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Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets
- robotnikman 6y agoThe fact that DMCA is starting to be used to censor critics is definitely concerning
- sudosysgen 6y agoIt has been for a while, especially on YouTube.
- AequitasOmnibus 6y agoThis is abusive behavior by Proctorio. Unfortunately they're not the only bad faith actors using DMCA inappropriately. We need desperately something akin to an anti-slapp[1] defense to fight back against these abusers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pu...
- OldHand2018 6y agoWell, a DMCA takedown is an accusation of illegal conduct and Twitter is a very public place. File a defamation suit against them, and force the C-suite and their lawyers to sit for depositions where they must justify their good-faith beliefs.
- harry8 6y agoWhat's your upside for doing this? The time, expense and stress is a pretty obvious downside for many if not most.
- smitty1110 6y agoCaveat Lector - IANAL Punitive damages. All you need to do is show the other party acted with malice or through fraud. Punitive damages are designed to be a punishment for the bad actor, you can net some nice coin that way if the judge is particularly unhappy with your opponent. Just get try to get in touch with the ACLU to see if they can give any advice before you file, the case law for this stuff is complicated last time I looked into it.
- OldHand2018 6y agoTo be perfectly honest, it felt good to write. And that was enough for me. But... I just talked to an experienced litigation lawyer about this hypothetical, and was told that success really depends on how Twitter handles the notice - how public is it, do your friends and business associates see that you were subjected to a DMCA takedown, etc.
- kevingadd 6y agoIf you have the kind of money it takes to file that suit and actually drag their C-suite into a courtroom, you aren't being inconvenienced by them throwing a DMCA takedown at you in the first place.
- nertzy 6y agoMaybe find a law office willing to take on the case for the chance at a cut of the penalty?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoSo perform hours and hours of unpaid labor on the hope that years from now you can make some lawyers a good chunk of money.
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- ByteJockey 6y agoThere's a certain personality type, that doesn't necessarily want to win, but just wants their opponent to lose. And is often willing to put in a lot of effort to make sure this happens.
- dotancohen 6y agoAre you asking for my ex-wife's number?
- ByteJockey 6y agoWe can use your ex-wife for good. We can use her to take down the RIAA.
- behringer 6y ago
- nullc 6y agoCalifornia anti-slapp law has been interpreted so broadly that it is an almost complete shield against defamation claims in public. This fact has its plusses and minuses.
- sebow 6y ago>Twitter is a very public place These kind of comments always rub me the wrong way. My basic argument against this is: if Twitter/Facebook is a public space, then why are twitter/facebook/other staff allowed to restrict your access to it? There have been literally countless times that this has happened without people violating any laws that would apply in real life(or even their own TOS in some cases). This is to say that twitter is not run by the government,and while that idea sounds scary,the point is that a private citizen is not able to remove you/your speech from a public space in real life.This is besides the fact that these platforms claim both publisher status and the right to censor because "they're private companies"(which they are, but the contradiction is clear when we're talking about them being "hosting public places").Most people forget the uneven playing field because of their addiction to these platforms. We either treat them fully as private companies or begin developing a "bill of rights" on the internet, unless of course we keep treating everyone (including the government) as 2-nd class citizens compared to the owners of these platforms.(Who can de facto "virtually jail" everyone without repercussions)
- tinus_hn 6y agoTwitter has now refused the takedown request and from the tweets you can see that the request truly is frivolous so they might be liable.
- 908B64B197 6y agoFolks are doing take-home exam wrong. Caltech had tremendous success with a culture of honesty and take-home exams.
- collegeburner 6y agoAs a current student, I can maybe offer a bit of perspective on this. There are a few different options I've seen tried: 1. Project-based assignments. These work well. In certain cases a tool to check for plagiarism may be helpful, provided that a human review is used to double-check flagged assignments. 2. Essays. These can be given as take-home assignments, in which case they are similar to 1. They can also be given in an exam format, which is generally difficult to cheat and does a good job of testing understanding. 3. Traditional exams. These work poorly in a take-home format. They typically require invasive solutions. The least-bad that I've seen are those in which teachers require students to get on zoom with a camera pointing at the student's face, workspace, and screen. The other big downside is that they generally make students more nervous about the test. To any profs that read this: please use options one or two if possible. Your students will thank you and may even do better for it.
