22 ms·

Confession. This vaguely reminded me of something (now admittedly, terrible) I did way back in highschool to give myself a bit more time on an assignment: submi

Confession. This vaguely reminded me of something (now admittedly, terrible) I did way back in highschool to give myself a bit more time on an assignment: submit a corrupted docx by putting in some random bytes in the file. This would give you time until the teacher would get to grading (and opening) the file at which point you’d hopefully have finished. Learning not to procrastinate as much turned out to be the better life skill.

thelittleone 5y ago
Glad to learn I wasn't the only one. When it comes to solving issues resulting from my procrastination, my ingenuity knows no bounds.
cbsks 5y ago
You weren’t the only one! My email client in high school also had a terrible tendency to “corrupt” words docs. It was a good way to buy a few days extension.
fotta 5y ago
In college most profs were aware of this and explicitly stated that malformed files would be graded either as a 0 or under whatever late policy they had.
- parhamn 5y ago
  Obviously at this point you’d explain quantum bit flips and point out how absurd their policy is. :)
  - spicybright 5y ago
    My solar flare ate my homework.
  - rubidium 5y ago
    “Obviously the universe doesn’t want you to pass my class” - professor
- easton 5y ago
  There isn’t a great excuse for it anymore, as Canvas (or your favorite other LMS) has a big button pre and post submit that will show your document as it appears for the teacher.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    Well then just blame Canvas. Blame anything but yourself!
  - caddybox 5y ago
    Canvas will not preview contents in zip archives or formats like ipynb.
- javajosh 5y ago
  I'd be curious to know what the natural rate of docx corruption is, and what the sources are. What are the odds of cosmic rays flipping a meaningful bit right as the docx is written to disk but not before, and in a way that doesn't cause a crash? What are the actual error modes with both spinning and solid state disks, across a variety of filesystem types and usage patterns? Is the damage normally like one bit, or a would it normally flip a few in some (physically) localized region? (It's just not something I think about very often, and only now do I realize how useless my knowledge is! I could speculate based on the flux of high-energy particles and the layout and energies involved in various storage media. I would expect the energies on non-volatile storage to be much higher than volatile storage, and so for bit flips to be rare. I would expect flips to be singular, and not come in groups - but if they did it would be temporal, not spatial - something like a solar flare. The interesting flips would be the least likely ones, where the serialization code is running. The threat-model here is the relatively large memory region consisting of the union of something like [cpu, kernel, jvm, thread, bytecode]. That's quite a surface area, and while it's fun to speculate about what a bit flip could do at various interesting points, but I assume for simplicity they all just crash your code. (I wonder how often random bit flips are why restarting software is unreasonably effective at fixing problems - or is it just an epidemic of thoughtless race conditions as I've always assumed?)
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    I've found the hard way that emailing a saved presentation that's still open in power point has a failure rate of 100%. No idea why. (I. E. hit save, create email , attach the file, does not work. Must close PowerPoint first). I imagine other usability issues exist which are similarly much more frequent than cosmic rays.
- nneonneo 5y ago
  Conferences are aware of it too! At least one major conference requires you to either upload your documents at the deadline, or a cryptographic hash of your documents, which can be submitted up to a week later. That way, they mitigate the load from the thundering herd of last minute submissions, and thereby avoid the inevitable excuse that the submission server died or that the internet was too clogged to upload their gargantuan video figure by the deadline.
qq66 5y ago
LOL this was a common thing in high school for me but one teacher was more technically literate than we gave him credit for and in class (with overhead projectors LOL) called the student out in front of the whole class and had printouts of the hex where he had fucked with it and gave him a 0. I don't think you could drag a kid publicly that way today, some parent would get the administration up your ass.
- Handytinge 5y ago
  What could parent complain about? I'm lost.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  That man believed in teaching more than what was in the textbook. Kudos for the lesson in integrity.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  There are ways to corrupt a file without messing with the hex content of the file
  - MichaelBurge 5y ago
