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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

#91
post #57
post #55

When I was in university, I scraped an internal job postings site for students to find internships. The site was terrible- each job description would load in a pop-up window controlled by Javascript, and loading a second description would override the first. It was also really slow and had limited filtering. My version could load job descriptions in new tabs, presented the table on a single page, and you could mark j…

Sounds like WaterlooWorks.

To me, it sounds more like the old system that WaterlooWorks replaced (JobMine). JobMine was just Oracle/PeopleSoft's PeopleTools under the hood.

Some of my friends who graduated earlier told stories about how JobMine at one point accepted resumes in HTML. Of course, this also meant that it was vulnerable to XSS attacks. The eventual fix was just to only allow PDF resumes.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#92

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

Wow what a dick. Yeah they backed off after the backlash but that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

I’ll use Codespaces next time

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#94

I hope they did their homework even after breaking the platform.

tbh i had online math homework years ago now like back in 5th grade. my solution was a whole lot jankier but i spent more time writing a script to store and use answers (unlimited quiz retakes go brrrr) than it would have taken me to just do the quizzes and was still happy. i ended up with this unholy thing that used a flat text file like a very ghetto database bc i didn't know shit about coding... eventually got to…

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1319/

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really get that vibe, especially when we called Colin. He was super friendly. But then again, we didn't want to test it and we complied immediately =)

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Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#96
I had a similar-ish experience between 2005-2010 but not as complex. Teachers could control what programs appeared in the start menu of computers in the class as well as see what is on their screen etc. Don't remember the name of the software.

Was incredibly easy to exploit by invoking windows explorer via a Word toolbar of all things. This meant I could browse the start menu shortcuts of every classroom in the school and open whatever application I wanted even if it was disabled by the teacher.

A relative worked in IT at another school using the same software. I showed it to them and they mentioned it to the company who were installing it in their school. The company refused to believe I could exploit it so easily and even said they would buy me an xBox if it was true. Of course, it was true and when shown proof they went silent and I never got an xBox.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#97
Epic stuff, and I think this experience may well be more valuable than the homework you avoided. Basically you did harder homework in order to avoid easier homework.

The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. (Although I also think watching a video and doing some multiple choice questions is the laziest low-effort homework assignment there is, and the damage may not have been all that big.) But you used logic and programming to work around a math problem, which are roughly in the same field, so I think that's fair.

A slightly similar situation: my previous job was at a bank, and banks over here are bound by all sorts of ethics and rules, and are required to regularly train all their employees in balancing the interests of customers, society, and the bank. This bank did that by gamifying it: we had an app where we had to answer all sorts of ethical questions and make sure our score in the app was over 70% at the end of every month.

A coworker used our testing framework to access the app, answer questions randomly like you did, and store the correct answer to use next time. It apparently worked very well, but using tech to avoid ethics questions is quite a different issue than yours. (He shared it with me when he left, and I tried it, but it didn't work for me.)

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#98
post #97

Epic stuff, and I think this experience may well be more valuable than the homework you avoided. Basically you did harder homework in order to avoid easier homework. The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. (Although I also think wat…

> The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that.

This, when the scope is limited to yourself, it's very different from when it impacts others.

Back when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was super popular, I was in university and had read about ARP poisoning. Our school was pretty cheap, so all the dorms had hubs instead of switches. This meant that it would be, theoretically, possible to ARP poison an entire dorm, MITM attack and read all the text being sent on AIM since it was sent in the clear. I had a bit of a cyber security passion lab in my dorm room, so I wrote a PoC and ran it on a LAN air-gapped from the rest of the network. I proved that it should work for myself, having confirmed that similar cleartext messages would get passed to the machine intending to listen in between two other machines.

I told my classmate of my project and he expressed interest, so I gave him a copy. Fortunately, I didn't add any authorship info, mostly because I forgot to. I did caution him that ARP poisoning is a pretty "noisy" attack, and someone who was paying attention would notice it. He foolish ran it on the university network, and confirmed he was able to see AIM messages flying back and forth for all the dorm, as well as all the other traffic. It didn't take long for our school's IT to notice that one dorm was funneling all traffic through one machine. A week later he was banned from having a computer in his dorm room for a school year. Thankfully he never gave me up, admitting it was his stupidity that brought it on himself, but nevertheless it was a lesson learned - if you're going to play in the grey space between ethical and not, do so responsibility and don't share the exploits with others.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#99
Love it!

In the world of Music Conservatories, practice space is limited and there is a lot of competition to get a room booked. Many places use a niche scheduling product called Asimut specifically tailored to conservatories. Depending on how it is set up, for example, you could book a room 72 hours in advance on a rolling basis - this mean people were always on their phones booking rooms and then extending their booking times.

As you can guess, I wrote a simple python script that lived on a vps and read a schedule and list of my favourite rooms from a text file, would wait until the right time and book/extend for me with my username and password. Never told anyone except my girlfriend, who spent enough time with me to realize I was making bookings without ever looking at my phone!

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