[HN Gopher] Syria's exam-related Internet shutdowns
___________________________________________________________________
Syria's exam-related Internet shutdowns
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-06-17 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| stewx wrote:
| How does cutting off Internet access across the board not
| dramatically hamper daily life and business? They must rely a lot
| less on it than we do in highly developed countries.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Nowadays there's a new meme in the form of "Tell me you're X
| without telling me you're X".
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tell-me-without-telling-me
|
| This is a good example of "Tell me you're a backwards country
| without telling me you're a backwards country." (if there's any
| insult meant, it's towards the leaders of that country bombing
| it to the stone age).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The country has been in a brutal civil war for a decade now,
| with something like half the population displaced from their
| homes.
|
| Internet's probably not on the top of the list of things you
| count on.
| paganel wrote:
| Fortunately for them things seem to have entered in a status-
| quo that strongly resembles peace since the Battle of Aleppo
| ended (that was about 4 years ago) and more generally since
| the Syrian Army's latest offensive in Idlib was stalled by
| the Turkish troops (late 2019 - early 2020).
| tbirdz wrote:
| On the contrary, I think Internet access would be even more
| important in that kind of situation
| hn8788 wrote:
| You can't eat internet access, or use internet access for
| shelter or self-defense, so it's probably not important for
| a lot of people.
| bagacrap wrote:
| you definitely can use it to learn about threats or to
| find shelter or food
| tbirdz wrote:
| No but you can use it to check news and current events,
| safety conditions, communicate with friends and family,
| and find information to help you survive better
| naveen99 wrote:
| Ironically, California is getting rid of the exams.
| carschno wrote:
| I suppose exams of which answers are googleable are not very
| useful for anything other than pushing piles of facts
| (temporarily) into students' heads. But I also suppose that the
| Syrian governement is probably not the best counterpart to argue
| about progressive education methods with.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| These super tests are dumb in any case. All it ends up measuring
| is who is most effective at cheating. The people that came up
| with this system probably wouldn't be able to pass it
| legitimately either.
| tester756 wrote:
| cheating on this kind of exams? good luck
|
| anyway, standarized exams are the best avaliable tool
|
| I wish there were exams like that after high edu in my country,
| just like some top schools in india do it (GATE Exam)
| pranau wrote:
| This happens in North Indian states as well where the state
| governments have gotten extremely trigger happy with cutting off
| internet access for trivial reasons like student exams. It's
| extremely frustrating and makes me wonder how people keep voting
| the same morons (I'm sorry but I do not have a charitable word
| for them) back into power.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The best vote of confidence is the brain gain/drain ratio.
|
| Are smart, educated and highly motivated professionals going to
| North India or are they leaving it?
| bagacrap wrote:
| if I wanted to rule without opposition I might take steps to
| drive away or suppress the intelligentsia, so I'm not sure
| what your metric is really measuring, maybe effectiveness of
| my tyranny?
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| I generally agree, but this doesn't work in countries that
| restrict cross border movement of their own citizens.
|
| North Korea neither gains talent from abroad nor loses talent
| to other countries. Europe loses talent to the United States.
| It's a flawed comparison, but North Korea is not a better
| place to work and do business than Europe, which this
| comparison would imply.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Because they aren't being "voted" in.
| unmole wrote:
| Because the other set of morons are not necessarily any better.
| nindalf wrote:
| Ah yes, the evergreen complaint in Indian politics. No matter
| how bad the current government is, it's supporters will claim
| the alternative is worse. Even when tens of thousands of
| people were dying because of COVID, people like this would
| say "abe librandu (hey libtard), if not Modiji then who?"
|
| Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might
| not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted
| about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen ... during
| a pandemic.
| unmole wrote:
| I'm not even remotely a BJP supporter, as my comment
| history will attest to.
|
| The union government's Covid response has been
| spectacularly bad, anyone who argues otherwise is a
| brainwashed idiot.
|
| If INC was in government some of the more megalomaniacal
| screwups might have been avoided. Lockdown wouldn't have
| been announced just hours before it went into effect for
| example.
|
| However, I don't see the overall results being much better.
| Be it Sanghis, Commies, Congressis or any flavour of
| regional satraps, I can't think of a single state
| government that actually did a halfway decent job.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| Kerala did much better than other states in terms of a
| rational and effective response to covid.
| yunohn wrote:
| This was a narrative, but not necessarily true?
|
| Early 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
| india-53431672
|
| Late 2020:
| https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/compelling-
| que...
