 1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way that takes a lot of time and effort. 2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial differences will be lost in compilation. 3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has g…

It's great that you run your courses that way and I'm sure your students benefit from the experience. But is it really scalable for lower division courses at public universities with high student to instructor ratios?

I've used this technique over 3 semesters so far, with a total of 500 students. My team is myself, a TA, and 10-15 undergraduate graders. I try to triage grading with automated tests and a bunch of tools to give me an overview of how students are doing their work (looking at the first and last commit, commit frequency, etc.). The most work is in assessing the oral assignments, but I actually like doing those the most - I get to hear from my students in their own voice, which is nice during this isolated pandemic.

I think it could possibly scale to larger classes as long as the grading team scales with it. I'm not sure how public universities handle their grader allocations.

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

#417

Post by bregma » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #5

In case you don't know who Proctorio is: (like me) Apparently it's a supervision software that students are forced to install on their private computer and (as expected) it'll do its worst to invade your privacy and flag "suspicious" things, based on which the university might punish you. "Suspicious" here means wearing glasses [3] or looking around in the room or blinking too much [4] or having eye and/or skin color…

Here I was assuming it was a proctological mod for Factorio that modifies how inserters work. Reality is infinitely worse.

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

#418

Post by dang » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

All: this thread discusses two distinct lawsuits. Originally there were two threads, but I merged them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217). Sorry! Now they're blended and there's not enough energy to reverse the entropy, so you'll need to track which is which as you read the thread.

One is discussed in the OP. The other URL was https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883, but that doesn't give any background. There's more here:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...

Edit: It turns out there have been quite a few previous threads too. Pointers to those at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558.

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

#419

Post by rapnie » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

chmaynard wrote: post #403

varenc wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN post you mentioned now seems to be merged with this one. Very confusingly. This puts yours and other comments way out of context. Why do the mods/dang do this? Is it just to avoid multiple stories on the same topic on the home page? There’s got to be a better solution than this. At least providing some sort of log of changes would be helpful.

I've been encouraging HN to merge comments on duplicate posts for a long time. If that's what happened here, I applaud it.

dang has given an explanation on the merge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907466

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

#420

Post by necovek » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

jasonjayr wrote: post #74

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…

While I despise software like this and how high-stakes and petty it can be, keep in mind that it's in the institution's interests to not only provide a quality education, but to defend the value of their brand. You might have worked very hard for a diploma from University X, but if it was found that University X was handing out diplomas like candy to other students that were not as academically rigorous, it weakens t…

Ideally though, I've worked very hard to get certain knowledge. Diploma is a nice side-effect that's supposed to be a shorthand proof of it, but most companies in eg. software engineering would test candidates anyway, which is where knowledge helps, a degree, not so much.