74 ms·

EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd

913 points by oxylibrium 5y ago

dartharva 5y ago
I think the bigger issue should be how the University came to choose something like Proctorio. This has been the case with many colleges around the world; disconnected or ignorant authorities keep signing up to whatever the SaaS salesman pitches to them, without vetting the company's background and records, and not listening to the affected parties in their arrogance. My own college struggled with online exams, and turned a deaf ear to students and even professors objecting against the platform being used (it's the most popular proctored exam platform). In the end, due to their own incompetence at handling exams, there turned out to be large-scale cheating and the college then forced the entire batch to give the exams again in the next term.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  There's probably a market opportunity to replace testing w/ something better. Some actual measurement of competence that's win/win/win for the students, instructors, and universities. Maybe a company come up with an interesting idea & get funding YC to scale the solution to that hard problem!
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  The problem was that COVID lockdowns took many schools by surprise, and instead of making exams designed for online platforms, they tried to fit regular into a online platform. Turns out, it's incredibly easy to cheat on those exams.
kasperni 5y ago
Background: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...
- squarefoot 5y ago
  The EFF took the student defense and sued back Proctorio yesterday. Good! https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf-student-it-falsely-accused-copyright-infringement-get https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf... https://www.eff.org/document/johnson-v-proctorio-complaint https://www.eff.org/document/johnson-v-proctorio-complaint
- dang 5y ago
  (This was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217, which we merged hither.)
  - input_sh 5y ago
    This isn't the same, it's two different lawsuits. One is for a student by the name of Ian Linkletter from British Columbia. EFF is suing on behalf of Erik Johnson from Miami. The only thing they have in common is Proctorio.
    - dang 5y ago
      Ah—sorry, I definitely missed that. I doubt that the distinction makes much difference for HN purposes, though, since threads on either one of those will fuse into the same discussion.
Nextgrid 5y ago
His GoFundMe if you want to contribute: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  I feel like this comment should be at the top - for anyone who feels strongly about this issue and didn’t spot this link further down in his Twitter thread. Have an upvote.
  - areactnativedev 5y ago
    Totally agree
- davesque 5y ago
  Just donated. Thanks for this.
- djoldman 5y ago
  EFF: "...The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson..." GoFundMe page: "...My name is Ian Linkletter... wired over $50,000 to Arvay Finlay, LLP, doubling my legal defense fund. John Trueman is joined by Cathie Boies Parker, Q.C., and Mark Underhill..." Different lawsuits?
  - rubatuga 5y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217
    - dang 5y ago
      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.
fxtentacle 5y ago
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 colors [1] that are difficult for AI to track or reading questions out aloud [2]. Because everyone knows that a good student is white, sits in a bright room, and will continuously stare at his/her PC screen while thinking about a difficult math problem, I guess. WTF? I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate. And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem. I'm sure this kind of misguided software would have failed me. And the worst part is: Bugs in this software will fail students in the real world. [4] So it is crucially important that this type of software receives a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned. But it seems that Proctorio is suing this guy for doing exactly that: Documenting how the software is supposed to work by linking to Proctorio's YouTube videos. [1] https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728 https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728 [2] https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-after-ai-software-flags-cheating-2020-10 https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte... [3] https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_half_way_through_my_exam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_...
- senectus1 5y ago
  wtf. this is some serious 1984 type shit.
- Guthur 5y ago
  It's actually very disappointing that this whole monitoring system was deemed necessary to begin with. How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe this level of intrusion should be part of the education process.
  - buran77 5y ago
mkl 5y ago
I'm sympathetic to the concerned individual threatened and harmed by corporate lawsuits, but I don't think I share the underlying concern. > In Linkletter’s view, customers and users were not getting the whole story. The software performed all kinds of invasive tracking, like watching for “abnormal” eye movements, head movements, and other behaviors branded suspicious by the company. The invasive tracking and filming were of great concern to Linkletter, who was worried about students being penalized academically on the basis of Proctorio’s analysis. In an in-person invigilated test environment, the invigilator/proctor is watching students carefully for suspicious movements and behaviours. We don't call that an invasion of privacy. While I don't like commercial proctoring software (I have to use some, not Proctorio, for students who can't enter the country because of Covid-19), being videoed by a machine while you do a test is a) not much different from everyone else in the class who's being watched in person (you probably get watched less, actually), b) a way to make sure essential academic standards are upheld. No one is going to get penalised based on some fallible "AI" system; "suspicious" events get reviewed by a person and usually aren't suspicious at all.
- anovikov 5y ago
  But i think it's OK to install the software just on a laptop you'd use to take tests, some old laptop, and keep yourself free of surveillance otherwise right? If so, i can't see how is it a problem: someone absolutely has to be watched while taking a test. But if it's during whole education process, then yeah, it's ridiculous and worth fighting against.
  - daemin 5y ago
    For some people "some old laptop" is all they actually have. I don't imagine a lot of students have both a desktop, a laptop, and "some old laptop" that they can use, so the software will get installed on the single computer they use (or share) to get their studies done on.
  - eythian 5y ago
    Not everyone has an old laptop lying around they can use for such a purpose.
northrup 5y ago
It’s as if nobody has ever read George Orwell’s 1984: “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense.”
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > It’s as if nobody has ever read George Orwell’s 1984 no, they read it and think "how can we do even better"
  - toyg 5y ago
    Orwell is the modern Machiavelli. In about 100 years, people will be wondering if 1984 was satire/criticism or an actual blueprint for effective government in the digital age, in the same way the real aim of Il Principe has been endlessly debated for centuries.
    - Rochus 5y ago
      In contrast, Orwell's fundamental rejection of the totalitarian surveillance society is well known and documented. Even in 100 years, those who are interested can read it all.
      - DocTomoe 5y ago
        Unless, of course, such documentation will be surpressed. Which is pretty Orwellian, in fact, such operations are the protagonist's job.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        The irony is, 1984 is used as a manual of sorts by some.
everyone 5y ago
They actually called their software Proctorio !??!?! From the Greek "anus" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procto-#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procto-#English I am dying lol
- SEMW 5y ago
  ...Or, just maybe, from the English word "proctor", meaning someone who invigilates an exam. Which is from the Latin "procurator" meaning overseer, unrelated to the Greek procto-
  - everyone 5y ago
    Yeah i found that.. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proctor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proctor Though in fairness proctor / procurator are extremely antiquated english words, that have survived in common usage only in the US for some reason.
    - everyone 5y ago
