28 ms·

Father-son duo helped techies ‘hack exams’, earn top scores for big payday

169 points by rustoo 5y ago

injidup 5y ago
The article makes it sounds like the perpetrators used some high tech hacking to do this. In effect they probably just used some kind of normal screen sharing like msteams did the exam for the client and pressed ok.
- JanisL 5y ago
  It honestly reminds me of the incident from a few years back where people were climbing the walls of buildings to help people inside cheat: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indian-parents-scale-school-wall-to-help-students-cheat-on-exams/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indian-parents-scale-school-wal... and https://news.yahoo.com/india-police-arrest-1-000-over-fresh-exam-142547419.html https://news.yahoo.com/india-police-arrest-1-000-over-fresh-...
- nitn 5y ago
  That's Indian Police. They simply don't have the computer literacy among them. The article says 'VOIP calls', I'm pretty sure that's just WhatsApp calls and Police got excited that someone is using WhatsApp calls to do their dirty work.
newyankee 5y ago
The world needs a lot of Physical examination testing spaces that are run on open standards but which can be rented by different institutions. These physical spaces should have the most stringent rules to prevent unethical behaviour. It is difficult to depend on honor system in ultra competitive societies like India and as an Indian it has impacts honest people like me more. Having said the above, unfortunately there are very few ways to do all round assessment of individuals in a purely objective manner. Human biases would always be there in subjective assessment and an interesting thing i see in India is that a lot of people mistake English speaking ability and communication skills for overall ability.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Universities and community colleges will typically let you use their exam rooms (with proctors) if you call ahead and schedule with them (sometimes with a fee).
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    Yes definitely. I've used this one [1] multiple times because it is a short distance from Chicago's central business district and they are responsive and highly competent for just a small amount of money. I think that when you look at public university systems in the USA, you'll see that they already have an internal need to offer test proctoring because they have students temporarily at one campus location but enrolled at a different one. Offering the service to the outside public is not much extra effort on their part. [1] https://testing.uic.edu/tests-administered/proctoring-services/ https://testing.uic.edu/tests-administered/proctoring-servic...
- np_tedious 5y ago
  I took a few actuarial exams at center like this (USA, passed some failed others). I was pretty impressed. Cost was fair, seemed like it'd be hard to cheat. Most common exams being taken there looked like TOEFL, GRE, MCAT. I don't see why more professional certs couldn't do the same
- TranquilMarmot 5y ago
  If people are having to hire other people to cheat on tests like this, it makes me wonder if it's the system that's broken. Maybe tests aren't the best way to judge somebody's capabilities.
  - chickenmonkey 5y ago
    Any system will have people who aren't performing well, and some fraction of those people will be tempted to cheat. Cheating in this case doesn't provide any indication that the system is broken.
avree 5y ago
They used Remote Desktop software, as it says in the article. Same way thousands of scams are run, etc. No "hacking" here.
14 5y ago
The site hijacks your browser and won't let you go back. Hate it when sites do that is there anyway to prevent that kind of behavior? Thanks
- dsnr 5y ago
  Hold the back button, and pick a page from the recent history.
- nefitty 5y ago
  I can't find any updates on the Chrome "fixes" for this. The best way to handle it is by long-pressing the back button to see a fuller history list. You can then hop to the page previous to the one that hijacked the button. It's infuriating to me as well.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Browse with JS off. If a site doesn't work without it, leave. Poor design correlates with poor content. If you really want to read it, use a proxy site like archive or outline.
  - codeisawesome 5y ago
    I love Safari's battery-life preserving ability, but I hate that it doesn't support a JavaScript Allow-list (you can only nuke JS across the web or have it always-on). uBlock Origin (my favourite and solely-trusted ad blocker) doesn't support recent Safari versions. Anyone know of any good options in this scenario? Either a trustworthy and working ad-blocker for Safari - or a battery preserving browser for the Mac with an extension set like Chromium/Firefox's...
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      I'm in the same boat with an older Firefox -- JavaScript is either on or off. I generally keep it off while browsing for information. When I'm doing local dev or working with trustworthy sites only, I turn it on. After a while, the process of toggling it is almost automatic, though it still takes a few clicks and typing. As I mentioned earlier, I've grown to avoid sites which tell me JS is required, and have found that it's mostly a good thing, because that type of design usually correlates with poor quality content, so they're really doing me a huge favor by denying me.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
It was my impression that the exams for upper education had so much cheating, it basically amounted to "if you're not cheating, you're not trying". duckduckgo for "india exams cheating": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=india+exams+cheating&t=newext&atb=v279-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fcbsnews1.cbsistatic.com%2Fhub%2Fi%2F2015%2F03%2F20%2F2954ade0-f2fa-467f-a2e9-c81442ff23d1%2Findiacheatingap408013340760.jpg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=india+exams+cheating&t=newext&atb=... Uh, don't turn off safesearch btw. Whoa that was crazy.
- blueblisters 5y ago
  Most of these images appear to be from a single instance of cheating from a state in India (Bihar) with relatively poor law enforcement. I imagine that in more higher stakes exams like the JEE, parents will likely not be able to get away with passing notes to their kids through the classroom window.