- 908B64B197 6y ago3. favors rote. But is cheaper and easier to grade.
- jholman 6y agoI think you're missing the point completely. Start by supposing, for the sake of argument, that you think that grades matter. Like for example for determining access to scholarships or graduate programs. Also suppose, for the sake of argument, that some percentage of the students are going to cheat, and suppose that it matters to the aforementioned grades. Also I'm assuming a distance-learning option, perhaps due to quarantine, but the question generalizes to other reasons. How do options 1 and 2 do anything at all to fight the alleged cheating problem? Remote essays are very easy to cheat, just as easy as any other kind of remote exam. Anything take-home is even easier to cheat. The parent commenter is simply claiming that cheating just doesn't happen enough to matter (at least not at Caltech, they claim). That's possible, I have no idea. But it's quite different from saying "remote exams are bad". --- As for why professors administer exams, btw... a professor is going to spend such-and-such an amount of time on you and your class. Maybe it's 5 hours per week, maybe it's 20. Would you rather they invest that time into teaching, or marking? Speaking as a former student and a current teacher, I tend to prefer it be spent on teaching. If you agree that the teaching is more valuable then the marking, teachers should choose the least labour-demanding form of assessment, so they can get back to investing energy in teaching (and/or get back to other responsibilities). Exams are easier to grade than projects and essays. A professor who chooses exams is usually saying "marking is not a good use of my time". (A professor who chooses essays or projects is usually saying "marking is a teaching opportunity so I hate this but oh well").
- zucker42 6y agoThere's currently little recourse or penalty for abusing the DMCA. What should be done is make companies liable to the user affected for issuing a willfully abusive request. If companies faced the same $150000 penalty willfully making a false DMCA request as exists for copyright infringement they would think twice about doing this.
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- bigbubba 6y agoDMCA abusers should have their copyright for the work in question nullified; it should go straight into the public domain. Companies that ignore fair use no longer have any moral right to that work.
- MereInterest 6y agoHow would that work for companies placing DMCA requests for works that they do not own? (I agree with the sentiment, and the poetic justice of the idea, but am curious on the edge cases.)
- bigbubba 6y agoImprison the executives, for a crime tantamount to theft. (Though umprisonment for fraudulent DMCA takedowns regardless of whether or not they own the copyright would be justice.)
- haneefmubarak 6y agoLet me tell you about a crime called perjury...
- haneefmubarak 6y ago
- some_furry 6y agoInterestingly, my tweets criticizing Proctorio still remain online, despite showing their beautified source code: https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1304621579540795392 https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1304621579540795392 https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1304623361461547009 https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1304623361461547009 This tweet thread culminated in a blog post: https://soatok.blog/2020/09/12/edutech-spyware-is-still-spyware-proctorio-edition/ https://soatok.blog/2020/09/12/edutech-spyware-is-still-spyw... They'd definitely have an incentive to remove my tweet too. Among other legally questionably things Proctorio is doing (besides their use of DMCA to silence critics) is claiming to be FIPS 140-2 compliant... but they're not listed here: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-module-validation-program/validated-modules/search?SearchMode=Basic&Vendor=Proctorio&CertificateStatus=Active&ValidationYear=0 https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-module-validati...
- MrMorden 6y agoSelf-assertions of compliance can be legitimate. To appear on that list they'd need third-party validation of their compliance, which is not the same thing.
- some_furry 6y agoI know: FIPS 140-2 validation is actually a meaningful thing, while FIPS 140-2 compliance is not. But even if they're legally not doing a fraud here due to specific word choice, they're not being wholly honest with their customers. And that sucks.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoShame on Twitter for making this student go through these efforts. It’s clear the company is abusing the DMCA to avoid criticism.
- ejohnson9912 6y agoTwitter is just taking the easy way out as a platform. It's the CYA approach.