      I reckon the majority of english speakers who read 'Proctorio' will immediately think anus.
      - yunohn 5y ago
        I think the majority of English speakers are completely unaware of this meaning. “Proctor” on the other hand, is something they would’ve heard of in an exam setting.
        festive-minsky 5y ago
        Mabye I'm in the minority; I'd never heard of a "Proctor", but I have heard of a "Proctologist", which is an anus doctor
        scbrg 5y ago
        Is this one of those regional things? Is the same word used throughout the entire English speaking world? Not a native English speaker myself, so my association was to the Greek word as well.
cycomanic 5y ago
So lots of people commenting that they don't have an issue with such software. Fine, but that's an entirely different debate. This is about the company sueing someone for criticising the software, by detailing how it is supposed to work. So even if we accept that we need such software, do we really want to go down the path that software companies can sue people for talking about how it works and criticising them?
- zibzab 5y ago
  Note also that the original lawsuit was for Ian tweeting about their public YouTube videos. How can this garbage lawauit be allowed to go on and cost a man $100.000 in lawyer fees??
  - worik 5y ago
    Because the rules are made by lawyers
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      and because it's in US.
      - ayewo 5y ago
        Small correction: he’s being sued (by a US company) in Canada, under a new Canadian law.
        koonsolo 5y ago
        Aha, that might change it indeed. Do they have the "loser pays the costs" policy or not?
        ayewo 5y ago
        Kind of. According to the EFF [1], he might be able to recover his legal costs: “ But Proctorio’s bad behavior has inspired a broad community of people to fight for better student privacy rights, and hundreds of people donated to Linkletter’s defense fund, which raised more than $50,000. And the PPPA gives him a greater chance of getting his fees back.” 1: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...
qmmmur 5y ago
If anyone here works for Proctorio. Please quit. Just quit.
- BigGreenTurtle 5y ago
  Looks like they outsource most of their company to Serbia, so I doubt many will see this.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  So many organizations you could say that for. They're probably paying people enough to keep them "happy".
helloguillecl 5y ago
I have a question for anyone who has seen similar situations. (I'm 35+ years old and have never work at a corporation except for some small gigs when I was 18, so I'm really ignorant of how these companies and internal decision making work) Why in the world would a company sue a critic, under weak legal arguments, thus buying themselves this kind of terrible negative publicity? Who will trust/like/or want to be associated with them now? I guess that this is to suppress criticism, but it must be expensive and difficult to do the same in every jurisdiction in which critics pop up, so it looks like a dumb strategy (let alone immoral). I mean the guy seems to be educated and good citizen, works at a Uni, you can publicly read his views on twitter. THe kind of person I tend to sympathize with. Without knowing who Proctorio is, I imagine them being the kind of company I don't want to be associated with, just because of this. I don't understand.
- atdrummond 5y ago
  This actually seems pretty effective to me. I now know that if I criticize Proctorio, I am likely on the hook for six figures in legal fees. That alone would be enough to scare off many people who would otherwise feel inclined to critique the product/company. In fact, winning the case may not even be that important to the firm.
  - helloguillecl 5y ago
    But for example in my home country, there's no way I could be sued for this. I mean I could, but if I was, the legal fees would likely need to be assumed by the entity making this kind of ridiculous lawsuit. There are too many like me, in different jurisdictions, who cannot be silenced like this. And I'm still in awe that a modern democracy like Canada, would allow their citizens to be threatened using their legal system. It seems corrupt.
  - t0mas88 5y ago
    Sure, you could scare some others into not criticizing you. But this case is going to be mainstream news now, while before their case only a small number of people would have read the tweets. And I think losing this case could get very expensive if the defendant manages to convince the judge it's a SLAPP case?
trhway 5y ago
s/Proctorio/Scientology/g would work just fine in the story https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-online-test-proctoring-lawsuit-universities-students-coronavirus https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin... Of course there are a lot of creepy software and sleezy businesses around. That is not the issue. The issue is the university administrators - the MBA style morons who overtook the universities - who subject their students to such a crap software. On the other side one can argue that that is really preparing students for the real life - after all they are going to come to the industry and will be subjected by the MBA style morons in the management there to the crap like Jira, Scrum, Slack (how being forced to constantly broadcast your status and be immediately responsive is that much different from Proctorio?), etc.
andyjohnson0 5y ago
His legal costs fundraising page is at [1] and gives come background to the harassment by Proctorio. [1] https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
JPDSm8NTaAYBHd 5y ago
he/him
AYBABTME 5y ago
I wonder if anyone ever reverse-SLAPPd the humans behind the SLAPP suits.
dartharva 5y ago
My university forcibly pushed students into online proctored examinations with similar privacy-invasive software too, despite repeated concerns raised by both students and instructors. As expected, it turned out to be a colossal failure - students found the remote "invigilators" didn't pay attention for jack shit and started cheating in exams, leading to the college forcibly bringing the entire batch back to their campus and taking all the tests again along with the ones in the next term.
Toutouxc 5y ago
What a bunch of fuckheads. Donated. Btw how does the system work in Canada, after he wins this, will he be able to sue for damages and strip Proctorio clean or what?
Immune 5y ago
I’ve sent an email in regarding a CCPA request and got this response. “ Hello, Thanks for reaching out! I'm following up on your request. I want to let you know that no one at Proctorio has access to your information. Only authorized personnel at your school (Instructors or Administrators) can access any of the information collected while taking an exam. I'd be happy to discuss this further with your instructor if you would like to connect me to them. Best, Josh”
jimmySixDOF 5y ago
They should have just ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now the they got the EFF to deal with and it serves them right. There is another HN thread on this and a lot of people in it are more upset about the line of work Proctorio is in and how they do it than the fact they sued this minor irritating student. My opinion is there is simply no easy pain free way to do fraud auditing and that's that. I just recently took a professional PeopleCert exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam in a closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp installed some invasive application. So what ? If there was a better way to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people will cheat then I would be all for it but just getting all shook up about a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular type milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book. But I am glad suing this kid is blowing up in their face.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Maybe catching a few cheaters here and there isn't worth implementing The Panopticon for everyone else.
  - fastball 5y ago
    The problem is that cheating (if allowed) does not end up being a few people here and there.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      Even if I were to believe you, so what? So a person gets a degree they don't deserve. Now they have all this student loan debt they can't pay off because they can't get and keep a job in their field because they didn't actually study. Or they do get a job and are able to keep it down, in which case, so what if they cheated? They're clearly capable. Let them keep doing the job. My solution: get rid of degrees completely. Can't cheat if there's no test to cheat on.
xtracto 5y ago
