user_pref("geo.provider.network.url", 'data:application/json,{"location": {"lat": 45.0, "lng": -122.0}, "accuracy": 128.0}');
I _believe_ this also stops wifi data from leaking anywhere.
geo.provider.use_corelocation: true/false # presumably for tracking on MacOS
geo.provider.use_geoclue: true/false # presumably for tracking Linux users with Geoclue2 provider [1]
geo.enabled: true/false # presumably, turns the whole thing off
It also appears[3][4], that setting geo.provider.testing to true might be required.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1063572
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24932199/how-to-change-f...
chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/location-guard-v3/h...
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/location-guar...
OK? it still sucks even with headphones. Imagine the following scenario: You are in a meeting using your headphones as you suggest. A coworker a few seats away from you are in the same meeting using their own headsphones. When they talk you hear their real voice reach your ears first (this happens with even the best noise canceling headphones to some extent) and then you hear their voice with some delay from the meeting.
This is not about manners or headphones.
Better meeting software identifies when this is happening and they suppress the streamed voice of your coworker just for you.
So unless I know the voice of everyone in the conference room, I have no idea who's speaking at any given point unless they're also gesticulating wildly.
This sounds like an awful idea.
https://www.science.org/content/article/sounds-you-cant-hear...
https://github.com/denysvitali/where-am-i
Tbh, I think this geolocation method is amazing, and I'm grateful it exists, because GPS indoor really sucks.
Some examples: on a train, on the underground, in a train station, in a mall, in an office building, ...
Would be a fun experiment, and a nice follow-up post :-).
Edit: Presumably it would be possible to hack the browser to return a false position.
Edit: Make it a convenient browser add-on, perhaps. There must be other applications.
Edit: pkulak points out that you just have to set a Firefox option. Why do I even comment on things I know nothing about.
Then we can be wherever we want, super precisely!
1. Some students think they can skip class and catch up through self-study, but actually they can't. The same I'd-rather-be-partying attitude that stops them attending lectures also stops them finding time to self-study. College is the first time students' time management is put to the test, and some students can't handle it. Giving them some external motivation to get out of bed does them a favour, in the long term.
2. Some courses are discussion-and-debate oriented. Less so in engineering, moreso in arts subjects. If Socratic debate is a key part of the class, students who don't show up will of course lose grades - and accurate record keeping makes sure that's done fairly.
3. Some governments require certain reporting to ensure people getting student visas are, in fact, students. Taking attendance for foreign students is one way to satisfy this.
4. When someone fails a course they'll often lodge an appeal. Perhaps they'll say the course was badly taught, or the exam covered material that wasn't in the lectures. Knowing whether the student attended the lectures helps adjudicate such complaints fairly.
A highly ranked university that attracts smart, self-motivated students has less reason to take attendance - whereas a university with lots of students skipping class, failing and complaining has more reason.
As for laboratory exercises in the physics department, they were in theory compulsory but still no one checked. The final year included a long experimental project that had to be documented and conclusions defended in a viva. Again no one formally checked that we actually did it but as we were grouped into small teams for this anyone who didn't pull their weight would have been reported by their fellow students and would not have had access to the experimental results which would have made it difficult to write it up and defend.
- Some students are "sponsored" by scholarships or organizations that request attendance data. - I want to know the attendance record for a student who is asking for an extension, or extra-credit work, or some other informal accommodation. - I like to draw fancy graphs correlating attendance and final grades.
But other than that, I don't care if students are in class or not. They're adults. Learning is their responsibility.
this is good information.
on the other hand, it is pretty impossible to turn off wifi on some apple computers. (when I look at wifi, I get a greyed out off toggle)
You have to get into csrutil to disable the chips from powering up.
If you fail someone who rarely attended class, and they claim that they did, asked you for support, and never received it, how might you defend yourself?
If you have an excellent student who encounters a hardship, how might you petition for leniency to allow them to drop without penalty beyond a cutoff, or delay submitting final grades until they can complete makeup work?