- sebastien_b 6y agoIs there anything that prevents anyone receiving a DMCA take down letter from charging a fee if that request is found to be fraudulent, illegal or otherwise unwarranted? If I were on the receiving end of such a request, I would confirm receipt with a response stating that any invalid requests will incur a fee of $50,000 (per request) unless they wish to cancel it immediately, and provide a link to do so. Failure of them to cancel it once processed if and when it’s found invalid: they’re on the hook for the fee.
- pacamara619 6y ago> Is there anything that prevents anyone receiving a DMCA take down letter from charging a fee if that request is found to be fraudulent, illegal or otherwise unwarranted? Well, yes, the law. How would you enforce a contract which binds the claimant to paying a fee? What if the claimant doesn't want to enter an agreement where he has to pay? Do you refuse his takedown request? Well congrats, you just made yourself liable.
- hsuduebc 6y agoThis kind of circle jerk by tech companies is both awkward and dangerous.
- strictnein 6y agoImagine working for a company like this. Not only is the product you're working on super sketchy and gross, but the company itself is abusive.
- ordu 6y agoAre there no other solutions instead of surveillance? Like make for each student his own schedule of exams, spread them evenly over the year, add some stochastic unpredictable in advance factor to that schedule. The most of tests could be taken online when we trust students to be honest. That tests are mostly for them, to have feedback from a system on their performance, and for the system as a kind of telemetry, also a feedback to see how good education courses work. But a few tests per student could be conducted offline, the system might want to make them more rigorous and to cover more topics than usual. It seems to me that the system is afraid of changing and tries to buy a solution of a problem instead of devising it. How to measure academic performance is the area of expertise of an academic organization, so why to outsource solution to an external software company with no expertise in academic measurements? I wrote it and got an idea that it is an ideological shift in a collective unconscious. Software engineer is a magician, an artisan of unsolved problems. Each new problem should be delegated to her with a trunk full of bucks, and a magical solution will come back shortly. So maybe we should think instead of removing 'magic' component from the description? How to make people think of software as of technology, not as of magic?
- C0l0rbalance 6y agoI used removeddit to better checkout the post in /r/ubc that they mentioned in the article. It looks like Proctorio used multiple shill accounts and completely changed the tune of their story to make it seem like CEO /u/artfulhacker was trying to help when in reality he literally posts user data and says "shame on you" https://removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started_proctorio_failed_hit_up_live_chat/ https://removeddit.com/r/UBC/comments/hgiiu1/midterm_started...
- 0_gravitas 6y agoI've maintained for a long time that if your exam can be invalidated by the existence of a web browser, its a worthless test that prioritizes arbitrary memorization over a deeper understanding of the material. Software like Proctorio's proliferation just reinforces the blatant farce and I'm so glad to be out of it.
- andrepd 6y agoIt's a fine balance. One one hand you want to let the students google material, consult books, use a calculator... on the other hand given free internet access what stops them from just asking (or paying) someone to solve the exam for them, or googling long enough until they found a solution someone posted online and just copy it, or cribbing from their mates? A good balance, I found (pre covid), was having the students sit a test with textbooks of their choosing and/or their own cheatsheets and lecture notes. No bullshit cramming and memorisation (you can consult literature as you would elsewhere), but also no cheating.
- 0_gravitas 6y ago> One one hand you want to let the students google material, consult books, use a calculator... on the other hand given free internet access what stops them from just asking (or paying) someone to solve the exam for them, or googling long enough until they found a solution someone posted online and just copy it, or cribbing from their mates? DING DING DING QUESTION OF THE CENTURY! I don't mean that sarcastically, my point is this: There is a clear, vulgar, mismatch of values here (and there sort of always has been). Shouldn't the purpose of schooling (especially higher education) be learning things, and not maximizing your score on arbitrary measurements of "performance"? I think it obviously should be, but that's not the game, because its non-trivial to measure and counter to the raison detre of the system at large. The very phrase "Competitive School" is a perversion.