Proctorio did a sort of IAMA two years ago in reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/augdmo/ask_proctorio_anything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/augdmo/ask_proctorio_a... As a technologist I've worked in "online bullet loans", payments and other controversial verticals but for the life of me , I would never work in such a dirty business (as Proctorio). I'd rather tell people I work in porn-tech (where people are literally f*d) than this asinine proctoring systems. Just... no.
plank_time 5y ago
This is something that Student Unions around the country should pick up and launch protests against. Refusing the take tests administered by Proctorio and having very loud protests across the country would be a perfect way to drive them out of business.
jkelleyrtp 5y ago
I personally believe education should just move forward into a world where cheating is impossible. Hands-on schools like Olin College of Engineering make it practically impossible to cheat... because you actually have to build something! Sure, plagiarism is still an issue, but that's much easier to control for than monitoring students while they take a test.
- arp242 5y ago
  I don't disagree, but the issue here is one of scale and costs. Testing is just easy, cheap, and very ingrained to boot. A single teacher can teach dozens or hundreds of students. Olin charges $55,612/year tuition fees alone; the total costs are estimated at $79,024/year[1]. This is a lot higher than a lot of other "normal" universities[2], and even seems higher than most "top universities"[3]. I'm sure it's great if you can afford it, but most can't. [1]: https://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/ https://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/ [2]: https://uscollegeinternational.com/2019/10/03/cheap-engineering-schools-in-usa/ https://uscollegeinternational.com/2019/10/03/cheap-engineer... [3]: https://studyabroad.careers360.com/articles/engineering-in-usa-know-study-cost https://studyabroad.careers360.com/articles/engineering-in-u...
  - jkelleyrtp 5y ago
    Olin provides a 50% scholarship for everyone and does really well at financial aid. I currently go here :). In the beginning of the school's lifetime, everyone had a 100% scholarship. It's a common tactic for schools to say their college is the same price as MIT/Harvard but not actually cost that much. Plus, many schools are moving towards a co-op/hand son/project-based model, even public ones. University of Waterloo is such an example, and many state schools I know are also transitioning into a project-based model. It's not that more expensive than testing - especially given the fact that everyone has a computer, 3d printers and workshops are relatively cheap, and most undergrad projects aren't that expensive. Students tend to get internships, pay for their school, and move into high paying jobs immediately out of school because how much experience they have, even if they have to give up some theoretical basis. That being said, Olin generates many grad-school students that do well at research.
unixhero 5y ago
How can we help? Is it donations? I couldn't see the donation link.
- input_sh 5y ago
  Here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
  - unixhero 5y ago
    Thank you
driverdan 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bena 5y ago
  I don't think that's entirely fair to the candidates. I don't know your stance on Proctorio and I'm not going to air dirty laundry to an effective stranger. And any company or hiring manager who tries to bait me into bad-mouthing a company I've worked at gets a red flag from me.
  - yhoneycomb 5y ago
    Agreed. An employer could just as easily say they don’t want anyone who bad mouths their previous employers because it reflects poorly on them. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Only if the goal is simply "get a job, anywhere". If the interview is to mutually figure out if you should work for the company, there is no such thing as a damned if you do, damned if you don't; all it can be is a "they care about what I care about" or "I don't want to work there".
      - yhoneycomb 5y ago
        Being able to pick your job that way is a privilege, and it certainly isn’t granted to everyone in all fields
        5y ago
Trias11 5y ago
How's universities are not yet part of class action lawsuit for gross abuse of privacy, students rights and segregation due to the personal characteristics?
- ranvel 5y ago
  It's endemic. I think critical mass at this point would just be a single case such as this one to catch fire in the national media. Something is missing from the equation and my guess is maybe deep pockets or familiar actors.
yowlingcat 5y ago
I want to have faith in the justice system to eventually bring this company to heel -- to believe that what they're doing is not just ethically wrong, but also in severe conflict with the law and liable to open them to significant litigation risk. Any practicing lawyers here that have thoughts about this?
jtsiskin 5y ago
Does anyone have a link to the tweets and shared videos?
linepupdesign 5y ago
One of the problems with Academia is that they like to assume everyone should learn the same way, and look the same while they learn.
arp242 5y ago
Another lawsuit: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf-student-it-falsely-accused-copyright-infringement-get https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf... tl;dr: someone examined a bit of the JavaScript code. Proctorio DMCA'd it.
6510 5y ago
There was a time when calculators were not allowed. The solution was that since people can always have access to calculators they should be allowed to use them. I think that should work, if a student can use a computer to answer a question he can always use a computer to answer that question. It should be encouraged to do so, the school should make an effort providing- and keeping the answers online and available for download.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  I remember a prof telling the class "if you can figure out how to program your calculator to do this then go for it". I learned how to program my calculator in that class and not much else.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  this clearly doesn't work because most test questions for students are trivially Google-able. So then tests as they currently exist would not be able to differentiate someone who has studied and internalized the material from someone who Googles quickly. Tests would have to be re-written to require a lot more creativity, which is not only hard to do as a test writer, it's harder to grade and ultimately for students, requires even more effort (compared to rote memorization of facts or rules). So I don't think most students or instructors love this idea.
  - 6510 5y ago
    Yes ofcourse, you would have to adapt the test. Make it more goal oriented. What are we testing for anyway? Ability to do something? Looking up or memorizing things is different from applying them.
  - 6510 5y ago
    It just struck me that memorized facts and rules are extremely hard to update.
steelframe 5y ago
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 program, because the discrepancy between their GPA and the fact that they can't even begin to explain memset (one of many trivial examples I ran across) was so stark. Well, all that cheating certainly caught up with them when they were face-to-face with me trying to get a job. It must of been stressful and humiliating for them as they sat there hemming and hawing while I asked them elementary question after question that they couldn't even begin to answer. Or maybe not, depending on whatever lack of pride and sense of self-worth led them to cheat like they did in the first place. I'm sure many of them managed to get a job somewhere in industry, and whoever hired them got to deal with a hire who turned out to be an imposter. Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely impacted by the technical interview process to the point that they were intellectually paralyzed. But at least some of them I'm sure just didn't learn anything.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Perhaps people get stressed in interviews? For instance, I don't code in C that often, and if asked, I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature is `memset(dst, value, n)` or `memset(dst, n, value)`. My guess from intuition is the first, but I would be hemming and hawing a bit if asked in an interview something like that. Also, many CS programs are easy enough that you'll never even encounter a memset.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    From my personal experience (and that of many friends of mine) who interviewed at Google, 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. Knowing this context might actually explain the situation that the parent comment describes a bit better. It is absolutely possible, as you described, to be perfectly capable within your CS niche without ever bothering with memset. But in that case, you probably won't pick C as your interviewing language and won't state that you are proficient in it. Which is what, I suspect, might have happened in that scenario the parent comment is describing.