If you believe lack of attendance is "wasting resources", then either you think the class isn't doing its part by teaching what students need, or you believe it is and yet students are not learning the material due to lack of attendance. In the former case, the problem is poor teaching, and so attendance isn't the solution. In the latter case, then the same argument would apply regardless of who's paying.
What's the logic here? Is there a third possibility I'm missing?
Now imagine you're a big donor. You donate enough money for, say, 10 scholarships. None of them attend class. None of them get degrees. Are you likely to donate again?
My (UK) University was very clear that attendance was not mandatory, but if you weren't attending lectures you were not going to get any extra help from the lecturers etc
I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take, but it's nice if you _know_ rather than _guess_ who bothered to make it in to class.
But why won't the crop grow on its own? It is strongly incentivized to live! And yet it does not. So you need to send photos of tilling the soil, planting the seed, watering, so that one day we might come there and see a harvested crop.
The answers were usually kept simple, so I'd guess things like 0 or 1 (the questions were never written in the app). I think I ended up with 60% or so on them, which was nice, since it was a bonus component meant to be a little boost to the grade anyways.
What the hell? Why?
There are still some restrictions around this sort of thing: IIRC a GPS receiver for sale to the public isn't allowed to give accurate data if it's too high up &/or moving too fast, to prevent unauthorized usage in ICBMs & other similar weapons. I think there would be a lot of red tape involved if you wanted to buy an unrestricted GPS device without this limitation.
GPS receivers sold to public also required to not operate at certain altitude/speed to prevent it from being used in ballistic (and probably other kinds?) missiles.
Your future doctors, scientists, government officials, etc... will have had to compete and gain coveted academic and career opportunities, in an environment that both has been heavily gamified, and is being overrun by cheaters.
Insulting measures like this TopHat practically endorses the culture of cheating, by telling students that they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task.
Schools with any integrity should be bending over backwards to find, nurture, and support students of integrity.
And to save those who only got admitted by being sketchy, but first semester is a chance to unlearn the bad lessons from before.
Not by treating them as criminals to be monitored, but by treating them like the respectable people they should aspire to be, and which the school expects and requires that they be.
And, for any hopelessly shitty students, who fail to honor this first semester extension of trust, the school should smack them to the curb. Lost tuition income, lost named buildings/chairs, and expensive lawsuits from helicopter parents, be damned.
A couple weeks ago there was an exam in an R1 institution that double booked the facility so one section did the exam in person on campus and the other did it "from home". The score distribution of the in person exam was a typical bell curve, and the distribution of the online exam looking like a power-law curve with over half the students scoring 100%.
Thankfully this outraged the professor, and through a variety of means (which I will not disclose publicly) over 25% of the students were caught red handed. Actions are being taken against them, though I'm not sure how far they will go. The evidence against them is overwhelmingly conclusive. In some cases the evidence led to more evidence of cheating in other courses. It seems clear that more that 25% cheated, but I guess catching some is better than none.
As someone who is keenly aware of this crisis, I feel tiny bursts of relief when I see these small wins, though it does feel a bit like bailing an ocean with a teacup.
Using every means available (multiple technologies and in-person proctored exams) cuts down cheating to probably ~2%... But online programs have serious integrity challenges.
Everyone's heard of Theranos, Enron, Martin Shkreli, and Bernie Madoff. This week, my 70+ year old aunt asked me about Charlie Javice and Frank. Yet, there are thousands of very successful people quietly building their castles who live and die in relative obscurity because their stories just aren't that thrilling.
If you spend a lot of time interacting with people in the latter category, or if you have them as your mentors, then you will be exposed to a model of what success through hard work and integrity looks like. If you don't, then it's very easy to think everyone successful is a cheater, and that cheating is the only way to break the ceiling into success.
No number in a spreadsheet will tell you who’s the genuine student. The moment you’re ranking like that you lost.
Long term human interaction in reduced groups is far better at creating genuine environments. But of course, that system doesn’t scale, and it’s a breeding ground for nepotism.
But one starting point is to communicate that you expect and require integrity, explain what that means, and then expect it. Trying to make metrics or tests or whatever to detect, rate, rank, etc. it just turns it into a game, like the same load of poo.
