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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

#471

Post by yowlingcat »

bena wrote: post #389
pessimizer wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why ask? All job interviews are weird mind games. My assumption when I'm asked why I left my last employer is that they're looking to second-guess my other answers based on what I say, or checking to see if I'm a disagreeable person who is willing to badmouth somebody generous enough to employ me. This is just taking the latter in the opposite direction.

There are plenty of reasons to move employers that doesn't involve saying that company you were working for is unethical. You could say that you've reached your ceiling and are looking for the next step up. That's a fair one. The company you are leaving may not be able to promote you. You're looking to work on new projects and your current company is just maintaining and/or adding features. That's also fair. > checki…

> No reasonable interviewer

Not convinced you have much space to declare some global idea of "reasonable interviewer" although you're more than welcome to complain about you personally not getting an offer from a company that clearly doesn't share your values. Your words say "badmouth" but that's just a way of hyperbolizing the ability to be vocally self-critical, which is necessary to learn lessons and achieve actual growth as a company.

Most startups have to do this, in my experience. You can't experiment without it. If you can't identify one weakness in your prior employer's model (whether ethically or functionally) or you'll get huffy about talking about that in an interview setting, why would I trust you with the responsibility of being in my organization? I'm going to get to those answers eventually. Why waste your time?

Looking back at history, do you think they called them the "traitorous eight" [1] because they were "reasonable interviewers" who would never "cast aspersions on a previous employer?" No. The history of this industry in the USA is based on vocal critique, competition and paper chasing in the pursuit of out-executing your competition.

If you don't have that culture of critique and open communication, it will be very hard to become #1 in whatever you're trying to do. Maybe that will never matter to you and the companies you join. Okay. If that works for you, great. But I'm a career startup person, so it does matter to me. I would literally /never/ have gotten anywhere without being able to earnestly note what my previous employers did right and wrong, and use those learnings in my next opportunity -- often very vocally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

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

#472

Post by Impassionata »

ska wrote: post #359
checkyoursudo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden everything had to change. One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the exp…

> decided to do an oral examination, This really is the best case, but as you note it was 8 students so quite manageable. It requires a little skill on the part of the examiner, but you can quickly find out how much material the student knows with much higher accuracy than other exam formats, in my opinion. One of the skills needed is to be able to make it conversational-feeling and reduce the anxiety of students. Yo…

This privileges confident speakers. (The same way written tests privilege confident readers, and standardized written tests privilege those who have the time and resources to study the standard.)

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

#473

Post by Nebasuke »

steelframe wrote: post #273

I conducted interviews at Google for about 8 years. I would often run across a fresh-from-college candidate who fell flat on their face, and all I could think was, "You've somehow managed to waste 4 years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars doing whatever it was you were doing for all that time." Some performed so poorly that I could only conclude that they cheated their way all the way through their progra…

I was a teaching assistant for multiple courses at a UK university. There was an introductory functional programming course, and two other functional programming based courses that followed up from that. The courses all had large practical programming exercises, and exams at the end.

However, every year there would be a good amount of students that did the follow up courses, that would not even know how to define the simplest function, use/define a list, etc, when I was trying to help them work on the practical exercises. These were weekly voluntary 4 hour labs in which we were available to help them and there was no performance pressure.

Somehow they always had a solution by the end of the deadline despite getting stuck during the labs. Of course this was often clearly copied. However, I was strongly discouraged by the lecturer to ever make an issue out of this, even when at one point a student handed in a copy with someone else's name on it. Basically the university barely dared to formally accuse students, and the lecturers also didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Most of these students ended up passing the module, and later on the whole course. It made me really sad/frustrated.

It did help setting expectations when performing interviews for software engineers at certain companies I worked in the past. I would ask a candidate to use their most comfortable programming language and would start with a simple version of a problem to get them in their comfort zone. Sadly, I would often have to simplify that multiple times, and ended up with candidates that could not write a single function, for loop, while loop, interface, class, or any other component of the language they actually wanted to use.

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

#474

Post by Nebasuke »

filoleg wrote: post #454
steelframe wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you won't be asked about memset or any C-related question unless you stated you were proficient in C and picked C as your interviewing language I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google.