  - yeshok 5y ago
    That is correct. In pan-India exams like the JEE and NEET, and even in high-stakes state-level exams, it would be impossible to cheat so blatantly. That doesn't mean cheating doesn't happen, but it would require you to know someone in the examining body. And, they would be risking their careers and their liberty to help you.
dlhavema 5y ago
We recently had a guy interview at our company and he had someone else do the technical part. He himself talked to the non technical people and his "colleague" talked to me and the other engineers. He looked nothing like his linked in profile, but i gave him the benefit of the doubt since maybe it was an old picture... It wasn't. All this was over video chat..
- buporin 5y ago
  Reminds me of these actual cases of interviewees who tried to cheat their way during online interview sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpGGmE4ayLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpGGmE4ayLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gS6TykNQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gS6TykNQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n77BUW-2hhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n77BUW-2hhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDk9UQcI8dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDk9UQcI8dU
warner25 5y ago
I'm a US military officer working in an IT career field, and we're all required to maintain some of these certifications. As in we literally can't have a privileged account to touch our own LAN unless a third-party entity like CompTIA, (ISC)2, ISACA, Cisco, or SANS deems us fit. The whole ecosystem and culture around this is just ridiculous. Despite entering this career field with undergraduate and graduate degrees in CS from serious universities, the first (and only) question that people asked me was, "what certs do you have?" People go around talking about which "cert" they want next, and which ones are the hardest to get. People list all their "certs" in their email signatures after their name. People really measure their worth, and the worth of others, by these things. So I've played the game by reading the exam guides and taking the tests (the military pays the $300-$1,500 testing fees for us in most cases, at least) and got "my certs." Now I'm a CISSP, CISM, CEH, and CCNA. The content of the exams isn't all bad; it's certainly different from academic CS and more applicable to managing IT. But these are just multiple-choice tests that one can easily pass with superficial knowledge obtained from a 100-page exam guide. Someone asked if CISSP was the hardest test I've ever taken... no... my final exams for Theory of Computation and Advanced Algorithms were... Anyway, I've come to find out that most people don't even read the exam guides to learn what little material they contain. The typical approach, apparently, is to acquire a "dump," which is the bank of actual questions, and then repeatedly take "practice exams" so that they've already seen (and memorized) all of the questions that they might encounter during the actual exam. So, blatant cheating. I think this is very well known throughout the military IT community, and probably among the certification vendors too, but everyone turns a blind eye to it. If we stopped it, then most of our staff wouldn't be allowed to work on the LAN (see above), and then how would we get anything done? If the certification vendors stopped it, then the money would dry up as fewer people would take their exams.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Same goes for financial industry regulatory exams. Very little actual learning, a lot of remembering stupid stuff. It's no wonder people want to cheat. I've also done network stuff, it's quite a lot more technical. But in the end it's still a silly thing to do multiple choice for. Debugging a network is a skill that's hard to boil down to that kind of exam, though to be fair they do show you how in the courses.
buporin 5y ago
Reminds me of these cases that come from India. as another commenter here commented, "It is difficult to depend on honor system in ultra competitive societies like India and as an Indian it has impacts honest people like me more". These are degree mills that offer degrees for a price: https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/inside-delhi-hidden-fake-degree-shops-1578941-2019-08-09 https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/inside-delhi-hidd... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3123929/indias-fake-degrees-hundreds-singapore-malaysia-us-canada-left https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3123929/indias... https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2021/oct/31/three-more-held-in-fake-degree-certificates-case-in-kochi-2377846.html https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2021/oct/31/th... https://indianexpress.com/article/india/up-govt-fake-degrees-probe-university-vc-7598202/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/up-govt-fake-degrees... https://redwiretimes.com/netizens-flood-ida-with-job-applications-using-fake-degrees-after-it-defended-its-hiring-of-woman-who-holds-fake-mba/ https://redwiretimes.com/netizens-flood-ida-with-job-applica...
vishnugupta 5y ago
Gaming education system is a huge cottage industry in India. Here's a list of "services" for sale I know of first hand. 1. Impersonation during an exam/interview. 2. Project work; end to end. 4. University degrees, including PhD end-to-end. You just need to attend a few classes. A poor or lower-middle income family has very very few escape routes into middle income group. Educational credentials is one of the best ways. A college degree opens multiple doors; government jobs, interviews in private companies etc., So the clamour to get educational degree in India is almost unprecedented. For example, the competition to get into IITs is immense. Google "Kota tuitions" for gory details. Here's a small example[1] [1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/why-kota-is-so-killing/articleshow/50421411.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-f...
- nsonha 5y ago
  > A poor or lower-middle income family has very very few escape routes into middle income group. Educational credentials is one of the best ways This is true universally, so I don't think it explains why some people in some countries are extra desperate to get degrees