| lucian1900 wrote:
| The failure narrative is not necessarily true either. Are
| we to trust British state propaganda of all things?
| yunohn wrote:
| I never claimed it was false. I said it's not entirely
| true. I think like most states, Kerala has a lot of
| misplaced pride, and fail to see that their politicians
| are similarly problematic. Just like the common criticism
| of BJP, they too neglected COVID policies during voting
| periods.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| By pretty much any metric Kerala handled the pandemic
| better than other states. It's worth looking at the
| material interests behind narratives. British imperialism
| (as export of capital at usury rates) is still heavily
| invested in India and communists winning in other states
| would threaten profits.
|
| The CPI (M) can hardly be compared to the BJP, they're
| complete opposites.
| yunohn wrote:
| Nobody is saying the metrics are identical, nor the
| parties. I'm saying that politicians are fallible, and
| commit similar injustices to their citizens. I believe
| it's crucial to have a nuanced discussion where any side
| is criticized for their shortcomings.
|
| From the Hindu, a decidedly anti-BJP, left news org:
| "Political exigencies also led the government to
| deliberately delay conducting a serosurveillance study
| till local body poll results were out".
| lucian1900 wrote:
| It still looks to me like comparing minor flaws to active
| state oppression and neglect. "Both sides" arguments
| imply some sort of equivalence which the outcomes don't
| support in this case.
| unmole wrote:
| > British imperialism (as export of capital at usury
| rates) is still heavily invested in India and communists
| winning in other states would threaten profits.
|
| What?
| lucian1900 wrote:
| Which bit is confusing?
|
| Imperialism as a stage of capitalism is alive and well.
| Rich countries remain rich by extracting wealth from poor
| countries, generally in the form of exporting capital to
| exploit cheap labour.
|
| Communists are anti-imperialists and if elected in all of
| India would fight against British (and US and Western
| European) exploitation. The British state propaganda arm
| would of course be opposed to communists in India, so as
| to not threaten the profits of the British ruling class.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| That's the issue in many (or most?) countries' politics.
|
| Rather than focus on the issues, just keep shouting about
| how bad the other side would've been if they had been in
| power.
|
| Somehow, UK tories always found a way to make it Corbyn's
| fault. Trump ads showed pictures of Trump's america,
| claiming that's what would happen under Biden.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's literally the easiest scare piece you can write.
|
| Yes, it's bad, but IMAGINE HOW BAD IT WOULD BE IF _THEY_
| WERE IN CHARGE.
|
| Regardless of who _THEY_ is, the people who will respond
| to those ads will do the actual legwork of filling in all
| the awful gaps in what could be happening.
|
| It's ridiculous that it works, but it really seems to be
| effective.
| buran77 wrote:
| Creating an enemy is politics 101 and routinely used by
| people of all walks of life. It's the easiest way not
| only to excuse your low performance, which is suddenly
| made to look good by comparison, but will also keep the
| people busy with worrying about that "larger evil" while
| you do your thing. Sets a low bar and distracts you from
| real issues.
|
| The opposition would have crippled the country even
| worse, that other country violates human rights far more
| egregiously, and that other plumber would have needed
| even more attempts to get that "paranormal" leak fixed.
| vmception wrote:
| These are valid criticisms though
|
| Nobody else will run, because by not being a career
| politician it means you didn't curate your life to be
| devoid of different random criticism from people just
| looking to derail your ambitions and character on the
| inter/national spotlight.
| dt3ft wrote:
| What if (and hear me out), the internet had a shut-down period,
| say, once a month, on a sunday or so. What would society look
| like? What kind of changes would we see? (provided, emergency
| services stay reachable).
| [deleted]
| stickfigure wrote:
| It would look like this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv
|
| People would use crazy contortions of logic to figure out how
| to enable the internet and do what they want to do anyway.
|
| "Emergency" services, you say? It would normalize "on Sundays
| we put on uniforms so we can access the internet". In a
| generation or two, not wearing fireman's turnouts on Sunday
| would be considered sinful. In a couple more generations, there
| would be violent street clashes between the fireman-uniform
| denominations and the police-uniform denominations.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I think it's an interesting thought experiment. Would
| applications improve their capabilities around caching, local
| processing, spooling of transactions and treat the internet as
| the "optimal" state but not required? What services are
| impossible to process locally? _e.g. cache map data, road
| conditions locally, present a "last updated" time on maps..