    No there isn't. It is a fundamental property of CS that all bitstrings with the same bits are equivalent for computing. So if file 1 is a bitstring, you don't modify the bits to produce file 2, then file 2 has the same bitstring and will be processed the same as file 1.
    - vba616 5y ago
      Mr. McGuire : I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin : Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire : Are you listening? Benjamin : Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire : Metadata. (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork) "The Windows NT NTFS can support forks (and so can be a file server for Mac files), the native feature providing that support is called an alternate data stream."
    - 5y ago
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
One of my college compsci professor didn't know anything about manipulating SMTP headers or manually crafting email messages. Couldn't abuse it too much, but could certainly turn in an assignment 8-12 hours late... because the timestamps would be before the cutoff. Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". We weren't even sending email on a public server, we were just using email on the local compsci server. Checking our messages with pine/alpine. The excuses didn't make any sense... but....
- gjvnq 5y ago
  As a kid I did manage to send emails in other people's names but I never really used it for anything serious.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Nitpickingly, while some SMTP (reicpients list) duplicated that in the email message, SMTP doesn't care about timestamps. It's the MIME stamp that can be messed with. Most servers add a "Received" line to the MIME contents with some SMTP info, and you can't fool the timestamp inside that.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". The funny thing is, on the real internet with SMTP (so, not in your case but commonly), that's actually true; I once worked at a company that sent a massive amount of email to customers with our own postfix clusters, and it turns out things like "MX was down for a few hours" or "customer's email system rate limited us" - or rarely even "our servers are overloaded and trickling mail out" - are real things and sometimes emails do get held up for hours or days.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    dunno the back-story, but I've had some "valid for 5 minutes" password reset emails that would arrive expired (after 6 minutes+). And it didn't seem like the kind of company to do shenanigans, just technical voodoo.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brightball 5y ago
One of my bosses did this to a VP of a telecom company early in my career. Answered several questions in an email and then said “and I’ve attached the graphic.” Did not actually attach the graphic, knowing that the message wouldn’t be checked until EOD. Sent the completed version the next morning with a “whoops”.
soheil 5y ago
If you can submit a docx file why not embed an image with an external URL?
- post-it 5y ago
  At the expense of the teacher/prof thinking you're a Luddite who typed up their assignment, took a screenshot, and posted that in a new document.
dereg 5y ago
Wow, I totally forgot about doing this. It was a great trick in a pinch. Dropbox offered me a much better solution to do the same thing in college, which was to submit my assignment on time, via a Dropbox link in email, but to a blank word file. It always gave me several hours to finish my papers. Now, I'm on the other side of it. My spouse is a teacher and I get to see the base tactics that some students try to pull off and the hair-pulling toll that hundreds of these paper cuts inflict on teachers when they have to chase down students.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  My memory of what happens when they are caught is that that “<something something>, stress, grandma, sick, boyfriend/girlfriend, dog, car, flatmate <something something>, I’ve learned a lesson, please let my attempt at cheating slide.” Faculty gives compassionate consideration and everyone moves on. Used to infuriate me.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    When I worked retail at a big box store in college, the operations manager kept a spreadsheet tally of the death, disease and mishap that afflicted store employees. After Christmas at the annual party he announced the total death toll (it was like 80 people and 50 pets for a staff of 120), and presented the person with the most fake death a funeral basket of flowers and summer sausage.
    - smus 5y ago
      The payoff here (looking like a giant asshole) doesn't seem worth the risk (publically humiliating someone who had the worst year of their life and lost a ton of family and friends)
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        It was a joke. Nothing was injured other than the brain cells killed by binge drinking. The guy was notorious, the dude didn’t realize that managers spoke to each other. His poor grandmother “died” about 8 times, just in one year.
rz2k 5y ago
There was a 90s era Saturday Night Live commercial for "Jiffy Express" that made your late packages look sent on time. https://youtu.be/e134NoLyTug https://youtu.be/e134NoLyTug
- TheJoeMan 5y ago