batmaniam 5y ago
> This is a civil action seeking a declaratory judgment of noninfringement under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 106, 107, as well as injunctive relief and damages for misrepresentation of copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) Oh cool, so the EFF is gonna claim a false DMCA filing. I hope the student will be made whole financially after what he had to go through; apparently he's been fighting this for a year.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  They need to go after the lawyers who signed off on the notice. That is the only way to get real accountability.
  - modsmustgo 5y ago
    ^Astrikes the portion of the law that says anything about responding to all claims "expeditiously", and replaces it with something that accurately represents the severity of the situation(s).^A edit: severity in relation to an actual copyright violation, not possible damages imagined in the accusers theoretical situation if the content was not removed. Some companies might gladly eat a fine if only 1/100 people challenge their sick interpretation of the law and it keeps the bad PR from getting out. I could bore you with far worse scenarios but I will not aid the authoritarians with any further information.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      The wording of the DMCA is irrelevant. All court officers take an oath to behave ethically. Submitting fraudulent documents because you're too lazy to exercise due diligence verifying the claim should result in meaningful punishment.
      - modsmustgo 5y ago
        Without reviewing the pasted code it's hard to know if the claim is fraudulent, but I can assure you the DMCA is not the right tool for the job as-is. Using the word "expeditiously" implies there is some immediate threat that must be dealt with to prevent grave damages to copyright holder. In reality maybe some sections of code were pasted for critique, clearly not to steal property from (c)holder. If only the most severe cases need to be handled "expeditiously" then MAYBE people wouldn't look at DMCA/DRM as a censorship tool. Right now though, its an automated nightmare which has no means for discriminating fair use of a small incomplete/unusable section of code vs someone posting full compiled binary. Great for them if they can prove the claim was fraudulent, it can only aid in the fight to fix this busted law that has been abused repeatedly to harm competition and critique. We have to fix it now before the cops start using it to shut down streamers by playing copyrighted music at them (oh wait this IS happening, we need to fix this stupid law already...).
jimnotgym 5y ago
Am I wrong to think Proctorio is a rubbish name. I keep thinking 'Proctology'.
unixhero 5y ago
You mean the ass company?
dang 5y ago
All: this thread discusses two distinct lawsuits. Originally there were two threads, but I merged them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217). Sorry! Now they're blended and there's not enough energy to reverse the entropy, so you'll need to track which is which as you read the thread. One is discussed in the OP. The other URL was https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883 https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883, but that doesn't give any background. There's more here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-online-test-proctoring-lawsuit-universities-students-coronavirus https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v... Edit: It turns out there have been quite a few previous threads too. Pointers to those at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558.
dang 5y ago
Related past threads: Students of color are getting flagged because testing software can’t see them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745582 - April 2021 (21 comments) Student Surveillance Vendor Proctorio Files SLAPP Lawsuit to Silence a Critic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250800 - Feb 2021 (40 comments) Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007 - Dec 2020 (106 comments) Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002730 - Nov 2020 (116 comments) An ed-tech specialist spoke out about proctoring software. Now he’s being sued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872084 - Oct 2020 (6 comments) EduTech Spyware Is Still Spyware: Proctorio Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450248 - Sept 2020 (9 comments)
stjohnswarts 5y ago
So proud of the EFF for stuff like this and it's why I'm a monthly donor.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I'm sorry but lock the computer down and have a proctor. It's worked for hundreds of years. Teaching younger people that it's okay to be surveilled 24/7 is frankly BS and we need a new Digital Bill of Rights as of yesterday. Humans deserve dignity, if you treat everyone like a criminal they start to feel like one and drive up their anxiety levels Also fuck Proctorio and its ilk
jacksavage 5y ago
Recently, I had an exam through ProctorU and thought I'd try to reclaim some privacy using Windows Sandbox when I learned that they utilize TeamViewer to take full control of your computer. This was not allowed only because parts of the control panel were disabled and they couldn't verify that I had only one monitor. I used a mirror to show them my laptop and desk but that was not sufficient. Spent a lot of time that weekend just trying to take the open-book exam. I really hope that universities will consider their students before adopting this type of software.
g_p 5y ago
Have been overseeing some exams being run at a well regarded university. No remote proctoring software (i.e. spyware) is in use. Students are taking their exams in the web browser of their choosing, on the platform of their choosing. They aren't sat dialled into a video call or anything else (but they have a link for a backup one in case they have issues or need clarifications on a typo etc.) It's straightforward - a well-designed examination should allow for adequate distinction between students, allowing everyone (who studied the course and learned) to show basic knowledge, and those who have more advanced understanding to demonstrate this. In designing assessments, questions were peer-reviewed to ensure they are not "easily googleable". They were designed to focus not on asking "what is X?" but on "tell us a way that Y could be achieved" or "give an example of how you would do Z". These questions are pretty hard to google, and time pressure makes it harder still. Focusing on understanding, and applying knowledge really seems to be the right way to design an exam. I can say from what I've seen and heard from colleagues so far, this approach is giving equal (if not more) differentiation among students than usual - the good students still perform well, and the poor students still perform poorly. And personally (from experience), I find it a more enjoyable to sit an exam that asks you to answer meaningful questions, than one that simply expects you to memorise and recite facts back. We're not bothered if you memorise the name - just describe how you'd solve the problem. From the number of people doing poorly even on fairly straightforward questions, I'm not hugely concerned that giving the exam online made any significant difference. A non-trivial number of students didn't even complete a mandatory question (which was clearly marked), so I assume they found it suitably challenging, even with access to the world's knowledge at their fingertips. I'd say that's a good exam.
cwkoss 5y ago
I've got to wonder how much child porn is on Proctorio's servers and how they deal with it. My guess is 'negligently'. Do they have systems to catch or prevent pervy teachers or proctorio employees who repeatedly watch recordings of students wearing revealing clothing, having wardrobe malfuctions, engaging in sexual activity without realizing they're being recorded, etc. How many pedofiles has proctorio caught? If it's zero, I don't think they are looking at all.
emmelaich 5y ago
Here's an odd copyright thing I came across recently .. this video (link below) has been marked as having a song when there is absolutely no fragment of the song in the video. The video was used for Forever Young by Youth Group. But this is the original footage, from Australian TV, from 1976. Waaay before even the original Forever Young, by Alphaville in 1984. I went to record a complaint but you have to be the owner, so I threw it in the too hard basket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nod5q7OHAF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nod5q7OHAF4
kaszanka 5y ago
Does anyone have copies/mirrors of the deleted Pastebin entries?