- irjustin 6y agoThat only makes sense if the goal of college and education is pure learning but we all know it's not. Learning is part of it for sure but Companies use college as a filter is another. Until jobs are unnecessary there's going to be this tug between learning and performing that's never going to good for either. All I'm saying is the answer is never so simple.
- ffpip 6y agoThis is also happening in India. A guy criticized a company that encourages parents to put their 11-12 year old kids into coding classes, over fake promises like jobs at google, app published to app store, etc. They banned his Youtube, Linkedin, Twitter, for copyright infringement. The infringement was he showed their company logo in his criticism. The company is WhiteHatJR. They advertise aggressively and with made up characters working at Google. https://www.whitehatjr.com https://www.whitehatjr.com https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/joio2u/now_whitehatjr_got_my_linkedin_account_also_banned/ https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/joio2u/now_whitehatj...
- ShroudedNight 6y agoIn case anybody else wants a (more?) primary source for this: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-the-day/whitehat-jr-and-the-curious-case-of-disappearing-dissent/63627/1 https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-th...
- ffpip 6y agoThe reddit post I linked is from the guy getting banned.
- desi_ninja 6y agoOh please, don’t link anything from Reddit India about criticizing bans. That sub is living example of censorship and banning anything which the mods don’t like . Some examples : https://medium.com/@akasha45/my-rant-against-reddit-india-r-india-moderators-9115eabf57d4 https://medium.com/@akasha45/my-rant-against-reddit-india-r-...
- ffpip 6y agoDo you not read other comments? Mod - Submission is in hindi. OP is the only on who has provided subtitles and a transcript and hence his thread has been approved. This link was reposted multiple times yesterday and they were all removed for not following the submission language rule. Meta comments have been removed. Discuss the topic at hand now that the thread is up and running rather than meta discussions about the older submissions. Khali peeli censorship chilla rahe ho
- ruined 6y agoThe "update" at the end of the article indicates the posts have been restored, but if you go look at the thread, the posts in question link to pastebin, and those pastebins have been taken down. So actually there was no infringing content in the thread at all, and the actual content on pastebin is still missing.
- rbecker 6y ago> Olsen claimed that Miami University had accepted the company’s terms and conditions on behalf of Johnson, and that Johnson allegedly violated those terms when he tweeted about the code. Universities have authority to bind their students to 3rd party contracts?
- villgax 6y agoDid people just forget that Netflix issued Copyright notices for takedown of tweets blasting their Cuties trailer. Content which they plastered all of the internet & then act this way.
- raxxorrax 6y agoI was fully on their side when they did show it and thought this was just a case of a French series going US (haven't watched it). But when I read the news I thought about canceling Netflix. It is inconceivable to me how a professional company can react this way. Honestly I think much of the criticism was very likely bullshit, but Netflix managed to top that off with this incredibly stupid reaction.
- IceWreck 6y agoMy uni uses similar, but slightly less invasive software. I completely broke a lot of its reporting by writing afew lines of javascript in userscripts which break the page visibility API, fullscreen detection, etc. And somehow some sites can detect if something you are copy pasting was written in the browser in their own text field or pasted from somewhere else. There is a flag in firefox which disables the onpaste events, etc but on chromium I have to use tools like xdotool.
- chaz6 6y agoThis gives me an idea for a dongle with a button, and when you press the button it sends the contents of the clipboard as keystrokes. No browser hacks needed!
- IceWreck 6y agoxdotool on linux does exactly this, but instead of a button you can set a timer to send keystrokes in for example 5 seconds.
- agilob 6y agoWhen you click on this link you are being tracked before you agree to tracking, my router is blocking this domain so silent redirect doesnt work for me and exposes tracking: https: / / guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_680ec19f-a1f4-4061-94cb-114bef96ed56 Every click generates new sessionId. Quite sure this isn't legal.
- Fnoord 6y agohttps://archive.is/m7cHZ https://archive.is/m7cHZ
- encom 6y agoThank you. Techcrunch is the worst. Should be banned from HN.
- cwhiz 6y agoThis site, TechCrunch, is an absolute privacy abomination. With content blockers, PiHole, and other privacy protections this site will barely load.