  This gave me a good laugh. Why does it seem actually viable.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- slyn 5y ago
  There’s a machine called a postage machine which will print stamps on envelopes so you don’t need to run to buy stamps all the time. My dad had one at his law office that you could change the date to and the date printed on the stamp, and in doing so you could essentially post-date mail like it was mailed at an earlier date. If we ever missed deadlines or needed an extra day to work on a project it could have been an indispensable tool, but I bet that would count as some sort of mail fraud so of course we never did that…
  - simondotau 5y ago
    It’s only fraud if you get caught.
  - codazoda 5y ago
    This reminds me of an unrelated but interesting story an old Art teacher told. She spoke of someone else submitting three pieces of artwork for a job or college app, but the person only included two pieces of art in the envelope. A letter was also included, which suggested the third piece was on the outside of the envelope. On the outside was a stamp, which was hand-made but good enough to get the package delivered. As I think about it today, I doubt that would get you a job or access to college, but it’s an interesting story. And, it was impressionable enough that I’m recalling it 30 years later.
throwaway48375 5y ago
For me it was "corrupted floppy disc".
- sasaf5 5y ago
  With a magnet.
vincentmarle 5y ago
I did a similar thing and handed in a bogus file to buy me some more time to actually finish the assignment … but then I got an A from the teacher, turns out she didn’t look at it at all!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
franga2000 5y ago
Oh yeah, I used to do that quite a lot. At first, just a docx file of random jumbled characters was enough, as everyone was used to compatibility issues around the Office 2003 -> 2007 migration. After everyone moved on to 2007, corrupting the file and saying "I did it on a Mac" was a common excuse, since everyone knew the Mac version of Office was kind of trash. I figured out a way to get Office to give you the "corrupted file, attempting repair" dialog and have it actually succeed, but then the contents was just random unicode with a couple sentences from Wikipedia in between, so it looked like there was something there, but the auto repair couldn't quite recover it. Teaching others to do this, even classmates teachers knew I wasn't friends with, meant that there wasn't a pattern for them to see and so they never suspected we were faking it. They just assumed "it's just a thing that happens sometimes".
- tomjen3 5y ago
  That is brilliant. Especially the part where you teach this to others. I can't help but wonder, how much more time did you spent on all of this, since you would presumably still need to do the assignment?
  - franga2000 5y ago
    Not too much, especially after the first few times. And I had the bad habit (still sort of do) of spending far more time avoiding things that I found boring than it would take to actually do them. And yes, I did have to do it eventually, but this helped stretch the deadline by a week or so, which is quite nice when you get like 4 assignments dumped on you in the same month (because god forbid the teachers work together and make us an evenly-loaded schedule).
- Macha 5y ago
  On the other side of avoiding it, I started college using OpenOffice, which worked fine until one day I got queried from a professor about why I had opted to go with a 5 column layout for the assignment submission when he opened it in MS Office for Mac. The content was all there, so it clearly wasn't a case of "Oops, corrupted, let's resubmit after the date". The doc in OpenOffice that I had made had the most basic formatting, just headings, a table of contents, paragraphs and the required double line spacing. Certainly no columns of any kind. After that I switched to PDF submissions for every module where they would be accepted.
geek_at 5y ago
A few students tried that on me but I just used the strings command to see if there is actually any text inside or just looked at the file size. Game on
WanderPanda 5y ago
Our trick was zipping the file and renaming it to have the original file extension again. You get some plausible deniability this way (which we ended up never needing to invoke)
teekert 5y ago
In the future this will be more difficult: Is this not signed with your private key at exactly 23:59 Feb 5 parhamn? Are you claiming inconsistency of the system? You’re of the hook when you can prove that. No doubt the kids will find a way, they have practically infinite time.
caddybox 5y ago
As someone who has worked long hours to finish difficult homework assignments during my student years, it really annoys me when I get blank submissions corrupted by sites like corruptmyfile.com. Recently, a few colleagues have started grading such files with a zero and will report it to student affairs if the corruption process is extremely obvious.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Same, but with a zip. Well, technically, docx are zip, but they didn't exist back then.

