• Louis II (unregistered) in reply to Channel6

    I don't know about it being so much 'marketing' so much as just a case of fully exploiting the potential of your situation by having a deeper understanding than your competition. The idea being that they essentially put their data in an easy to find place and expected it to be safe, but this safe place was essentially public with out them realizing.

    As for the hacking students: Bravo to that. Clearly it shows their promise as people with potentially bright futures due to their ability to decipher a system and use it to survive.

  • (cs) in reply to Ville
    Ville:
    borat:
    thumping a digital device is likely to make it work again
    Interesting, never heard of such repair methodology before.
    Percussive maintenance works quite well with certain CRT monitor problems, though those are analog.

    I've also heard of hard disk heads getting stuck to the platter by "sticktion". A lateral whack that's hard enough but not too hard can unstick it. The disk's still dying, but it can at least let you read data off it.

    Similarly with some iffy semi-defective or semi-dead chips, though squeezing them usually works better than whacking.

  • You don't want to know (unregistered)

    It also works on the old Nintendo consoles (before they had moving parts). Not starting? Give them a good hard WHACK and they'll work.

    I had a Bluetooth dongle as well that had to be squeezed every hour or so or it would disconnect. Needless to say, after a few days of that it died entirely.

  • Doesn't matter (unregistered) in reply to Fedaykin
    Fedaykin:
    My College Biology prof solved the problem of writing and cheating on tests in a very effective manner. We had tests every two weeks (2 hours long), and every one but the first had exactly one question:

    1.) What did you learn the last two weeks?

    The "answer" key was a list of topics that had been covered over the last two weeks, and you were graded based on the percentage of those topics you discussed intelligently in your essay. For example, one topic might be mitosis, and an accurate description of mitosis would be what the grader would look for.

    Of course, his TAs hated him (at least those that weren't fathering his children) because the grading was extremely difficult, but it did make it more or less useless to try to look at someone else's paper.

    On the plus side, that was one of the few classes, even college classes, that I knew the material dead cold.

    The TAs were fathering his children? Damn, that's a biology professor doing some advanced research...

  • Lucia (unregistered)

    Look at it this way: Idiot teachers set up a stupid system that allowed students to realize how easy it was to break it. These students will forever remember this and some of them will become hackers. Oh sheer irony!

  • qtothep (unregistered) in reply to Abraxus

    my high school had OS7 with that weird folder based view for networked computers (I forget what it was called). Only admins could get to the finder. Then they made one of the math teachers an admin. She went out and bought some Lemonade Stand type of game that she wanted all the math students to play (which might actually be the Real WTF). She couldn't figure out how to add the game to each users folder, so she just gave us the password so we could all log in as her. The password: math. I quickly figured out that it gave me full admin access, and so did about a million other people. Two days later the entire network was in shambles after everyone deleted half the network. The real administrator flipped out, cursed the teacher out and made her change her password. He didn't, however, remove her admin access. Her new password: htam.

  • (cs) in reply to qtothep
    He didn't, however, remove her admin access. Her new password: htam.

    At least it wasn't so bad as golf to flog. :P

  • , (unregistered) in reply to Doesn't matter
    Doesn't matter:
    Fedaykin:
    My College Biology prof solved the problem of writing and cheating on tests in a very effective manner. We had tests every two weeks (2 hours long), and every one but the first had exactly one question:

    1.) What did you learn the last two weeks?

    The "answer" key was a list of topics that had been covered over the last two weeks, and you were graded based on the percentage of those topics you discussed intelligently in your essay. For example, one topic might be mitosis, and an accurate description of mitosis would be what the grader would look for.

    Of course, his TAs hated him (at least those that weren't fathering his children) because the grading was extremely difficult, but it did make it more or less useless to try to look at someone else's paper.

    On the plus side, that was one of the few classes, even college classes, that I knew the material dead cold.

    The TAs were fathering his children? Damn, that's a biology professor doing some advanced research...

    If you forgot something, reading would jog your memory. Then you can rephrase it.

    How is that secure? If I handed you my completed paper, you could use it. Copying it word for word would make you stupid.

    Thinking the only way to read and use a document is to copy it word for word makes you the most stupid.

    Like teachers that would give a high grade for an exact quote from a textbook, even if the quote was wrong and a low grade to something a student wrote them self because it was not in a textbook, even though the student is right.

  • Fedaykin (unregistered) in reply to ,
    :
    If you forgot something, reading would jog your memory. Then you can rephrase it.