  - tangoalpha 5y ago
    The desperation is more in countries where being in poor or lower-middle income family restricts access to affordable quality schooling for kids, affordable sheltering, quality medicine or insurance. Hence you see more such desperation in under-developed or developing countries like India.
  - ghoda 5y ago
    There is an extreme lack of professional educational institutions in India.
  - wyclif 5y ago
    Don't forget, India has the caste social system which is what differentiates their brand of toxic status, social, and income climbing.
  - deleted 5y ago
pdm55 5y ago
We have a certification system for every skill in Australia. Are you a Probation and Parole officer? A preschool worker? An ambulance worker? Working in the food industry selling cheese? You will need a certificate for these skills. Have you been doing the job for 20 years? Sorry. From about 2002, Australian Quality Training Framework (now reorganised as the Australian Quality Framework) deemed you unable to continue working in your area of expertise and demanded you get certification. Outward Bound instructors with 20 years experience would suddenly find that a neophyte with a certificate was deemed able to direct dangerous rock climbing experiences, while they could only look on in dread. Certification was a turf fight between different bureaucracies: State versus Federal. Of course, the Federal Government won the battle, as they controlled the purse strings. University qualifications and technical college qualifications, all provided by state institutions, were ignored. A plumber had no need to sit a technical college exam. A federally-approved privately-run Registered Training Organisation (RTO) could provide you with the appropriate certification. It was all too easy. Hand over the money and take the certification test. The hack for a fork lift driver's certificate was to turn over the test paper: the answers were written on the back! It should have been a national scandal. But, of course, we Aussies are too compliant. And in the end, the federal bureaucrats expanded their empires. I seem angry. And yes I am. Worthless paper certification is hiding the risks being taken with Australia’s future.
- moritonal 5y ago
  That is biased towards people who succeed in education. The trade jobs are traditionally where the disabled/dyslexic/neuro-quirky(?) excel IMHO because of the one-size-for-all nature of exams.
- emmelaich 5y ago
  I've been hearing / seeing ads for this recently in Aus. https://qualifyme.edu.au/rpl-skills-trade-recognition/ https://qualifyme.edu.au/rpl-skills-trade-recognition/ Pretty sure it's a revenue raiser and does fuck-all for anyone else.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  I mostly agree, and this isn't a defense of certs, but - > You will need a certificate for these skills. Have you been doing the job for 20 years? Sorry. I've encountered an alarming number of people with decades of "experience" who were in fact incompetent. Certs are a bad solution, but they're a bad solution to a real problem.
DeathArrow 5y ago
What's wrong with journalists? Using remote desktop to take the exam on behalf of someone else is "hacking"?
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Blame the dumb laws - it is unauthorized usage of the tester's system which is how hacking is often defined legally. It is a distasteful and a low technical knowledge equivocation of unauthorized computer access is always "hacking" but I can see why they would use it even without sensationalization from typical attempts at accessibility without mountains of exposition for amateurs mixed in.
- panzagl 5y ago
  Yeah, only one guy is wearing a hoodie, and it's light grey. Everyone knows hackers wear dark grey hoodies.
belter 5y ago
So many fascinating items in this case for multiple reasons: - From an Expert who is good enough to pass an enormous variety of IT certifications but reckless and inept to cover his tracks. - The splashing of the suspect photos on a national newspaper before their conviction in court. Love the note under their photo... "Photo by special arrangement" - The ability to easily overcome most software cheating detection software etc... There is a lot on criticism here of the education system in India and the Certification industry. Although many of the points raised are relevant, lets not forget that cheating in unfortunately prevalent at the most exquisite levels of Academic research in the so called developed countries. Random sample: ------------------------------------------ "More than 60 Fall CS50 Enrollees Faced Academic Dishonesty Charges" https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/3/cs50-cheating-cases-2017/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/3/cs50-cheating-ca... "Luxembourg Prime Minister Bettel accused of massive plagiarism - Only two pages of 56-page university dissertation were plagiarism-free, magazine investigation finds" https://www.politico.eu/article/luxembourg-prime-minister-bettel-faces-plagiarism-university-degree-dissertation/ https://www.politico.eu/article/luxembourg-prime-minister-be... "German education minister quits over PhD plagiarism" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/09/german-education-minister-quits-phd-plagiarism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/09/german-educati... "Guttenberg plagiarism scandal" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scandal "2012 Harvard cheating scandal" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal ------------------------------------------
- ghoda 5y ago
  While I expected to see it happen in the abstract, the education minister quitting over PhD plagiarism is just poetic
- derbOac 5y ago
  Also, remember these are the cases that: 1. Were caught. 2. Were publicized. 3. Were indisputable, and not in some grey boundary area.
jhgb 5y ago
> Father-son duo helped techies ‘hack exams’ Oh, that's cool... ...wait, you actually meant "to cheat", not "to solve a technical problem in a clever way".
qwerty456127 5y ago
Competitive exams are evil, a serious problem in Asian countries including India. People have to survive inhumanly hard, exhausting studying regimes just to land a job which hardly uses a humble portion of what they learnt. Exams should only check if the attendant is skilled sufficiently for the degree/job. Competitive exams could have their organic place in the world as a kind of professional intellectual sports though.
