DailyDirt: Mostly Harmless Scams...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Feb 7th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

There's cheating, and then there's cheating. There are obviously bad scams that hurt people or involve the loss of significant amounts of money or property, but some scams are hurtful on a much smaller scale. Here are just a few notable examples of some cheaters who were caught red-handed.

Now that computers are better than humans at playing chess, it shouldn't be too surprising that chess engines are being caught in use in human vs human tournaments. One teenager was found using the Fritz chess engine during competition, and it could mean future chess tournaments will be held without any kind of technology near the competitors. [url]
A mid-40s software developer was caught outsourcing his job to a team of programmers in China (for about a fifth of his annual salary). And he would have gotten away with it, too, if he'd just covered his tracks a bit better. [url]
Prof T. Mills Kelly taught a class at George Mason University that encouraged undergraduates to enter fake information into Wikipedia. Don't believe everything you read, kids... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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Filed Under: cheaters, chess, fritz, outsourcing, scams, t. mills kelly, wikipedia
Companies: george mason university

9 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 7 Feb 2013 @ 5:07pm

Chess computers haven't "solved" chess yet, so they're not THAT good. I think Checkers has been solved, and so has Connect4.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Feb 2013 @ 5:46pm

Well, if there exists a class who's entire purpose is to undermine Wikipedia then it's the last time I donate until it proves it can guard against malicious input.
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DCX2, 7 Feb 2013 @ 6:25pm

Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Removal_of_false_information

An informal assessment by the popular IT magazine PC Pro for its 2007 article "Wikipedia Uncovered"[38] tested Wikipedia by introducing 10 errors that "varied between bleeding obvious and deftly subtle" into articles (the researchers later corrected the articles they had edited). Labeling the results "impressive" it noted that all but one was noted and fixed within the hour, and that "the Wikipedians' tools and know-how were just too much for our team." A second series of another 10 tests, using "far more subtle errors" and additional techniques to conceal their nature, met similar results: "despite our stealth attempts the vast majority... were discovered remarkably quickly... the ridiculously minor Jesse James error was corrected within a minute and a very slight change to Queen Anne's entry was put right within two minutes." Two of the latter series were not detected. The article concluded that "Wikipedia corrects the vast majority of errors within minutes, but if they're not spotted within the first day the chances... dwindle as you're then relying on someone to spot the errors while reading the article rather than reviewing the edits."
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Feb 2013 @ 8:41pm

Re:
Today it can, but with declining number of contributors that could change.

But I cross that bridge when we get there.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Feb 2013 @ 8:46pm

Bob there was a real entrepreneur.
It rare to see a working man wanting to outsource his own job and make a profit out of it LoL
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fb39ca4 (profile), 7 Feb 2013 @ 10:19pm

Those chess programs can't compute millions of possible outcomes in nanoseconds. Modern CPUs execute single instructions on a scale of nanoseconds.
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dennis deems (profile), 8 Feb 2013 @ 7:15am

Computers are not better than humans at playing chess. They are better than humans at storing and cross-indexing encyclopedic knowledge of chess openings. They are better than humans at building and traversing a tree of potential moves. They have to examine every branch of that tree in order to determine the optimal move, because until they resolve the min/max they are unable to distinguish between a brilliancy and a crass beginner's blunder. (Possibly some refined pruning of the tree has evolved to make this examination more efficient.)

Computers do not in fact play chess. Computers have no knowledge or understanding of chess. Computers understand hash trees and indexes. Humans have chess knowledge and understanding, and they use it to program chess computers.
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Rekrul, 8 Feb 2013 @ 7:25am

Re:
If you want to be technical, computers don't do anything other than shuffle bytes around and compare values.
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Rekrul, 8 Feb 2013 @ 7:29am

A mid-40s software developer was caught outsourcing his job...
I seem to recall hearing that Bill Gates did something similar when he was younger. Got hired to write something and then conned his friend into doing all the work.
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