Panos

I am the professor who wrote the blog post.

What you mention was a very big problem for the adoption of services like Turnitin. In fact, when there is a match, there is no way of seeing the "source" of the homework, unless you get a permission from the "owner" of the homework.

Also, students when they submit the assignment to Turnitin, they assign a license to index the content for plagiarism detection purposes, and for nothing else.

And students have the right to remove their assignments from the index, if I understand the language of the agreement correctly.

James, I did exactly what you suggested. Every single student came to protest. I believed that things would play out exactly as you are thinking. Unfortunately, they turned out very differently.

Justin, I am the professor who wrote the article.

The 44 hours is not a number to show how much extra I had to work. Believe me, a 14-hour day is a pretty common thing for me. Teaching is only part of my overall job (I also have to do research, supervise PhD students, review papers, serve on committees and many other things).

The 44 hours figure is given just as a contrast to the actual time that I spent in class. I would much rather spend these 44 hours on helping students, on creating new assignments, on finding things in the news that are relevant to tomorrow's class and so on. Instead, these 44 hours were literally wasted on the students that should have been the least deserving. (When I had the student crying in my office, I had actually lines of students waiting outside to ask me questions about the material in the class. Most of them ended up leaving, as they could not wait for so long.)

Also blaming NYU/Stern for this is a rather shortsighted approach. I would not be surprised if the situation is identical in many other schools but just nobody has the incentives to fight cheating.

Just a note: My PhD is in computer science. I have a technical background. I code for fun, and I detected cheating in the Excel assignments using my own code.

It is not available on the web. It is in the print edition, and in the iPad version of the magazine. You can download the scan if you want to read it. I guess they make the articles available online a few days later than the print edition.

Spot on. It is actually one of the explanations in the Gneezy and Rustichini paper: "consider the practice of paying back a small amount for recycling a soft drink bottle, which is common in many European countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are less willing to recycle when this small compensation is offered, than they are in places where no money is offered, and failure to recycle is simply considered bad behavior. It is unlikely that the amount offered is considered insulting. A different explanation in this case might be that people are afraid of looking ‘‘cheap’’ for making the effort of recycling to collect the small amount."

See the updated blog post.

That, unfortunately, I could not observe. My intuition says that he had a PPC feed for his parked domains and he was using the click.mygeek.com etc services to click on them.

Note that he was not always clicking on the links, to maintain a reasonable low clickthrough rate for the ads.

OK, I added the screenshots that show the adservers as well. When I was writing the article, I was told not to involve any party that has been defrauded and did not give explicit permission to be involved in the story. Since I see them mentioned in the WSJ article, I feel that I can put the relevant screenshots there as well.

Confirming your observation.

I got the explanation: All the targeted sites (e.g., Mevio or Current.TV) now have filters in place. So you will not be able to see the actual landing pages. The landing page will be a blank page as the ad click will not work.

Btw for the record: It is mainly CPC fraud, sending (invisible) traffic to sites like Mevio and Current.TV which serve mainly CPM ads.

The screenshots above redirect to a search engine. (My IP had already been used for clicks and I could not generate the ad clicks for the screenshots)

If you want to see the scheme in action go to the new domains set up by the scammer:

http://www.kidsbeanbags1.com/index2.php

http://www.kingsizemattress1.com/index2.php

http://www.neckpillow1.com/index2.php

http://www.pillowtopmattress1.com/index2.php

http://www.pillowcovers1.com/index2.php

http://www.tempurpillow1.com/index2.php

http://www.contourpillow1.com/index2.php

If you want to observe the full click behavior: Chrome->Tools->DeveloperTools->Network

Let me know what you see. Curious to see if the scammer changed the behavior.

All these parts happen within the index2.php of the parked domains (see the section with the title "Re-directions and generating click fraud with normal click patterns").

Take a look at this screenshot: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-R9lgD8LQfdw/TXEu7e2Sb5I/A...

and here are the detailed requests

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-qVyp1ChmmRA/TXExPKhXnOI/A...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3KulINgZhwA/TXExPdCASOI/A...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q3Cpp0uIM6g/TXExPsl3ycI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-zWpoE6IlyfI/TXExP36fWhI/A...

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-c0FdFkU0xX4/TXExQF5jHfI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-oLleFeARs3o/TXExQS95chI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_-KqSY7ue5w/TXExQTVttwI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Dxp-OfM0oXw/TXExQrQsoLI/A...

What is a click other than a "redirect" from one page to another? Add the appropriate parameters in the HTTP call and you are done. There is no need for actual user interaction for an HTTP call to be considered a "click".

Take a look at the screenshots: You will see that the redirects are URLs that you would "click" as a user to see an ad.

The clever part is that the "clicks" come from a wide variety of IPs, wide variety of browsers, and on different times.

Yes and no.

No, because it cannot be used as an exploit.

Yes, because it allows you to read the address of the "top" object.

Consider it similar to the CSS link-color hack to read the past browsing history of a user.

But intellectual labor can become an industrial product.

Not all products of intellectual effort are theorems and mathematical proofs.

And please read this before citing Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/godels-theorem.htm...

Thanks! I was not aware that a more general audience would be interested in what I am writing. I am writing mainly to organize my own thoughts.

Even if it is a prank, it is just awesome :-)

But the subsequent letter (not in the blog post), almost hints that the guy is just a crank.