- elldoubleyew 5y ago
  >People have to survive inhumanly hard, exhausting studying regimes just to land a job which hardly uses a humble portion of what they learnt. I always thought the purpose of these kinds of exams was to determine if you had enough work ethic to pass them. The information actually included is peripheral at best most of the time.
- Jensson 5y ago
  The exams are hard since it is a poor country without many good university spots. There isn't much you can do about that, except increase the number of spots until the requirements to get in are no longer that high. Edit: And the main problem with increasing the number of seats is corruption. You can't just give people money and expect them to create an institution that actually educates people. All of the processes required to make that work will have to be made and expanded etc. It takes a long time to go from corrupt poor country into a modern country where things like education exists in abundance.
iwasnothere 5y ago
Just like drugs, this is unsolvable because there's just so much money to be had without basically banning foreign students from attending American universities. I have a close friend who used to get paid $5k-$10k per (Chinese) student to take tests fore them until she started looking too old to pass for a student. When she aged out she just started a "Test Prep Center", and now has about a dozen test takers working for her. She spent more $$ on her house in Palo Alto than I will make in my career. That's just capitalism.
- dhosek 5y ago
  There's a part of me that thinks it would have been nice to do college again after I finished the first time but get paid to take someone else's classes (except for the moral issues).
Communitivity 5y ago
My opinion is that these tests are not to test competence, but to mitigate risk by transferring that risk elsewhere. Kind of a version of the 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM'. If you give a user sudo privileges, and then they don't know what they're doing so they rm -rf or worse, then management puts you squarely to blame. If the user has a cert you can point to, and regs that say users with that cert may get sudo privileges, then you can point to the regs and the cert so that now the certifying organization is to blame. Or more likely the user will be blamed, malice will assumed instead of ignorance. Which brings to mind Bear's rule 11 (I'm Bear): Never attribute to malice, without investigation, what you can attribute to ignorance, as ignorance is common and malice is not.
bewocwnavy 5y ago
I know one Indian friend in a renowned company who came in Canada as an International student. He completed his 2 year diploma course in IT/Technical support. After the course, he did not get the interviews due to lack of Canadian experience. To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer. Within a week with new resume, he gathered 3 top offers in Ontario, negotiated and signed $70K per year with XYZ company as Lead Operations Specialist. Not just in India, even in Canada, to make the top dollar and join upper middle class league, new breed of cons always game the system and use shortcuts. Once they join the class, they game the real estate market. Cycle goes on and on. They always win, rest of innocent ones who comply with rules and system are stuck behind with minimum wage job and renting single rooms, never get to ever see a dream house of their own.
- vitus 5y ago
  > To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer. Within a week with new resume, he gathered 3 top offers in Ontario, negotiated and signed $70K per year with XYZ company as Lead Operations Specialist. That sounds like a failure of the companies to do a proper background check and follow up for proof of employment.
  - yardie 5y ago
    I ordered a copy of my background record and holy shit was it missing a lot of information. High schools jobs were listed, college work study jobs were listed, 15 years of employment was missing, followed by small patches of employment here and there. My credit record was only marginally better, it didn't have any employers listed of my 14 years working abroad. If it wasn't on my CV no one would know. And since some of these companies were merged, acquired, or out of business it's very hard to track down. HR can realistically only check your last employer because anything older than a few years may as well be made up.
    - vitus 5y ago
      Well... yes and no. If it is indeed a "top company" that's still recognizable as such today, then I'd expect it to be around in some form. I imagine HR could ask you for a proof-of-employment letter if you said you worked at Microsoft and Facebook* for a couple of years but neither showed up on a background check. I imagine they'd be even more suspicious if you additionally didn't have any references from either company. * Feel free to replace with any other "top companies" of your choosing
alisonkisk 5y ago
> We received intel that several services are available on the dark web, Is this true, or just made up to sound scary? I'm not convinced th clients wouldn't know how to use "dark web" or why this business would bother.
nnain 5y ago
> "They have been running this scam since the Covid-19 outbreak, as all examinations shifted to an online mode."
evancoop 5y ago
Whether it's a scandal of this ilk, or the Lori Laughlin variant thereof, at some point, don't we need to consider the underlying incentive structure of the broader system rather than the specific behavior of the bad actors? If the dwindling path to social mobility runs through exams and a shrinking list of institutions, then there will be those who respond to these incentives unethically. How do we change the incentives?
bostonsre 5y ago
Hacking examee's computer == screen sharing with control given up?
dmingod666 5y ago
Hard to do this on on kubernetes exams tbh.
AdamN 5y ago
I remember a friend who's dad knew somebody from school who had a great way to make money. He would 'guarantee' he could get somebody into one of their top 3 schools because he had inside contacts. If he was unsuccessful he would return the money as part of his guarantee (he did actually do this, it wasn't a total fraud). The brilliance was that he did nothing. If the person got in he would keep the money. If not, he would return the money!

