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

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

#511

Post by bena » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

yowlingcat wrote: post #471

bena wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actua…

Now you're being condescending and projecting things onto me simply to try and undercut my point. Try talking to people without calling them huffy or assuming the people you're talking to are stupid. Maybe they just have different opinions from you.

I have no problem with honest critique. But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area. I'm not willing to go there with either employers or employees.

My way of avoiding the issue is to simply not work for companies I find ethically questionable. And if I were working for a company that I found later to be ethically questionable, I'd get another job.

The eight didn't get new jobs, they started a new company. It's like Activision and Atari. And it's a far cry from "I don't agree with their management structure" or "I don't like their method of crediting work" to "I think they're unethical".

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

#512

Post by jrumbut » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #503

Impassionata wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It doesn't if the examiner understands the material. You can't bullshit someone who knows much more about a topic than you do - bullshitting with confidence will only make you sound like a fool. If the examiner isn't much more knowledgeable about a topic than their students, then something else has gone wrong.

But you can appear to know less than you actually do through a lack of confidence.

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

#513

Post by derivagral » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #407

derivagral wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A top 10 MBA program my partner went through had several people cheating in the program. I'll give you some anecdotal notes. Some cheaters get discovered and "outed" (esp those the group didn't like) when they brag during parties, some never gave up enough evidence to make an accusation official, others would talk about hiring CPAs for accounting exams/projects. Many in the class were concerned on whether normal stud…

What kind of an MBA program is it where students worry if normal study groups are ok? It sounds like the definition of cheating was very broad there.

Depends on you, the professor, the college, and the rules as to how you might interpret "individual" homework assignments and study "groups", particularly if you're led to believe you'll get removed from the program for transgressing. This particular issue was fleshed out quickly (and sanely, imo) but it did contribute to why the group didn't like one particular individual. Not everyone in the program is there to network and build trust!

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

#514

Post by LanceH » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #333

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…

I had to use Proctorio for a stats class that I took, and two or three times per test it asked me to lift my laptop up and rotate it so that it could see the entire room. The worst part was that when I was done the button to return to the test never showed up. Each time this happened, I had to contact customer support to get them to unlock my screen. The distraction this posed had a measurable impact on my scores on…

You should demands points on the exam for successfully completing the instructions of the exam. Anything which can count against a grade must surely count toward a grade.

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

#515

Post by driverdan » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

2ion wrote: post #279

driverdan wrote: post #161

Proctorio is on my red flag list. If any current or former employees of a flagged company apply for a job on my team I expect their reason for leaving to be for ethical reasons, or for them to tell me about how they had ethical problems with what the company was doing. If they don't I immediately remove them from the candidate pool.

Yeah sure. I also discriminate against people because I don't like the color of their skin while feeling high and mighty. What you're saying is, that if company A bids more salary than company B, you reserve the prerogative to judge that anybody should join company B because you deem the totally legal company A bad, even though the principles of the labour market dictate that if company A furthers the welfare of the…

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. When people have options no one chooses a job purely on economic motives. The ethics of the role and the company should absolutely be a consideration. If that's not something you consider then you may be sociopathic.

I also take exception to comparing a protected class to something like ethical behavior. I would never filter candidates by protected class and no one else should either. Past unethical behavior is absolutely something you should consider.

Look at my website (in my bio). I've done unethical things in the past. I expect potential employers to question me about them.

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

#516

Post by amalcon » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

anticristi wrote: post #292

soperj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. Make the exams open book and then the only thing you really need to worry about is the correct student taking the exam. If you're testing based on memorization of things in this day in age, then the course is useless.

Our university physics teacher allowed us to bring one-page self-made cheat sheet. By the time you compressed the essence of a whole course into a one-pager, you were pretty much done learning. :))

I recall at some point that I started writing that type of cheat sheet, even if I didn't get to refer to it in the exam, for that reason.

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

#517

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

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.

If you shoot yourself in one foot you get a nasty limp. Two is much better, for balance.

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

#518

Post by curryst » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #495

saruken wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't "cheating" the norm in real-world jobs too? It's rare that I or any of the developers I work with complete a task without looking something up or asking a question of someone more knowledgeable. Seems to me the problem is how the assignments are posed – If the goal is to create a program that does X, and I can do that by copy/pasting or tweaking something from StackOverflow, have I not completed the goal? B…

Please don't muddy the waters like that. I'm sure you understand perfectly well that when a job asks you to do X, they just want to get X done, whereas when a school asks you to do X, they want to test your skills or make you practice.

Isn't the purpose of school to train you to where you can do X for a company? If standard practice in the field is to look that up, I fail to see the value in forcing you to remember how to do X so that you can later forget it and end up Googling it anyways.

I generally find it silly to teach things that you can adequately grasp from Google in 10 minutes. That's not to imply that anything can be learned from Google in 10 minutes, but I find it dumb to spend time on that in a college. Learning how to implement on optimized bubble sort? That's kind of dumb; in the real world you just use an existing one. It's almost certainly faster than what you would have come up with. Learning recursion? Yeah, that probably deserves to be taught because some people really struggle with it.

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

#519

Post by yowlingcat » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #511

yowlingcat wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 actua…

Now you're being condescending and projecting things onto me simply to try and undercut my point. Try talking to people without calling them huffy or assuming the people you're talking to are stupid. Maybe they just have different opinions from you. I have no problem with honest critique. But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period o…

> But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area.

It may sound subjective, but that's a view that may not be shared by the rest of the world; not in the eyes of the law, legislators, prospective employees. An accomplice is an accomplice. Especially in 2021, if you can't accept some responsibility to interrogate what the side effects are of the paycheck you accept (even if you don't agree with it), you're going to have a very difficult time participating in public discourse.

You could risk giving the impression that you'd rather ignore any negative externalities of your own work due to your own selfish motivations, even if it comes at the expense of society at large. And many members of society at large may deem you a coward and a liar by omission (I can't say I'd blame them). Some of those members may be people you'll never work with, but some of them may be companies that are interviewing. It won't matter if you want to hand-wave that away by saying "maybe they just have different opinions from you" -- when you're taking the money, you're either taking the responsibility that comes with taking that money or not.

Your vocation is part of your civic duty because it forms the basis for how you materially contribute to the taxes that fund society. If the path by which you earn those funds is compromised, then incrementally, so too is your little equity slice of society. Do you think it's reasonable to accept your desire to bow out from that conversation altogether? Or do you think that such a request will sound immature, evasive and tone deaf, that it will only succeed in drawing suspicion and ire?

Rather than accuse me of undercutting your point, I'd ask you to consider whether your point undercuts itself.

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

#520

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 3:17 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #102

amcoastal wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you need to design an online version of that course if you're going to allow online students to take it.

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 -…

Why should this be the only year; why not join the 2020s and do the later classes online in the future too? If the students did their first year remotely they've already learnt to learn that way, so it should work even better with second- and third-year students AFAICS.