thelittleone 5y ago

Glad to learn I wasn't the only one. When it comes to solving issues resulting from my procrastination, my ingenuity knows no bounds.

cbsks 5y ago

You weren’t the only one! My email client in high school also had a terrible tendency to “corrupt” words docs. It was a good way to buy a few days extension.

fotta 5y ago

In college most profs were aware of this and explicitly stated that malformed files would be graded either as a 0 or under whatever late policy they had.

parhamn 5y ago
Obviously at this point you’d explain quantum bit flips and point out how absurd their policy is. :)
- spicybright 5y ago
  My solar flare ate my homework.
- rubidium 5y ago
  “Obviously the universe doesn’t want you to pass my class” - professor
easton 5y ago
There isn’t a great excuse for it anymore, as Canvas (or your favorite other LMS) has a big button pre and post submit that will show your document as it appears for the teacher.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Well then just blame Canvas. Blame anything but yourself!
- caddybox 5y ago
  Canvas will not preview contents in zip archives or formats like ipynb.
javajosh 5y ago
I'd be curious to know what the natural rate of docx corruption is, and what the sources are. What are the odds of cosmic rays flipping a meaningful bit right as the docx is written to disk but not before, and in a way that doesn't cause a crash? What are the actual error modes with both spinning and solid state disks, across a variety of filesystem types and usage patterns? Is the damage normally like one bit, or a would it normally flip a few in some (physically) localized region? (It's just not something I think about very often, and only now do I realize how useless my knowledge is! I could speculate based on the flux of high-energy particles and the layout and energies involved in various storage media. I would expect the energies on non-volatile storage to be much higher than volatile storage, and so for bit flips to be rare. I would expect flips to be singular, and not come in groups - but if they did it would be temporal, not spatial - something like a solar flare. The interesting flips would be the least likely ones, where the serialization code is running. The threat-model here is the relatively large memory region consisting of the union of something like [cpu, kernel, jvm, thread, bytecode]. That's quite a surface area, and while it's fun to speculate about what a bit flip could do at various interesting points, but I assume for simplicity they all just crash your code. (I wonder how often random bit flips are why restarting software is unreasonably effective at fixing problems - or is it just an epidemic of thoughtless race conditions as I've always assumed?)
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I've found the hard way that emailing a saved presentation that's still open in power point has a failure rate of 100%. No idea why. (I. E. hit save, create email , attach the file, does not work. Must close PowerPoint first). I imagine other usability issues exist which are similarly much more frequent than cosmic rays.
nneonneo 5y ago
Conferences are aware of it too! At least one major conference requires you to either upload your documents at the deadline, or a cryptographic hash of your documents, which can be submitted up to a week later. That way, they mitigate the load from the thundering herd of last minute submissions, and thereby avoid the inevitable excuse that the submission server died or that the internet was too clogged to upload their gargantuan video figure by the deadline.

qq66 5y ago

LOL this was a common thing in high school for me but one teacher was more technically literate than we gave him credit for and in class (with overhead projectors LOL) called the student out in front of the whole class and had printouts of the hex where he had fucked with it and gave him a 0. I don't think you could drag a kid publicly that way today, some parent would get the administration up your ass.