169 points by rustoo 5y ago

The article makes it sounds like the perpetrators used some high tech hacking to do this. In effect they probably just used some kind of normal screen sharing like msteams did the exam for the client and pressed ok.

JanisL 5y ago
It honestly reminds me of the incident from a few years back where people were climbing the walls of buildings to help people inside cheat: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indian-parents-scale-school-wall-to-help-students-cheat-on-exams/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indian-parents-scale-school-wal... and https://news.yahoo.com/india-police-arrest-1-000-over-fresh-exam-142547419.html https://news.yahoo.com/india-police-arrest-1-000-over-fresh-...
nitn 5y ago
That's Indian Police. They simply don't have the computer literacy among them. The article says 'VOIP calls', I'm pretty sure that's just WhatsApp calls and Police got excited that someone is using WhatsApp calls to do their dirty work.

newyankee 5y ago

The world needs a lot of Physical examination testing spaces that are run on open standards but which can be rented by different institutions. These physical spaces should have the most stringent rules to prevent unethical behaviour. It is difficult to depend on honor system in ultra competitive societies like India and as an Indian it has impacts honest people like me more. Having said the above, unfortunately there are very few ways to do all round assessment of individuals in a purely objective manner. Human biases would always be there in subjective assessment and an interesting thing i see in India is that a lot of people mistake English speaking ability and communication skills for overall ability.

jimbob45 5y ago
Universities and community colleges will typically let you use their exam rooms (with proctors) if you call ahead and schedule with them (sometimes with a fee).
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  Yes definitely. I've used this one [1] multiple times because it is a short distance from Chicago's central business district and they are responsive and highly competent for just a small amount of money. I think that when you look at public university systems in the USA, you'll see that they already have an internal need to offer test proctoring because they have students temporarily at one campus location but enrolled at a different one. Offering the service to the outside public is not much extra effort on their part. [1] https://testing.uic.edu/tests-administered/proctoring-services/ https://testing.uic.edu/tests-administered/proctoring-servic...
np_tedious 5y ago
I took a few actuarial exams at center like this (USA, passed some failed others). I was pretty impressed. Cost was fair, seemed like it'd be hard to cheat. Most common exams being taken there looked like TOEFL, GRE, MCAT. I don't see why more professional certs couldn't do the same
TranquilMarmot 5y ago
If people are having to hire other people to cheat on tests like this, it makes me wonder if it's the system that's broken. Maybe tests aren't the best way to judge somebody's capabilities.
- chickenmonkey 5y ago
  Any system will have people who aren't performing well, and some fraction of those people will be tempted to cheat. Cheating in this case doesn't provide any indication that the system is broken.

avree 5y ago

They used Remote Desktop software, as it says in the article. Same way thousands of scams are run, etc. No "hacking" here.

14 5y ago

The site hijacks your browser and won't let you go back. Hate it when sites do that is there anyway to prevent that kind of behavior? Thanks

dsnr 5y ago
Hold the back button, and pick a page from the recent history.
nefitty 5y ago
I can't find any updates on the Chrome "fixes" for this. The best way to handle it is by long-pressing the back button to see a fuller history list. You can then hop to the page previous to the one that hijacked the button. It's infuriating to me as well.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Browse with JS off. If a site doesn't work without it, leave. Poor design correlates with poor content. If you really want to read it, use a proxy site like archive or outline.
- codeisawesome 5y ago
  I love Safari's battery-life preserving ability, but I hate that it doesn't support a JavaScript Allow-list (you can only nuke JS across the web or have it always-on). uBlock Origin (my favourite and solely-trusted ad blocker) doesn't support recent Safari versions. Anyone know of any good options in this scenario? Either a trustworthy and working ad-blocker for Safari - or a battery preserving browser for the Mac with an extension set like Chromium/Firefox's...
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    I'm in the same boat with an older Firefox -- JavaScript is either on or off. I generally keep it off while browsing for information. When I'm doing local dev or working with trustworthy sites only, I turn it on. After a while, the process of toggling it is almost automatic, though it still takes a few clicks and typing. As I mentioned earlier, I've grown to avoid sites which tell me JS is required, and have found that it's mostly a good thing, because that type of design usually correlates with poor quality content, so they're really doing me a huge favor by denying me.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

It was my impression that the exams for upper education had so much cheating, it basically amounted to "if you're not cheating, you're not trying". duckduckgo for "india exams cheating": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=india+exams+cheating&t=newext&atb=v279-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fcbsnews1.cbsistatic.com%2Fhub%2Fi%2F2015%2F03%2F20%2F2954ade0-f2fa-467f-a2e9-c81442ff23d1%2Findiacheatingap408013340760.jpg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=india+exams+cheating&t=newext&atb=... Uh, don't turn off safesearch btw. Whoa that was crazy.