913 points by oxylibrium 5y ago

I think the bigger issue should be how the University came to choose something like Proctorio. This has been the case with many colleges around the world; disconnected or ignorant authorities keep signing up to whatever the SaaS salesman pitches to them, without vetting the company's background and records, and not listening to the affected parties in their arrogance. My own college struggled with online exams, and turned a deaf ear to students and even professors objecting against the platform being used (it's the most popular proctored exam platform). In the end, due to their own incompetence at handling exams, there turned out to be large-scale cheating and the college then forced the entire batch to give the exams again in the next term.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
There's probably a market opportunity to replace testing w/ something better. Some actual measurement of competence that's win/win/win for the students, instructors, and universities. Maybe a company come up with an interesting idea & get funding YC to scale the solution to that hard problem!
TrackerFF 5y ago
The problem was that COVID lockdowns took many schools by surprise, and instead of making exams designed for online platforms, they tried to fit regular into a online platform. Turns out, it's incredibly easy to cheat on those exams.

kasperni 5y ago

Background: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...

squarefoot 5y ago
The EFF took the student defense and sued back Proctorio yesterday. Good! https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf-student-it-falsely-accused-copyright-infringement-get https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf... https://www.eff.org/document/johnson-v-proctorio-complaint https://www.eff.org/document/johnson-v-proctorio-complaint
dang 5y ago
(This was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217, which we merged hither.)
- input_sh 5y ago
  This isn't the same, it's two different lawsuits. One is for a student by the name of Ian Linkletter from British Columbia. EFF is suing on behalf of Erik Johnson from Miami. The only thing they have in common is Proctorio.
  - dang 5y ago
    Ah—sorry, I definitely missed that. I doubt that the distinction makes much difference for HN purposes, though, since threads on either one of those will fuse into the same discussion.

Nextgrid 5y ago

His GoFundMe if you want to contribute: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio

tailspin2019 5y ago
I feel like this comment should be at the top - for anyone who feels strongly about this issue and didn’t spot this link further down in his Twitter thread. Have an upvote.
- areactnativedev 5y ago
  Totally agree
davesque 5y ago
Just donated. Thanks for this.
djoldman 5y ago
EFF: "...The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson..." GoFundMe page: "...My name is Ian Linkletter... wired over $50,000 to Arvay Finlay, LLP, doubling my legal defense fund. John Trueman is joined by Cathie Boies Parker, Q.C., and Mark Underhill..." Different lawsuits?
- rubatuga 5y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217
  - dang 5y ago
    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.

fxtentacle 5y ago

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 colors [1] that are difficult for AI to track or reading questions out aloud [2]. Because everyone knows that a good student is white, sits in a bright room, and will continuously stare at his/her PC screen while thinking about a difficult math problem, I guess. WTF? I am so glad that this kind of abuse was not yet common when I was in university. I love sitting in the (dark) basement, it helps me concentrate. And I tend to close my eyes a lot because it helps me visualize the problem. I'm sure this kind of misguided software would have failed me. And the worst part is: Bugs in this software will fail students in the real world. [4] So it is crucially important that this type of software receives a lot of scrutiny to make sure it works as planned. But it seems that Proctorio is suing this guy for doing exactly that: Documenting how the software is supposed to work by linking to Proctorio's YouTube videos. [1] https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728 https://twitter.com/uhreeb/status/1303139738065481728 [2] https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-after-ai-software-flags-cheating-2020-10 https://www.insider.com/viral-tiktok-student-fails-exam-afte... [3] https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions https://proctorio.com/frequently-asked-questions [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_half_way_through_my_exam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UBC/comments/g2ub05/god_kicked_out_...

senectus1 5y ago
wtf. this is some serious 1984 type shit.
Guthur 5y ago
It's actually very disappointing that this whole monitoring system was deemed necessary to begin with. How screwed is the system that anyone one would believe this level of intrusion should be part of the education process.
- buran77 5y ago

mkl 5y ago

I'm sympathetic to the concerned individual threatened and harmed by corporate lawsuits, but I don't think I share the underlying concern. > In Linkletter’s view, customers and users were not getting the whole story. The software performed all kinds of invasive tracking, like watching for “abnormal” eye movements, head movements, and other behaviors branded suspicious by the company. The invasive tracking and filming were of great concern to Linkletter, who was worried about students being penalized academically on the basis of Proctorio’s analysis. In an in-person invigilated test environment, the invigilator/proctor is watching students carefully for suspicious movements and behaviours. We don't call that an invasion of privacy. While I don't like commercial proctoring software (I have to use some, not Proctorio, for students who can't enter the country because of Covid-19), being videoed by a machine while you do a test is a) not much different from everyone else in the class who's being watched in person (you probably get watched less, actually), b) a way to make sure essential academic standards are upheld. No one is going to get penalised based on some fallible "AI" system; "suspicious" events get reviewed by a person and usually aren't suspicious at all.

anovikov 5y ago
But i think it's OK to install the software just on a laptop you'd use to take tests, some old laptop, and keep yourself free of surveillance otherwise right? If so, i can't see how is it a problem: someone absolutely has to be watched while taking a test. But if it's during whole education process, then yeah, it's ridiculous and worth fighting against.
- daemin 5y ago
  For some people "some old laptop" is all they actually have. I don't imagine a lot of students have both a desktop, a laptop, and "some old laptop" that they can use, so the software will get installed on the single computer they use (or share) to get their studies done on.
- eythian 5y ago
  Not everyone has an old laptop lying around they can use for such a purpose.

northrup 5y ago

It’s as if nobody has ever read George Orwell’s 1984: “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense.”

jcelerier 5y ago
> It’s as if nobody has ever read George Orwell’s 1984 no, they read it and think "how can we do even better"
- toyg 5y ago
  Orwell is the modern Machiavelli. In about 100 years, people will be wondering if 1984 was satire/criticism or an actual blueprint for effective government in the digital age, in the same way the real aim of Il Principe has been endlessly debated for centuries.
  - Rochus 5y ago
    In contrast, Orwell's fundamental rejection of the totalitarian surveillance society is well known and documented. Even in 100 years, those who are interested can read it all.
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      Unless, of course, such documentation will be surpressed. Which is pretty Orwellian, in fact, such operations are the protagonist's job.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      The irony is, 1984 is used as a manual of sorts by some.

everyone 5y ago

They actually called their software Proctorio !??!?! From the Greek "anus" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procto-#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procto-#English I am dying lol

SEMW 5y ago
...Or, just maybe, from the English word "proctor", meaning someone who invigilates an exam. Which is from the Latin "procurator" meaning overseer, unrelated to the Greek procto-
- everyone 5y ago
  Yeah i found that.. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proctor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proctor Though in fairness proctor / procurator are extremely antiquated english words, that have survived in common usage only in the US for some reason.
  - everyone 5y ago
    I reckon the majority of english speakers who read 'Proctorio' will immediately think anus.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      I think the majority of English speakers are completely unaware of this meaning. “Proctor” on the other hand, is something they would’ve heard of in an exam setting.
      - festive-minsky 5y ago
        Mabye I'm in the minority; I'd never heard of a "Proctor", but I have heard of a "Proctologist", which is an anus doctor
      - scbrg 5y ago
        Is this one of those regional things? Is the same word used throughout the entire English speaking world? Not a native English speaker myself, so my association was to the Greek word as well.