Handytinge 5y ago
What could parent complain about? I'm lost.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
That man believed in teaching more than what was in the textbook. Kudos for the lesson in integrity.
suifbwish 5y ago
There are ways to corrupt a file without messing with the hex content of the file
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  No there isn't. It is a fundamental property of CS that all bitstrings with the same bits are equivalent for computing. So if file 1 is a bitstring, you don't modify the bits to produce file 2, then file 2 has the same bitstring and will be processed the same as file 1.
  - vba616 5y ago
    Mr. McGuire : I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin : Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire : Are you listening? Benjamin : Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire : Metadata. (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork) "The Windows NT NTFS can support forks (and so can be a file server for Mac files), the native feature providing that support is called an alternate data stream."
  - 5y ago

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

One of my college compsci professor didn't know anything about manipulating SMTP headers or manually crafting email messages. Couldn't abuse it too much, but could certainly turn in an assignment 8-12 hours late... because the timestamps would be before the cutoff. Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". We weren't even sending email on a public server, we were just using email on the local compsci server. Checking our messages with pine/alpine. The excuses didn't make any sense... but....

gjvnq 5y ago
As a kid I did manage to send emails in other people's names but I never really used it for anything serious.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
Nitpickingly, while some SMTP (reicpients list) duplicated that in the email message, SMTP doesn't care about timestamps. It's the MIME stamp that can be messed with. Most servers add a "Received" line to the MIME contents with some SMTP info, and you can't fool the timestamp inside that.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". The funny thing is, on the real internet with SMTP (so, not in your case but commonly), that's actually true; I once worked at a company that sent a massive amount of email to customers with our own postfix clusters, and it turns out things like "MX was down for a few hours" or "customer's email system rate limited us" - or rarely even "our servers are overloaded and trickling mail out" - are real things and sometimes emails do get held up for hours or days.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  dunno the back-story, but I've had some "valid for 5 minutes" password reset emails that would arrive expired (after 6 minutes+). And it didn't seem like the kind of company to do shenanigans, just technical voodoo.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brightball 5y ago

One of my bosses did this to a VP of a telecom company early in my career. Answered several questions in an email and then said “and I’ve attached the graphic.” Did not actually attach the graphic, knowing that the message wouldn’t be checked until EOD. Sent the completed version the next morning with a “whoops”.

soheil 5y ago

If you can submit a docx file why not embed an image with an external URL?

post-it 5y ago
At the expense of the teacher/prof thinking you're a Luddite who typed up their assignment, took a screenshot, and posted that in a new document.

dereg 5y ago

Wow, I totally forgot about doing this. It was a great trick in a pinch. Dropbox offered me a much better solution to do the same thing in college, which was to submit my assignment on time, via a Dropbox link in email, but to a blank word file. It always gave me several hours to finish my papers. Now, I'm on the other side of it. My spouse is a teacher and I get to see the base tactics that some students try to pull off and the hair-pulling toll that hundreds of these paper cuts inflict on teachers when they have to chase down students.

lostlogin 5y ago
My memory of what happens when they are caught is that that “<something something>, stress, grandma, sick, boyfriend/girlfriend, dog, car, flatmate <something something>, I’ve learned a lesson, please let my attempt at cheating slide.” Faculty gives compassionate consideration and everyone moves on. Used to infuriate me.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  When I worked retail at a big box store in college, the operations manager kept a spreadsheet tally of the death, disease and mishap that afflicted store employees. After Christmas at the annual party he announced the total death toll (it was like 80 people and 50 pets for a staff of 120), and presented the person with the most fake death a funeral basket of flowers and summer sausage.
  - smus 5y ago
    The payoff here (looking like a giant asshole) doesn't seem worth the risk (publically humiliating someone who had the worst year of their life and lost a ton of family and friends)
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      It was a joke. Nothing was injured other than the brain cells killed by binge drinking. The guy was notorious, the dude didn’t realize that managers spoke to each other. His poor grandmother “died” about 8 times, just in one year.

rz2k 5y ago

There was a 90s era Saturday Night Live commercial for "Jiffy Express" that made your late packages look sent on time. https://youtu.be/e134NoLyTug https://youtu.be/e134NoLyTug