blueblisters 5y ago
Most of these images appear to be from a single instance of cheating from a state in India (Bihar) with relatively poor law enforcement. I imagine that in more higher stakes exams like the JEE, parents will likely not be able to get away with passing notes to their kids through the classroom window.
- yeshok 5y ago
  That is correct. In pan-India exams like the JEE and NEET, and even in high-stakes state-level exams, it would be impossible to cheat so blatantly. That doesn't mean cheating doesn't happen, but it would require you to know someone in the examining body. And, they would be risking their careers and their liberty to help you.

dlhavema 5y ago

We recently had a guy interview at our company and he had someone else do the technical part. He himself talked to the non technical people and his "colleague" talked to me and the other engineers. He looked nothing like his linked in profile, but i gave him the benefit of the doubt since maybe it was an old picture... It wasn't. All this was over video chat..

buporin 5y ago
Reminds me of these actual cases of interviewees who tried to cheat their way during online interview sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpGGmE4ayLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpGGmE4ayLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gS6TykNQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gS6TykNQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n77BUW-2hhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n77BUW-2hhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDk9UQcI8dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDk9UQcI8dU

warner25 5y ago

I'm a US military officer working in an IT career field, and we're all required to maintain some of these certifications. As in we literally can't have a privileged account to touch our own LAN unless a third-party entity like CompTIA, (ISC)2, ISACA, Cisco, or SANS deems us fit. The whole ecosystem and culture around this is just ridiculous. Despite entering this career field with undergraduate and graduate degrees in CS from serious universities, the first (and only) question that people asked me was, "what certs do you have?" People go around talking about which "cert" they want next, and which ones are the hardest to get. People list all their "certs" in their email signatures after their name. People really measure their worth, and the worth of others, by these things. So I've played the game by reading the exam guides and taking the tests (the military pays the $300-$1,500 testing fees for us in most cases, at least) and got "my certs." Now I'm a CISSP, CISM, CEH, and CCNA. The content of the exams isn't all bad; it's certainly different from academic CS and more applicable to managing IT. But these are just multiple-choice tests that one can easily pass with superficial knowledge obtained from a 100-page exam guide. Someone asked if CISSP was the hardest test I've ever taken... no... my final exams for Theory of Computation and Advanced Algorithms were... Anyway, I've come to find out that most people don't even read the exam guides to learn what little material they contain. The typical approach, apparently, is to acquire a "dump," which is the bank of actual questions, and then repeatedly take "practice exams" so that they've already seen (and memorized) all of the questions that they might encounter during the actual exam. So, blatant cheating. I think this is very well known throughout the military IT community, and probably among the certification vendors too, but everyone turns a blind eye to it. If we stopped it, then most of our staff wouldn't be allowed to work on the LAN (see above), and then how would we get anything done? If the certification vendors stopped it, then the money would dry up as fewer people would take their exams.

lordnacho 5y ago
Same goes for financial industry regulatory exams. Very little actual learning, a lot of remembering stupid stuff. It's no wonder people want to cheat. I've also done network stuff, it's quite a lot more technical. But in the end it's still a silly thing to do multiple choice for. Debugging a network is a skill that's hard to boil down to that kind of exam, though to be fair they do show you how in the courses.

buporin 5y ago

Reminds me of these cases that come from India. as another commenter here commented, "It is difficult to depend on honor system in ultra competitive societies like India and as an Indian it has impacts honest people like me more". These are degree mills that offer degrees for a price: https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/inside-delhi-hidden-fake-degree-shops-1578941-2019-08-09 https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/inside-delhi-hidd... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3123929/indias-fake-degrees-hundreds-singapore-malaysia-us-canada-left https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3123929/indias... https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2021/oct/31/three-more-held-in-fake-degree-certificates-case-in-kochi-2377846.html https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2021/oct/31/th... https://indianexpress.com/article/india/up-govt-fake-degrees-probe-university-vc-7598202/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/up-govt-fake-degrees... https://redwiretimes.com/netizens-flood-ida-with-job-applications-using-fake-degrees-after-it-defended-its-hiring-of-woman-who-holds-fake-mba/ https://redwiretimes.com/netizens-flood-ida-with-job-applica...

vishnugupta 5y ago

Gaming education system is a huge cottage industry in India. Here's a list of "services" for sale I know of first hand. 1. Impersonation during an exam/interview. 2. Project work; end to end. 4. University degrees, including PhD end-to-end. You just need to attend a few classes. A poor or lower-middle income family has very very few escape routes into middle income group. Educational credentials is one of the best ways. A college degree opens multiple doors; government jobs, interviews in private companies etc., So the clamour to get educational degree in India is almost unprecedented. For example, the competition to get into IITs is immense. Google "Kota tuitions" for gory details. Here's a small example[1] [1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/why-kota-is-so-killing/articleshow/50421411.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-f...