| purchase things over encrypted sms with some token mechanism,
| etc..._
| awb wrote:
| There are plenty of rural towns and homesteads with no cell or
| Internet service in the US where this is the reality 24/7. Even
| here in the Bay Area in the Santa Cruz mountains and in Big Sur
| there are places like that and people living a fully
| disconnected lifestyle.
|
| So from a personal / family point of view, it would probably
| feel like the 80s or early 90s. You'd have modern amenities
| with landlines being the primary form of connection.
|
| From a business / services perspective, places would have to
| have more robust backup and service continuity systems in place
| to keep things running smoothly during the outages. But this is
| just best practice anyway, so I'm not sure it would have as big
| an impact as we might think.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Probably the same thing that would happen if we shut off
| electricity or running water for one day a month.
|
| There's no reason everyone suffer because a small handful of
| people lack the self discipline to disconnect.
| swiley wrote:
| The internet was empowering to PC users. Now that PCs have
| mostly been replaced with smartphones we think of it as a bad
| thing used to feed addictions and serve ads/television because
| that's what it's become.
| sneak wrote:
| Many people would lose access to transportation of many
| different kinds. Some people might lose their jobs.
|
| Some people would lose access to their usual forms of delivered
| food, and would have to prepare in advance (buying food on
| Saturday to have on hand the next day).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| All websites that allows you to stream things would have a
| short term download feature.
|
| People would use phones to actually call others, which would
| make them easier to spy on.
|
| It would be overall very inconvenient, but some Karens would
| think it was good for all the young nerds and it would stick
| around for that reason.
|
| It wouldn't get people to meet up in real life much more than
| they do now, because it would be difficult to organize and it
| would be difficult to find where you are going without GPS.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I'd guess it'd be similar to how some European cities prohibit
| all large retailers (including food stores) from opening on
| Sunday, except a hell of a lot more expensive.
|
| You'd need extra shifts on site, redundant local networks for
| emergency services, redundant links for phone companies, extra
| space in ports and warehouses, special contingency plans,
| _etc._ And all of that gets excercised 1 /30 less often than
| usual so is more prone to failure--in a situation of where
| communication is degraded in the first place.
|
| An ISOC report on government Internet shutdowns
| (https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/02/I...) says Zimbabwe lost 5.7 million,
| or 10% daily GDP, per day during a sudden six-day shutdown.
|
| A regular shutdown would be more workable, but given the
| countries you're interested in are probably more Internet-
| dependent than Zimbabwe something on the order of 0.1% GDP when
| averaged over a month still sounds plausible. For scale, the US
| federal government spends 1.2% GDP on education.
| ghaff wrote:
| That sounds about right. Depending upon what "shutting down
| the Internet" means. Does everyone need to now have a POTS
| landline again if they want to communicate with anyone on a
| Sunday? But, in general, some combination of alternative
| systems for critical purposes and lots of things, including
| most shopping and other services, simply shutting down for
| the day.
| em-bee wrote:
| the reason for the closure is employment laws. employees
| simply have the right to not be forced to work on sundays or
| public holidays.
|
| if you run your own business you can work whenever you want.
| you just can't have employees work those days.
|
| restaurants, hospitals, transportation and similar industries
| get an exception to let employees work any day. restaurants
| usually close on mondays instead.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| It's not that I'm _objecting_ to the closure: it is
| certainly very inconvenient at first (I did go without food
| on quite a few Sundays when I couldn't gather the
| determination to hike to a small shop), but not unworkable;
| it was simply a convenient comparison (if with much lighter
| economic consequences). I suspect the precise conditions
| vary by country, because I've certainly bought stuff from
| hired cashiers on Sundays, it's only the supermarket chains
| that didn't work.
|
| As to the rights argument, I tend to be wary of them in
| general, because any mention of a "right" tends to have an
| absolute or moral quality to it, and those are dangerous
| enough not to be used lightly or without justification.
|
| The goal of guaranteeing people a holiday is not itself bad
| (I'm just not ready to call it a "right"), but can be
| reached in quite a few other ways, such as (off the top of
| my head) prohibiting employment contracts that span a
| weekend boundary or just flat out prohibiting contracts
| that mandate work on holidays except for (strictly
| optional) overtime. Each of the options can have additional
| effects (such as shaping the weekend ambiance of your city
| in a certain way or making overtime _de facto_ obligatory
| for low-paying jobs), and I'm not against deciding that any
| of them is best, only against not recognizing the existence
| of the choice. My concern is the intellectual honesty, not
| the employment politics.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It is common across lots of Europe for most or all shops to
| be closed on Sundays.