TheJoeMan 5y ago
This gave me a good laugh. Why does it seem actually viable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
slyn 5y ago
There’s a machine called a postage machine which will print stamps on envelopes so you don’t need to run to buy stamps all the time. My dad had one at his law office that you could change the date to and the date printed on the stamp, and in doing so you could essentially post-date mail like it was mailed at an earlier date. If we ever missed deadlines or needed an extra day to work on a project it could have been an indispensable tool, but I bet that would count as some sort of mail fraud so of course we never did that…
- simondotau 5y ago
  It’s only fraud if you get caught.
- codazoda 5y ago
  This reminds me of an unrelated but interesting story an old Art teacher told. She spoke of someone else submitting three pieces of artwork for a job or college app, but the person only included two pieces of art in the envelope. A letter was also included, which suggested the third piece was on the outside of the envelope. On the outside was a stamp, which was hand-made but good enough to get the package delivered. As I think about it today, I doubt that would get you a job or access to college, but it’s an interesting story. And, it was impressionable enough that I’m recalling it 30 years later.

throwaway48375 5y ago

For me it was "corrupted floppy disc".

sasaf5 5y ago
With a magnet.

vincentmarle 5y ago

I did a similar thing and handed in a bogus file to buy me some more time to actually finish the assignment … but then I got an A from the teacher, turns out she didn’t look at it at all!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

franga2000 5y ago

Oh yeah, I used to do that quite a lot. At first, just a docx file of random jumbled characters was enough, as everyone was used to compatibility issues around the Office 2003 -> 2007 migration. After everyone moved on to 2007, corrupting the file and saying "I did it on a Mac" was a common excuse, since everyone knew the Mac version of Office was kind of trash. I figured out a way to get Office to give you the "corrupted file, attempting repair" dialog and have it actually succeed, but then the contents was just random unicode with a couple sentences from Wikipedia in between, so it looked like there was something there, but the auto repair couldn't quite recover it. Teaching others to do this, even classmates teachers knew I wasn't friends with, meant that there wasn't a pattern for them to see and so they never suspected we were faking it. They just assumed "it's just a thing that happens sometimes".

tomjen3 5y ago
That is brilliant. Especially the part where you teach this to others. I can't help but wonder, how much more time did you spent on all of this, since you would presumably still need to do the assignment?
- franga2000 5y ago
  Not too much, especially after the first few times. And I had the bad habit (still sort of do) of spending far more time avoiding things that I found boring than it would take to actually do them. And yes, I did have to do it eventually, but this helped stretch the deadline by a week or so, which is quite nice when you get like 4 assignments dumped on you in the same month (because god forbid the teachers work together and make us an evenly-loaded schedule).
Macha 5y ago
On the other side of avoiding it, I started college using OpenOffice, which worked fine until one day I got queried from a professor about why I had opted to go with a 5 column layout for the assignment submission when he opened it in MS Office for Mac. The content was all there, so it clearly wasn't a case of "Oops, corrupted, let's resubmit after the date". The doc in OpenOffice that I had made had the most basic formatting, just headings, a table of contents, paragraphs and the required double line spacing. Certainly no columns of any kind. After that I switched to PDF submissions for every module where they would be accepted.

geek_at 5y ago

A few students tried that on me but I just used the strings command to see if there is actually any text inside or just looked at the file size. Game on

WanderPanda 5y ago

Our trick was zipping the file and renaming it to have the original file extension again. You get some plausible deniability this way (which we ended up never needing to invoke)

teekert 5y ago

In the future this will be more difficult: Is this not signed with your private key at exactly 23:59 Feb 5 parhamn? Are you claiming inconsistency of the system? You’re of the hook when you can prove that. No doubt the kids will find a way, they have practically infinite time.

caddybox 5y ago

As someone who has worked long hours to finish difficult homework assignments during my student years, it really annoys me when I get blank submissions corrupted by sites like corruptmyfile.com. Recently, a few colleagues have started grading such files with a zero and will report it to student affairs if the corruption process is extremely obvious.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Same, but with a zip. Well, technically, docx are zip, but they didn't exist back then.