>I might not ask about C-specific context, but if you don't know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes, you have no business being a SWE at Google I know quite a few engineers who passed Google interviews and work there, and they wouldn't know how to do this off the top of their head. I also interviewed with Google a few times, and not once was I asked a question like this. Also seems weird you would say that t…

Having performed interviews at Google for about 5 years, I don't think the needing to "know how to write a value to a sequence of bytes" is representative indeed. Many of current junior candidates use Java/Python in which it seems too niche a question to be a valuable signal for a hiring committee, particularly if it's for general SWE. Either you've dealt with this problem before and you know it, or you'll struggle.

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

#475

Post by fludlight »

Impassionata wrote: post #472
ska wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decided to do an oral examination, This really is the best case, but as you note it was 8 students so quite manageable. It requires a little skill on the part of the examiner, but you can quickly find out how much material the student knows with much higher accuracy than other exam formats, in my opinion. One of the skills needed is to be able to make it conversational-feeling and reduce the anxiety of students. Yo…

This privileges confident speakers. (The same way written tests privilege confident readers, and standardized written tests privilege those who have the time and resources to study the standard.)

Schools should be teaching kids to be confident speakers and readers from an early age.

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

#476

Post by phendrenad2 »

paulgb wrote: post #411
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think that being charged with perjury is a penalty too high for lawyers as a group to accept could be a consequence of simply filing a DNCA notice on behalf of a corporation. So I doubt it'll happen. If there were a special penalty, more of a slap on the wrist, but enough to inconvenience lawyers who sign off on these bogus claims, then I think that it would be, counterintuitively, more effective.

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

#477

Post by Turing_Machine »

professoretc wrote: post #190
Turing_Machine wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the answer. No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.

> actual work for the teaching staff It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100 job candidates every week, forever.

Yeah, I've done it. Both as a TA and as instructor of record.

The fact that the university doesn't provide adequate staffing is not an excuse for short-changing the students still further.

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

#478

Post by Turing_Machine »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #229
Turing_Machine wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the answer. No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.

Your answer indicates you don't really understand the intent nor desires of university profs. It's not to be the best version of the teachers you had in grade school. We can argue if this is THE best approach, but it is how the system is set up.

I taught at a Big 10 university for 12 years, both as a TA and as instructor of record.

So I think I actually understand the system pretty well.

Edit: teaching is part of the job, dude. It just is. If you asked the average taxpayer (you know, the ones who pay the base salary before grant money is taken into account) whether teaching is an important part of the job, what do you suppose they're going to say?

If you don't want to teach, you need to find a job that doesn't involve teaching. If you accept a job that requires teaching, you're morally obligated to provide the best teaching you can.

Or so I see it.

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

#479

Post by nomoneys »

liminalsunset wrote: post #208
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…

For what it's worth, at the school this happened at, UBC, Proctorio is now effectively banned, along with other similar "algorithmic" proctoring tools, and exams are no longer allowed to use it with some exceptions. They've moved to Lockdown Browser without the recording, and to Zoom proctoring. In my opinion, neither are particularly effective measures against cheating, and I'm sure they are trivially bypassable. Th…

Currently a student where this is happening as well and can share a bit about it. In my classes (mostly CS and math), I never used Proctorio as a lot of my professors seem to share concerns ethically as well as a lot of buggy software creating false positives. This lawsuit has been happening for a few months, as well as the CEO of Proctorio leaking student chat logs and threatening the student after the student made a post complaining about the use of Proctorio, both of which were shared and highly upvoted on r/UBC (link below). Certain faculties relied on Proctorio a bit more, like in business, has shifted to more extreme measures, where the Professor requires the student to be logged into two Zoom accounts with camera on, one facing the students face/hands, and the other facing the students desk/screen from behind.

As for alternative options, most my classes used open book paired with more limited time restraint, possibilities of questioning students if anything looked suspicious immediately after the exam, and making the tests harder and scaling afterwards. Although there'll always be bad apples, I'm thankful many of my profs has adapted very well to help the students learn.

Student's post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started...

Proctorio CEO's comment (u/artfulhacker) got deleted back is on removeddit, Linkletter is also here defending the student as well: https://www.removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_sta... https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hhbowl/proctorio_ceo_m...

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

#480

Post by Xunjin »

dang wrote: post #388
rubatuga wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think @dang did a faulty merge between two different, but related articles. This was the original article it was from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217

Yikes - I didn't realize there were two distinct lawsuits. I guess I foolishly assumed that they would only shoot themselves in one foot? I'm not sure what to do now that these threads have gotten blended so thoroughly. Will figure something out.

No worries dang, mistakes happen :P.
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