Though here is one thing you can do. Explain that you expect integrity, and then watch the students raise their hands and ask how they will be tested on this. You say it's expected. Back and forth a few times, until eventually some of them start crying, and then their heads explode, because they can't figure out how to game that. Those students sadly were too far gone.
Then, after that first semester of integrity culture, some of the students who didn't explode will cheat, and they will be expelled with the fury of an angry god, and everyone on campus will know why. News stories will be written, word will spread, college guides will be updated. The next batch of applicants after that will have fewer cheaters than before, and will have disproportionately attracted students who aspire to integrity and who wouldn't have known to apply to this school before the news.
A school with an honor code that students and faculty take seriously wasn't that newsworthy decades ago, but it's news now.
This assumes that the students are untrustworthy and the faculty/institution are ultimately trusted. In a world in which that is not true (such as the world that produces the article we're commenting on), and students sometimes encounter problems due to unclear expectations or vague criteria that are not the student's fault, it is not unreasonable for people to ask questions whose goal is to find out the actual non-vague criteria to avoid unpleasant surprises.
By way of one of many examples: many excellent classes encourage students to talk about assignments with each other, as long as the work they turn in is their own. Now consider what happens if a student accustomed to such a policy encounters a class taught with a different policy, where that policy has not been made clear in advance.
Honor codes and integrity are excellent things to enforce. Transparency and crystal-clear criteria are also excellent things to enforce. Not to allow gaming the system, but to ensure the system doesn't game anyone.
True. This proposal requires expecting and requiring the faculty to have integrity.
And you really need the college/university as a whole to commit to this, not just isolated professors, partly so that there can be no confusion by students.
(Some battle-scarred faculty and grad students could tell speak of entire departments that need to be shut down completely, because the administration and faculty are too far gone. I think you could never do this with one of those departments. You'd only get posturing, and the same arrogant and underhanded behaviors as before, and students would briefly be a little confused, but quickly realize that the old sketchy game-playing is still fully on.)
Not just integrity, but also consistency, objectivity, absence of caprice or bias...
That said, I hope the service doesn't implicitly trust data sent by untrusted clients like web browsers, otherwise someone could just use something like this to send it a false location: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation/i...
The BSSID is unique per SSID, per AP. The BSSID is usually derived (usually by incrementing the last octet) from the AP MAC address, however.
So an AP MAC might be 77:99:44:EE:C4:11.
It has a wireless network called "Bob's SSID". It will have a BSSID of something like 77:99:44:EE:C4:12.
Then, the AP may be broadcasting another called "Mary's SSID", and it will have a BSSID of something like 77:99:44:EE:C4:13.
Edit: More not-well-written info on BSSIDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_set_(802.11_network)
Looks like the BSSID is derived from the AP serial number by some vendors. Never seen that myself.
And then see if you can be magically transported somewhere else.
Consumer router firmware UIs, typically owned by ISPs, I'd not expect that yeah. Some don't even let you pick a WiFi band anymore and require other changes to be submitted through an ISP portal on the web somewhere (thinking of Belgium here, not sure which ISP it was)
Sure, some hacker somewhere will screw with these databases by rotating their AP MAC Address regularly but 99.9% are not going to touch it and 99.9% is good enough for location databases.
Trilaterate (or multilaterate). Angulation uses angle, like a directional antenna, constructive/destructive interference for beamforming (this is how airplane landing systems work if I'm understanding it correctly), or optics like our two eyes, to find the angles to a target from known positions in order to determine its position in space
Trilateration is based on distances from known locations, determined either by signal delay (GNSS does that; newer cell towers also but call it "timing advance") or signal strength (used with both WiFis and cell towers)
> locally, given the WiFi hotspots
You'll also need a local database with the hotspots' positions (usually those aren't actually measured but estimated from observations at different locations). I'm not aware of a device that ships with this, nor popular software that uses it as its primary method, as such databases are many gigabytes. Thus this is typically not local; you're sharing your data (thus location) with the server which then kindly tells you where it thinks you are