nsonha 5y ago
> A poor or lower-middle income family has very very few escape routes into middle income group. Educational credentials is one of the best ways This is true universally, so I don't think it explains why some people in some countries are extra desperate to get degrees
- tangoalpha 5y ago
  The desperation is more in countries where being in poor or lower-middle income family restricts access to affordable quality schooling for kids, affordable sheltering, quality medicine or insurance. Hence you see more such desperation in under-developed or developing countries like India.
- ghoda 5y ago
  There is an extreme lack of professional educational institutions in India.
- wyclif 5y ago
  Don't forget, India has the caste social system which is what differentiates their brand of toxic status, social, and income climbing.
- deleted 5y ago

pdm55 5y ago

We have a certification system for every skill in Australia. Are you a Probation and Parole officer? A preschool worker? An ambulance worker? Working in the food industry selling cheese? You will need a certificate for these skills. Have you been doing the job for 20 years? Sorry. From about 2002, Australian Quality Training Framework (now reorganised as the Australian Quality Framework) deemed you unable to continue working in your area of expertise and demanded you get certification. Outward Bound instructors with 20 years experience would suddenly find that a neophyte with a certificate was deemed able to direct dangerous rock climbing experiences, while they could only look on in dread. Certification was a turf fight between different bureaucracies: State versus Federal. Of course, the Federal Government won the battle, as they controlled the purse strings. University qualifications and technical college qualifications, all provided by state institutions, were ignored. A plumber had no need to sit a technical college exam. A federally-approved privately-run Registered Training Organisation (RTO) could provide you with the appropriate certification. It was all too easy. Hand over the money and take the certification test. The hack for a fork lift driver's certificate was to turn over the test paper: the answers were written on the back! It should have been a national scandal. But, of course, we Aussies are too compliant. And in the end, the federal bureaucrats expanded their empires. I seem angry. And yes I am. Worthless paper certification is hiding the risks being taken with Australia’s future.

moritonal 5y ago
That is biased towards people who succeed in education. The trade jobs are traditionally where the disabled/dyslexic/neuro-quirky(?) excel IMHO because of the one-size-for-all nature of exams.
emmelaich 5y ago
I've been hearing / seeing ads for this recently in Aus. https://qualifyme.edu.au/rpl-skills-trade-recognition/ https://qualifyme.edu.au/rpl-skills-trade-recognition/ Pretty sure it's a revenue raiser and does fuck-all for anyone else.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I mostly agree, and this isn't a defense of certs, but - > You will need a certificate for these skills. Have you been doing the job for 20 years? Sorry. I've encountered an alarming number of people with decades of "experience" who were in fact incompetent. Certs are a bad solution, but they're a bad solution to a real problem.

DeathArrow 5y ago

What's wrong with journalists? Using remote desktop to take the exam on behalf of someone else is "hacking"?

Nasrudith 5y ago
Blame the dumb laws - it is unauthorized usage of the tester's system which is how hacking is often defined legally. It is a distasteful and a low technical knowledge equivocation of unauthorized computer access is always "hacking" but I can see why they would use it even without sensationalization from typical attempts at accessibility without mountains of exposition for amateurs mixed in.
panzagl 5y ago
Yeah, only one guy is wearing a hoodie, and it's light grey. Everyone knows hackers wear dark grey hoodies.

belter 5y ago

So many fascinating items in this case for multiple reasons: - From an Expert who is good enough to pass an enormous variety of IT certifications but reckless and inept to cover his tracks. - The splashing of the suspect photos on a national newspaper before their conviction in court. Love the note under their photo... "Photo by special arrangement" - The ability to easily overcome most software cheating detection software etc... There is a lot on criticism here of the education system in India and the Certification industry. Although many of the points raised are relevant, lets not forget that cheating in unfortunately prevalent at the most exquisite levels of Academic research in the so called developed countries. Random sample: ------------------------------------------ "More than 60 Fall CS50 Enrollees Faced Academic Dishonesty Charges" https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/3/cs50-cheating-cases-2017/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/3/cs50-cheating-ca... "Luxembourg Prime Minister Bettel accused of massive plagiarism - Only two pages of 56-page university dissertation were plagiarism-free, magazine investigation finds" https://www.politico.eu/article/luxembourg-prime-minister-bettel-faces-plagiarism-university-degree-dissertation/ https://www.politico.eu/article/luxembourg-prime-minister-be... "German education minister quits over PhD plagiarism" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/09/german-education-minister-quits-phd-plagiarism https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/09/german-educati... "Guttenberg plagiarism scandal" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scandal "2012 Harvard cheating scandal" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal ------------------------------------------

ghoda 5y ago
While I expected to see it happen in the abstract, the education minister quitting over PhD plagiarism is just poetic
derbOac 5y ago
Also, remember these are the cases that: 1. Were caught. 2. Were publicized. 3. Were indisputable, and not in some grey boundary area.

jhgb 5y ago

> Father-son duo helped techies ‘hack exams’ Oh, that's cool... ...wait, you actually meant "to cheat", not "to solve a technical problem in a clever way".

qwerty456127 5y ago

Competitive exams are evil, a serious problem in Asian countries including India. People have to survive inhumanly hard, exhausting studying regimes just to land a job which hardly uses a humble portion of what they learnt. Exams should only check if the attendant is skilled sufficiently for the degree/job. Competitive exams could have their organic place in the world as a kind of professional intellectual sports though.

