Poor Mojo's Newswire

In the case of that student, the professor in the course had tried to prevent cheating by using a testing system that pulled questions at random from a bank of possibilities. The online tests could be taken anywhere and were open-book, but students had only a short window each week in which to take them, which was not long enough for most people to look up the answers on the fly. As the students proceeded, they were told whether each answer was right or wrong. Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice, with the two results averaged into a final score. "So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but we're all guaranteed an A in the end," Mr. Smith told me. "We're playing the system, and we're playing the system pretty well."

Students are banned from carrying cell phones at New York City's public schools, but rather than leave the devices at home, many students pay $1/day to leave them with mobile storage companies whose trucks are parked outside the school grounds. Nice racket, eh? But yesterday one of the trucks was robbed at gunpoint of hundreds of phones. Panic and wailing ensued. The kids, who use the ironically named Safe Mobile Storage because electronic devices are banned from school, scrambled out from Christopher Columbus HS in a panic when word of the heist spread at about 11 a.m. “They took my iPhone and my iPod Touch,” said Brandon Solas, 18, as he stood helplessly outside the truck parked down the block from his Bronxdale school. Solas said the robbery netted “mostly iPhones, iPod Touches and Blackberrys . . . They got a lot of dough on that one.” Another student, Miriam Hernandez, wept hysterically in her boyfriend’s arms. “That iPhone had everything — pictures of my boyfriend, my niece, my family’s videos — everything,” wailed Hernandez, 15. “I just got that iPhone and just put all that on there. “And it looks like I’m not getting another one!”

As you have no doubt heard, 6 and a half million hashed passwords have been leaked from LinkedIn. Also, those password hashes were unsalted, so if you use your LinkedIn password in other places, change it everywhere. In a word, oops. There is a 118MB file floating around (which shouldn’t be too hard to find if you look for it) that contains the hashes. The file does not contain the usernames that match the passwords. LinkedIn also apparently has over 150 million accounts. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but appearances can be deceptive. I, like a lot of other people, believe that it’s certain that the account information is being sat on by whoever compromised the database. There are several ways that a database dump like this could be acquired, and none of the likely scenarios include a column-level dump of just passwords.