|
| The local population don't view that as odd or inconvenient -
| simply as 'the way things are'.
|
| As a visitor though, it means you need to plan ahead at least
| 24 hours - if you haven't bought food for sunday by midday
| saturday, there's a good chance you're going hungry.
|
| I would be very interested to know the macroeconomic impact
| of such a policy. Presumably labor running shops is reduced,
| but overall sales volume is not, which could outweigh the
| economic cost of inconvenience for the whole population...
| em-bee wrote:
| most visitors don't cook for themselves though. restaurants
| are open, so only a few people will be inconvenienced by
| closed supermarkets. they are probably more inconvenienced
| by closed restaurants on mondays.
| ghaff wrote:
| It was pretty normal in the US as well until a few decades
| ago. When I was an undergrad, very little in the city I
| lived was open on a Sunday. I remember it being a nuisance
| as an undergrad. I often had classes and other things to do
| during the week and often had sports on Saturday, so
| finding the time to do shopping runs during the week could
| be a pain.
|
| Historically, the reason was religious. But mom and pop
| stores also often opposed Sunday opening because large
| retailers were in a better position to just add incremental
| staff than they were.
| tester756 wrote:
| >The local population don't view that as odd or
| inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'.
|
| Definitely not in Poland
| tomjen3 wrote:
| >The local population don't view that as odd or
| inconvenient - simply as 'the way things are'.
|
| This used to be the way things were here in Denmark, and
| yes we thought it was inconvenient and stupid so we got rid
| of it (almost, there are a few days left in the year where
| it is still the case, and they are inconvinient and
| stupid).
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know Danish holidays but you don't think stores
| should be mostly shut on major family holidays? In the
| US, I fully support most stores with some exceptions like
| maybe pharmacies being shut on at least Thanksgiving and
| Christmas.
| dantheman wrote:
| The local population does view it as inconvenient and many
| wish that things would be open.
|
| Hell, normally at train stations there are some shops that
| are open and they are packed and cleaned out.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off of the
| internet if they want.
|
| Forcing everyone off the internet via government control is a
| step too far.
| blfr wrote:
| There's nothing stopping people from taking a day off
| individually but it's still a coordination problem. You might
| want to spend time with other people. Much like setting a
| market day in medieval towns.
| foxpurple wrote:
| Without the internet it would be rather difficult to
| coordinate anything with others since you can't contact
| them. I assume phone and sms is included in this blockout
| since they run over the internet now and could be used to
| build the internet from scratch if excluded.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Still an interesting thought experiment.
| grecy wrote:
| You could just ask your parents.
|
| If you want to know about life before TV, just ask your
| grandparents.
| overcast wrote:
| No, just removing the internet doesn't revert life back to
| the time before it. They are asking what would our "today"
| look like if we had an internet day of rest once a week.
| Maybe people would have a regular get together day?
| ghaff wrote:
| The problem is that a huge number of things that weren't
| dependent on network connectivity now are. Now, having said
| that, in many places in the US, stores were mostly closed
| on Sunday so it sort of was a "day of rest" in many places.
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| The cynic in me expects we'd see vociferous lobbying from the
| usual suspects for endless expansion of what traffic falls
| under the excluded 'emergency' category.
| lagadu wrote:
| No electronic payments? We'd see most people unable to pay for
| gas or food, huge economic impact from that alone.
|
| I guess this would vary by country but plenty of us live in
| countries where live money is seldomly used.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| I guess people would stay inside, not be able to talk to
| anyone, not be able to check public transit schedules, not be
| able to use maps unless they had downloaded them in advance,
| and probably not be able to use credit cards to buy food
| (assuming supermarkets and restaurants would even bother to be
| open).
| ghaff wrote:
| You do realize that people were able to go out on Sunday and
| do things before there was an Internet that they could
| connect to and that stores were often closed. And that they
| could make plans in advance if they were meeting someone or
| going somewhere.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Yes but I don't know if people would be willing to deal
| with those things now.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know. Normally, I often get together with friends
| on a weekend day. We coordinate things beforehand via
| email but we mostly don't really need Internet otherwise.
| viraptor wrote:
| > provided, emergency services stay reachable
|
| Define "emergency services". Are online maps showing me the
| route to the hospital an emergency service? What about online
| translation service useful in emergency abroad? What about
| online bank access for emergency funds? Etc...