elldoubleyew 5y ago
>People have to survive inhumanly hard, exhausting studying regimes just to land a job which hardly uses a humble portion of what they learnt. I always thought the purpose of these kinds of exams was to determine if you had enough work ethic to pass them. The information actually included is peripheral at best most of the time.
Jensson 5y ago
The exams are hard since it is a poor country without many good university spots. There isn't much you can do about that, except increase the number of spots until the requirements to get in are no longer that high. Edit: And the main problem with increasing the number of seats is corruption. You can't just give people money and expect them to create an institution that actually educates people. All of the processes required to make that work will have to be made and expanded etc. It takes a long time to go from corrupt poor country into a modern country where things like education exists in abundance.

iwasnothere 5y ago

Just like drugs, this is unsolvable because there's just so much money to be had without basically banning foreign students from attending American universities. I have a close friend who used to get paid $5k-$10k per (Chinese) student to take tests fore them until she started looking too old to pass for a student. When she aged out she just started a "Test Prep Center", and now has about a dozen test takers working for her. She spent more $$ on her house in Palo Alto than I will make in my career. That's just capitalism.

dhosek 5y ago
There's a part of me that thinks it would have been nice to do college again after I finished the first time but get paid to take someone else's classes (except for the moral issues).

Communitivity 5y ago

My opinion is that these tests are not to test competence, but to mitigate risk by transferring that risk elsewhere. Kind of a version of the 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM'. If you give a user sudo privileges, and then they don't know what they're doing so they rm -rf or worse, then management puts you squarely to blame. If the user has a cert you can point to, and regs that say users with that cert may get sudo privileges, then you can point to the regs and the cert so that now the certifying organization is to blame. Or more likely the user will be blamed, malice will assumed instead of ignorance. Which brings to mind Bear's rule 11 (I'm Bear): Never attribute to malice, without investigation, what you can attribute to ignorance, as ignorance is common and malice is not.

bewocwnavy 5y ago

I know one Indian friend in a renowned company who came in Canada as an International student. He completed his 2 year diploma course in IT/Technical support. After the course, he did not get the interviews due to lack of Canadian experience. To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer. Within a week with new resume, he gathered 3 top offers in Ontario, negotiated and signed $70K per year with XYZ company as Lead Operations Specialist. Not just in India, even in Canada, to make the top dollar and join upper middle class league, new breed of cons always game the system and use shortcuts. Once they join the class, they game the real estate market. Cycle goes on and on. They always win, rest of innocent ones who comply with rules and system are stuck behind with minimum wage job and renting single rooms, never get to ever see a dream house of their own.

vitus 5y ago
> To counter that, he modified his resume and added 2 fake experiences from top companies as Network Engineer. Within a week with new resume, he gathered 3 top offers in Ontario, negotiated and signed $70K per year with XYZ company as Lead Operations Specialist. That sounds like a failure of the companies to do a proper background check and follow up for proof of employment.
- yardie 5y ago
  I ordered a copy of my background record and holy shit was it missing a lot of information. High schools jobs were listed, college work study jobs were listed, 15 years of employment was missing, followed by small patches of employment here and there. My credit record was only marginally better, it didn't have any employers listed of my 14 years working abroad. If it wasn't on my CV no one would know. And since some of these companies were merged, acquired, or out of business it's very hard to track down. HR can realistically only check your last employer because anything older than a few years may as well be made up.
  - vitus 5y ago
    Well... yes and no. If it is indeed a "top company" that's still recognizable as such today, then I'd expect it to be around in some form. I imagine HR could ask you for a proof-of-employment letter if you said you worked at Microsoft and Facebook* for a couple of years but neither showed up on a background check. I imagine they'd be even more suspicious if you additionally didn't have any references from either company. * Feel free to replace with any other "top companies" of your choosing

alisonkisk 5y ago

> We received intel that several services are available on the dark web, Is this true, or just made up to sound scary? I'm not convinced th clients wouldn't know how to use "dark web" or why this business would bother.

nnain 5y ago

> "They have been running this scam since the Covid-19 outbreak, as all examinations shifted to an online mode."

evancoop 5y ago

Whether it's a scandal of this ilk, or the Lori Laughlin variant thereof, at some point, don't we need to consider the underlying incentive structure of the broader system rather than the specific behavior of the bad actors? If the dwindling path to social mobility runs through exams and a shrinking list of institutions, then there will be those who respond to these incentives unethically. How do we change the incentives?

bostonsre 5y ago

Hacking examee's computer == screen sharing with control given up?

dmingod666 5y ago

Hard to do this on on kubernetes exams tbh.

AdamN 5y ago

I remember a friend who's dad knew somebody from school who had a great way to make money. He would 'guarantee' he could get somebody into one of their top 3 schools because he had inside contacts. If he was unsuccessful he would return the money as part of his guarantee (he did actually do this, it wasn't a total fraud). The brilliance was that he did nothing. If the person got in he would keep the money. If not, he would return the money!