cycomanic 5y ago

So lots of people commenting that they don't have an issue with such software. Fine, but that's an entirely different debate. This is about the company sueing someone for criticising the software, by detailing how it is supposed to work. So even if we accept that we need such software, do we really want to go down the path that software companies can sue people for talking about how it works and criticising them?

zibzab 5y ago
Note also that the original lawsuit was for Ian tweeting about their public YouTube videos. How can this garbage lawauit be allowed to go on and cost a man $100.000 in lawyer fees??
- worik 5y ago
  Because the rules are made by lawyers
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    and because it's in US.
    - ayewo 5y ago
      Small correction: he’s being sued (by a US company) in Canada, under a new Canadian law.
      - koonsolo 5y ago
        Aha, that might change it indeed. Do they have the "loser pays the costs" policy or not?
        ayewo 5y ago
        Kind of. According to the EFF [1], he might be able to recover his legal costs: “ But Proctorio’s bad behavior has inspired a broad community of people to fight for better student privacy rights, and hundreds of people donated to Linkletter’s defense fund, which raised more than $50,000. And the PPPA gives him a greater chance of getting his fees back.” 1: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...

qmmmur 5y ago

If anyone here works for Proctorio. Please quit. Just quit.

BigGreenTurtle 5y ago
Looks like they outsource most of their company to Serbia, so I doubt many will see this.
barbazoo 5y ago
So many organizations you could say that for. They're probably paying people enough to keep them "happy".

helloguillecl 5y ago

I have a question for anyone who has seen similar situations. (I'm 35+ years old and have never work at a corporation except for some small gigs when I was 18, so I'm really ignorant of how these companies and internal decision making work) Why in the world would a company sue a critic, under weak legal arguments, thus buying themselves this kind of terrible negative publicity? Who will trust/like/or want to be associated with them now? I guess that this is to suppress criticism, but it must be expensive and difficult to do the same in every jurisdiction in which critics pop up, so it looks like a dumb strategy (let alone immoral). I mean the guy seems to be educated and good citizen, works at a Uni, you can publicly read his views on twitter. THe kind of person I tend to sympathize with. Without knowing who Proctorio is, I imagine them being the kind of company I don't want to be associated with, just because of this. I don't understand.

atdrummond 5y ago
This actually seems pretty effective to me. I now know that if I criticize Proctorio, I am likely on the hook for six figures in legal fees. That alone would be enough to scare off many people who would otherwise feel inclined to critique the product/company. In fact, winning the case may not even be that important to the firm.
- helloguillecl 5y ago
  But for example in my home country, there's no way I could be sued for this. I mean I could, but if I was, the legal fees would likely need to be assumed by the entity making this kind of ridiculous lawsuit. There are too many like me, in different jurisdictions, who cannot be silenced like this. And I'm still in awe that a modern democracy like Canada, would allow their citizens to be threatened using their legal system. It seems corrupt.
- t0mas88 5y ago
  Sure, you could scare some others into not criticizing you. But this case is going to be mainstream news now, while before their case only a small number of people would have read the tweets. And I think losing this case could get very expensive if the defendant manages to convince the judge it's a SLAPP case?

trhway 5y ago

s/Proctorio/Scientology/g would work just fine in the story https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-online-test-proctoring-lawsuit-universities-students-coronavirus https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin... Of course there are a lot of creepy software and sleezy businesses around. That is not the issue. The issue is the university administrators - the MBA style morons who overtook the universities - who subject their students to such a crap software. On the other side one can argue that that is really preparing students for the real life - after all they are going to come to the industry and will be subjected by the MBA style morons in the management there to the crap like Jira, Scrum, Slack (how being forced to constantly broadcast your status and be immediately responsive is that much different from Proctorio?), etc.

andyjohnson0 5y ago

His legal costs fundraising page is at [1] and gives come background to the harassment by Proctorio. [1] https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio

JPDSm8NTaAYBHd 5y ago

he/him

AYBABTME 5y ago

I wonder if anyone ever reverse-SLAPPd the humans behind the SLAPP suits.

dartharva 5y ago

My university forcibly pushed students into online proctored examinations with similar privacy-invasive software too, despite repeated concerns raised by both students and instructors. As expected, it turned out to be a colossal failure - students found the remote "invigilators" didn't pay attention for jack shit and started cheating in exams, leading to the college forcibly bringing the entire batch back to their campus and taking all the tests again along with the ones in the next term.

Toutouxc 5y ago

What a bunch of fuckheads. Donated. Btw how does the system work in Canada, after he wins this, will he be able to sue for damages and strip Proctorio clean or what?

Immune 5y ago

I’ve sent an email in regarding a CCPA request and got this response. “ Hello, Thanks for reaching out! I'm following up on your request. I want to let you know that no one at Proctorio has access to your information. Only authorized personnel at your school (Instructors or Administrators) can access any of the information collected while taking an exam. I'd be happy to discuss this further with your instructor if you would like to connect me to them. Best, Josh”

jimmySixDOF 5y ago

They should have just ignored this guy and gone on with life. Now the they got the EFF to deal with and it serves them right. There is another HN thread on this and a lot of people in it are more upset about the line of work Proctorio is in and how they do it than the fact they sued this minor irritating student. My opinion is there is simply no easy pain free way to do fraud auditing and that's that. I just recently took a professional PeopleCert exam online with a guy watching me through my webcam in a closed room I had to display in advance etc and temp installed some invasive application. So what ? If there was a better way to deal with the unfortunate fact that some people will cheat then I would be all for it but just getting all shook up about a temporary set of specific restrictions for a singular type milestone event is a little unrealistic in my book. But I am glad suing this kid is blowing up in their face.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moron4hire 5y ago
Maybe catching a few cheaters here and there isn't worth implementing The Panopticon for everyone else.
- fastball 5y ago
  The problem is that cheating (if allowed) does not end up being a few people here and there.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    Even if I were to believe you, so what? So a person gets a degree they don't deserve. Now they have all this student loan debt they can't pay off because they can't get and keep a job in their field because they didn't actually study. Or they do get a job and are able to keep it down, in which case, so what if they cheated? They're clearly capable. Let them keep doing the job. My solution: get rid of degrees completely. Can't cheat if there's no test to cheat on.

xtracto 5y ago

Proctorio did a sort of IAMA two years ago in reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/augdmo/ask_proctorio_anything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/augdmo/ask_proctorio_a... As a technologist I've worked in "online bullet loans", payments and other controversial verticals but for the life of me , I would never work in such a dirty business (as Proctorio). I'd rather tell people I work in porn-tech (where people are literally f*d) than this asinine proctoring systems. Just... no.