    How are you going to discretely find what you are looking for off of someone else's hand written, multi-page essay that covers 10-15 different high levels topics with many sub topics each in the middle of a proctored exam?

    How is that secure? If I handed you my completed paper, you could use it. Copying it word for word would make you stupid.

    Yeah, because someone is just going to hand you their test in the middle of a proctored exam. If you meant hand you their completed exam at a later date, that's not going to help you any more than studying, because it won't tell you anything new about the exam that you didn't already know.

    Thinking the only way to read and use a document is to copy it word for word makes you the most stupid.

    Who said anything about copying word for word?

  • Francisco (unregistered) in reply to Mr. Happy

    [quote user="Mr. Happy"][quote user="Kermos"][...]

    1993, eh? That would be about the same time that I accidentally discovered the "grades system" on the school network and that it was totally unprotected. You just had to know where it was to get into it. I kindly informed the teacher that he may want to look into at least adding a password to it. I got thanked for it, but they still had all of my teachers manually re-calculate my grades to prove that I hadn't tampered with it. They determined that I hadn't, but my girlfriend made the honour roll that term... ;) Shhh...she still doesn't know I did it.[/quote]

    If I were a senior member of staff in that school I would have insisted on everybody's grades being re-calculated on the grounds that the flaw must have been well-known if even the honest students know about it.

  • Francisco (unregistered) in reply to nckomodo
    nckomodo:
    This is no WTF, this is the normal behavior of kids, especially in school. What would be a WTF, however slight, is any kid who DIDN'T resort to cheating in this case.

    I would have been honest. What's the point of cheating? You're only cheating yourself. I would have been quietly grinning to myself when the computers crashed and everybody had to revert back to paper.

  • CiH (unregistered) in reply to Ville
    Ville:
    borat:
    thumping a digital device is likely to make it work again
    Interesting, never heard of such repair methodology before.

    Wow! If thumping something is an entire repair methodology what entails a mere repair method?

  • Engywuck (unregistered) in reply to foobar
    foobar:
    Even pen & paper tests are sometimes made pointless by technology. In grade 11 we we're working on De Bello Gallico and one major test would consist of translating one chapter from Latin. Fortunately the teacher decided to give us a vocabulary list up-front. He wanted us to memorize them, instead of giving them to us during the test...

    Needless to say I didn't have to study hard for that one. The computer was quite accurate in predicting the right chapter.

    My fathers class did the same -- in 1967(!) You know, there exist books where every (major) latin word is listed with references where it can be found in classical latin literature. So take three or four of the more obscure words given to you and look where they all occur simultanuously...

    Well, it blew up one day: some dumb co-students wrote perfect answers - they had memorized the wohle chapter in a translated book...

  • AK_00 (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    EatenByAGrue:
    However, the best defense in the world against in-class cheating is essay questions
    Not so. My high school biology teacher always gave essay tests. One or, at most, two "questions" (directions, actually: "List and describe the various avaricti of the trebonidian finculum found in pyxicephalus edulis, including structure and function.") which she would write on the board for us a couple of weeks before test day. This, she explained, would give us plenty of time to study on exactly what the test covered, so that there would be no excuse for not knowing the information.

    I never had the guts (fear of flunking), but there were certain girls in my class who came to test wearing their thick winter coats. They wrote studiously on their blank paper for the majority of the class period, and at some point when the teacher was sufficiently distracted, quietly slipped a completed essay, written at home some days before, out of a coat sleeve to be turned in.

    I used to do a similar kind of thing. Only, instead of writing huge essays beforehand to take into the test (I'm far too lazy for that) I would just remember the answers instead. Then I'd just write them all down during the test.

    I never got caught!

  • Paolo G (unregistered)

    I doubt anyone ever used slide rules to teach arithmetic, in the same way that no teacher would use a calculator to teach arithmetic these days.

  • Jason (unregistered) in reply to Channel6

    I was thinking the same thing, but apparently there is a real River City High. http://www.rivercityhs.com/

  • Brendan (unregistered)

    At my high school we had online tests in some classes. Since they were done in a browser, we decided to check out the source code to see if there was anything interesting going on. That's when we found out that it was scored entirely using Javascript. To get a 100% on any test, all you had to do was complete the test (it was difficult to tell how many questions on a test were graded by the computer, and which ones were graded by the teacher), then type something like: javascript:alert(nCorrect=nAttempt)

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