plank_time 5y ago

This is something that Student Unions around the country should pick up and launch protests against. Refusing the take tests administered by Proctorio and having very loud protests across the country would be a perfect way to drive them out of business.

jkelleyrtp 5y ago

I personally believe education should just move forward into a world where cheating is impossible. Hands-on schools like Olin College of Engineering make it practically impossible to cheat... because you actually have to build something! Sure, plagiarism is still an issue, but that's much easier to control for than monitoring students while they take a test.

arp242 5y ago
I don't disagree, but the issue here is one of scale and costs. Testing is just easy, cheap, and very ingrained to boot. A single teacher can teach dozens or hundreds of students. Olin charges $55,612/year tuition fees alone; the total costs are estimated at $79,024/year[1]. This is a lot higher than a lot of other "normal" universities[2], and even seems higher than most "top universities"[3]. I'm sure it's great if you can afford it, but most can't. [1]: https://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/ https://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/ [2]: https://uscollegeinternational.com/2019/10/03/cheap-engineering-schools-in-usa/ https://uscollegeinternational.com/2019/10/03/cheap-engineer... [3]: https://studyabroad.careers360.com/articles/engineering-in-usa-know-study-cost https://studyabroad.careers360.com/articles/engineering-in-u...
- jkelleyrtp 5y ago
  Olin provides a 50% scholarship for everyone and does really well at financial aid. I currently go here :). In the beginning of the school's lifetime, everyone had a 100% scholarship. It's a common tactic for schools to say their college is the same price as MIT/Harvard but not actually cost that much. Plus, many schools are moving towards a co-op/hand son/project-based model, even public ones. University of Waterloo is such an example, and many state schools I know are also transitioning into a project-based model. It's not that more expensive than testing - especially given the fact that everyone has a computer, 3d printers and workshops are relatively cheap, and most undergrad projects aren't that expensive. Students tend to get internships, pay for their school, and move into high paying jobs immediately out of school because how much experience they have, even if they have to give up some theoretical basis. That being said, Olin generates many grad-school students that do well at research.

unixhero 5y ago

How can we help? Is it donations? I couldn't see the donation link.

input_sh 5y ago
Here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
- unixhero 5y ago
  Thank you

driverdan 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bena 5y ago
I don't think that's entirely fair to the candidates. I don't know your stance on Proctorio and I'm not going to air dirty laundry to an effective stranger. And any company or hiring manager who tries to bait me into bad-mouthing a company I've worked at gets a red flag from me.
- yhoneycomb 5y ago
  Agreed. An employer could just as easily say they don’t want anyone who bad mouths their previous employers because it reflects poorly on them. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Only if the goal is simply "get a job, anywhere". If the interview is to mutually figure out if you should work for the company, there is no such thing as a damned if you do, damned if you don't; all it can be is a "they care about what I care about" or "I don't want to work there".
    - yhoneycomb 5y ago
      Being able to pick your job that way is a privilege, and it certainly isn’t granted to everyone in all fields
      - 5y ago

Trias11 5y ago

How's universities are not yet part of class action lawsuit for gross abuse of privacy, students rights and segregation due to the personal characteristics?

ranvel 5y ago
It's endemic. I think critical mass at this point would just be a single case such as this one to catch fire in the national media. Something is missing from the equation and my guess is maybe deep pockets or familiar actors.

yowlingcat 5y ago

I want to have faith in the justice system to eventually bring this company to heel -- to believe that what they're doing is not just ethically wrong, but also in severe conflict with the law and liable to open them to significant litigation risk. Any practicing lawyers here that have thoughts about this?

jtsiskin 5y ago

Does anyone have a link to the tweets and shared videos?

linepupdesign 5y ago

One of the problems with Academia is that they like to assume everyone should learn the same way, and look the same while they learn.

arp242 5y ago

Another lawsuit: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf-student-it-falsely-accused-copyright-infringement-get https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf... tl;dr: someone examined a bit of the JavaScript code. Proctorio DMCA'd it.

6510 5y ago

There was a time when calculators were not allowed. The solution was that since people can always have access to calculators they should be allowed to use them. I think that should work, if a student can use a computer to answer a question he can always use a computer to answer that question. It should be encouraged to do so, the school should make an effort providing- and keeping the answers online and available for download.

annoyingnoob 5y ago
I remember a prof telling the class "if you can figure out how to program your calculator to do this then go for it". I learned how to program my calculator in that class and not much else.
bagacrap 5y ago
this clearly doesn't work because most test questions for students are trivially Google-able. So then tests as they currently exist would not be able to differentiate someone who has studied and internalized the material from someone who Googles quickly. Tests would have to be re-written to require a lot more creativity, which is not only hard to do as a test writer, it's harder to grade and ultimately for students, requires even more effort (compared to rote memorization of facts or rules). So I don't think most students or instructors love this idea.
- 6510 5y ago
  Yes ofcourse, you would have to adapt the test. Make it more goal oriented. What are we testing for anyway? Ability to do something? Looking up or memorizing things is different from applying them.
- 6510 5y ago
  It just struck me that memorized facts and rules are extremely hard to update.

steelframe 5y ago

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 program, because the discrepancy between their GPA and the fact that they can't even begin to explain memset (one of many trivial examples I ran across) was so stark. Well, all that cheating certainly caught up with them when they were face-to-face with me trying to get a job. It must of been stressful and humiliating for them as they sat there hemming and hawing while I asked them elementary question after question that they couldn't even begin to answer. Or maybe not, depending on whatever lack of pride and sense of self-worth led them to cheat like they did in the first place. I'm sure many of them managed to get a job somewhere in industry, and whoever hired them got to deal with a hire who turned out to be an imposter. Of course I recognize that some people may have been severely impacted by the technical interview process to the point that they were intellectually paralyzed. But at least some of them I'm sure just didn't learn anything.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Perhaps people get stressed in interviews? For instance, I don't code in C that often, and if asked, I'm not sure I could remember off the top of my head if the function signature is `memset(dst, value, n)` or `memset(dst, n, value)`. My guess from intuition is the first, but I would be hemming and hawing a bit if asked in an interview something like that. Also, many CS programs are easy enough that you'll never even encounter a memset.
- filoleg 5y ago
  From my personal experience (and that of many friends of mine) who interviewed at Google, 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. Knowing this context might actually explain the situation that the parent comment describes a bit better. It is absolutely possible, as you described, to be perfectly capable within your CS niche without ever bothering with memset. But in that case, you probably won't pick C as your interviewing language and won't state that you are proficient in it. Which is what, I suspect, might have happened in that scenario the parent comment is describing.

batmaniam 5y ago

> This is a civil action seeking a declaratory judgment of noninfringement under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 106, 107, as well as injunctive relief and damages for misrepresentation of copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) Oh cool, so the EFF is gonna claim a false DMCA filing. I hope the student will be made whole financially after what he had to go through; apparently he's been fighting this for a year.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
They need to go after the lawyers who signed off on the notice. That is the only way to get real accountability.
- modsmustgo 5y ago
  ^Astrikes the portion of the law that says anything about responding to all claims "expeditiously", and replaces it with something that accurately represents the severity of the situation(s).^A edit: severity in relation to an actual copyright violation, not possible damages imagined in the accusers theoretical situation if the content was not removed. Some companies might gladly eat a fine if only 1/100 people challenge their sick interpretation of the law and it keeps the bad PR from getting out. I could bore you with far worse scenarios but I will not aid the authoritarians with any further information.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    The wording of the DMCA is irrelevant. All court officers take an oath to behave ethically. Submitting fraudulent documents because you're too lazy to exercise due diligence verifying the claim should result in meaningful punishment.
    - modsmustgo 5y ago
      Without reviewing the pasted code it's hard to know if the claim is fraudulent, but I can assure you the DMCA is not the right tool for the job as-is. Using the word "expeditiously" implies there is some immediate threat that must be dealt with to prevent grave damages to copyright holder. In reality maybe some sections of code were pasted for critique, clearly not to steal property from (c)holder. If only the most severe cases need to be handled "expeditiously" then MAYBE people wouldn't look at DMCA/DRM as a censorship tool. Right now though, its an automated nightmare which has no means for discriminating fair use of a small incomplete/unusable section of code vs someone posting full compiled binary. Great for them if they can prove the claim was fraudulent, it can only aid in the fight to fix this busted law that has been abused repeatedly to harm competition and critique. We have to fix it now before the cops start using it to shut down streamers by playing copyrighted music at them (oh wait this IS happening, we need to fix this stupid law already...).

jimnotgym 5y ago

Am I wrong to think Proctorio is a rubbish name. I keep thinking 'Proctology'.

unixhero 5y ago

You mean the ass company?

dang 5y ago

All: this thread discusses two distinct lawsuits. Originally there were two threads, but I merged them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217). Sorry! Now they're blended and there's not enough energy to reverse the entropy, so you'll need to track which is which as you read the thread. One is discussed in the OP. The other URL was https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883 https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883, but that doesn't give any background. There's more here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-online-test-proctoring-lawsuit-universities-students-coronavirus https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21526792/proctorio-onlin... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-vendor-proctorio-files-slapp-lawsuit-silence-critic https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v... Edit: It turns out there have been quite a few previous threads too. Pointers to those at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907558.

dang 5y ago

Related past threads: Students of color are getting flagged because testing software can’t see them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745582 - April 2021 (21 comments) Student Surveillance Vendor Proctorio Files SLAPP Lawsuit to Silence a Critic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250800 - Feb 2021 (40 comments) Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007 - Dec 2020 (106 comments) Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25002730 - Nov 2020 (116 comments) An ed-tech specialist spoke out about proctoring software. Now he’s being sued - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872084 - Oct 2020 (6 comments) EduTech Spyware Is Still Spyware: Proctorio Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450248 - Sept 2020 (9 comments)

stjohnswarts 5y ago

So proud of the EFF for stuff like this and it's why I'm a monthly donor.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I'm sorry but lock the computer down and have a proctor. It's worked for hundreds of years. Teaching younger people that it's okay to be surveilled 24/7 is frankly BS and we need a new Digital Bill of Rights as of yesterday. Humans deserve dignity, if you treat everyone like a criminal they start to feel like one and drive up their anxiety levels Also fuck Proctorio and its ilk

jacksavage 5y ago

Recently, I had an exam through ProctorU and thought I'd try to reclaim some privacy using Windows Sandbox when I learned that they utilize TeamViewer to take full control of your computer. This was not allowed only because parts of the control panel were disabled and they couldn't verify that I had only one monitor. I used a mirror to show them my laptop and desk but that was not sufficient. Spent a lot of time that weekend just trying to take the open-book exam. I really hope that universities will consider their students before adopting this type of software.

g_p 5y ago

Have been overseeing some exams being run at a well regarded university. No remote proctoring software (i.e. spyware) is in use. Students are taking their exams in the web browser of their choosing, on the platform of their choosing. They aren't sat dialled into a video call or anything else (but they have a link for a backup one in case they have issues or need clarifications on a typo etc.) It's straightforward - a well-designed examination should allow for adequate distinction between students, allowing everyone (who studied the course and learned) to show basic knowledge, and those who have more advanced understanding to demonstrate this. In designing assessments, questions were peer-reviewed to ensure they are not "easily googleable". They were designed to focus not on asking "what is X?" but on "tell us a way that Y could be achieved" or "give an example of how you would do Z". These questions are pretty hard to google, and time pressure makes it harder still. Focusing on understanding, and applying knowledge really seems to be the right way to design an exam. I can say from what I've seen and heard from colleagues so far, this approach is giving equal (if not more) differentiation among students than usual - the good students still perform well, and the poor students still perform poorly. And personally (from experience), I find it a more enjoyable to sit an exam that asks you to answer meaningful questions, than one that simply expects you to memorise and recite facts back. We're not bothered if you memorise the name - just describe how you'd solve the problem. From the number of people doing poorly even on fairly straightforward questions, I'm not hugely concerned that giving the exam online made any significant difference. A non-trivial number of students didn't even complete a mandatory question (which was clearly marked), so I assume they found it suitably challenging, even with access to the world's knowledge at their fingertips. I'd say that's a good exam.

cwkoss 5y ago

I've got to wonder how much child porn is on Proctorio's servers and how they deal with it. My guess is 'negligently'. Do they have systems to catch or prevent pervy teachers or proctorio employees who repeatedly watch recordings of students wearing revealing clothing, having wardrobe malfuctions, engaging in sexual activity without realizing they're being recorded, etc. How many pedofiles has proctorio caught? If it's zero, I don't think they are looking at all.

emmelaich 5y ago

Here's an odd copyright thing I came across recently .. this video (link below) has been marked as having a song when there is absolutely no fragment of the song in the video. The video was used for Forever Young by Youth Group. But this is the original footage, from Australian TV, from 1976. Waaay before even the original Forever Young, by Alphaville in 1984. I went to record a complaint but you have to be the owner, so I threw it in the too hard basket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nod5q7OHAF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nod5q7OHAF4

kaszanka 5y ago

Does anyone have copies/mirrors of the deleted Pastebin entries?