|
| We really got to the utility stage of the internet where half
| the services can be an "emergency" service in some context.
|
| But on the other extreme, you can have a look at more strict
| Jewish communities where one day every week is a no-internet
| day.
|
| I'm not sure if you're looking for personal or society changes,
| but I've been doing a completely non-religious tech-Sabbath day
| occasionally. It's a nice, relaxing experience. Nothing mind-
| altering though.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's a fair answer. If the question is whether people could
| live without Netflix, email, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. for
| one day a month, at least my answer would be "of course,
| without breaking a sweat."
|
| But if you posit a general lack of network connectivity,
| you're right that it means that most services that we take
| for granted would be down including things like e.g. buying
| gas.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > whether people could live without Netflix
|
| People would be surprised the Netflix button stopped
| working on their TV.
|
| "No Netflix but I can still watch cable?"
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| On the other hand, if we had started years ago regularly
| arbitrarily shut down the internet for a day, as apparently
| Syria does, we probably wouldn't have come to rely on the
| internet for so much basic infrastructure. I doubt buying
| gas is down in Syria when they shut down the internet.
|
| It's not realistic to think that could have happened in the
| USA, but it's interesting to think about. As a software
| engineer who knows how unreliable and vulnerable our
| software infrastructure is, I don't love how much of
| society is dependent upon it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| (and the other piece is, I doubt the US government has
| the ability to easily "shut down the internet" for a day
| -- at least I hope they don't, although they might, they
| shouldn't, and if they do it shouldn't be easy or
| expected. Cause they would definitely use that ability
| for nefarious ends).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > On the other hand, if we had started years ago
| regularly arbitrarily shut down the internet for a day,
| as apparently Syria does, we probably wouldn't have come
| to rely on the internet for so much basic infrastructure.
|
| The question then is, is that a good thing?
|
| I'd bet on "no". Right, people on Syria get to know how
| to buy gas on a no-internet day, but they also have to
| maintain that knowledge and infrastructure every other
| day of the year.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I think the internet probably isn't involved in their
| gas-buying much on most days. Rather than buying gas
| differently on no-internet days.
|
| We bought gas fine before the internet, and I don't think
| the internet has seriously improved our gas-buying
| experience, and yet...
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume the credit card readers communicate over the
| Internet in some manner. The gas prices at the pumps are
| set over _some_ sort of network though it may be local.
|
| You might be surprised how much communication there was
| between branch stores and HQ going back decades though
| before probably some point in the 90s it may have been
| over phone lines.
| dang wrote:
| Since the more in-depth article hasn't been discussed on HN
| before, we've switched the URL to that from
| https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1405487207377522696.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Cheers!
| pimterry wrote:
| Even if you accept "it must be completely impossible for students
| to access the internet during exam periods" as an important goal
| (it seems very extreme to me, but whatever) I'm astonished that
| cutting the entire country's internet off is the only way to
| achieve that.
|
| What about cutting off just mobile data + school wifi? Everybody
| with wifi or a network connection elsewhere would be just fine.
| Still extreme, but dramatically less disruptive.
|
| Plausibly you could limit this further, to block data only on
| phone masts near schools.
|
| Still an ridiculous measure, but I'm really surprised that
| they've taken the most extreme measure possible instead of trying
| to limit the fallout at least a little bit. It's not like nobody
| is using it -
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?location...
| shows that by 2017 more than 1/3 of Syrians had internet access,
| and rapidly increasing.
| padastra wrote:
| At some level of incompetence, you might ask whether the
| underlying assumptions are wrong -- for example, perhaps
| they're looking for excuses to reduce internet access more
| generally.
| jl6 wrote:
| One could imagine a 365-day excuse calendar which provides a
| cover story for any time they want to shut down the internet.
| Today's excuse is exams.
| FredPret wrote:
| This whole story belongs under April 1st sadly
| [deleted]
| _old_dude_ wrote:
| It's like a fire drill. The government wants to desensitize
| people.
|
| They want people be to used to the fact that cutting internet
| is something mundane so the next time they do it because of a
| protest, nobody will care.
| slipframe wrote:
| > _It 's like a fire drill. The government wants to
| desensitize people._
|
| I think this analogy is good, except for 'desensitize'
| which should be 'normalize'. Fire drills particularly are
| meant to normalize responding to a fire alarm going off (to
| make sure people know how to get out of buildings fast),
| but certainly aren't meant to desensitize people to fire
| alarms.
|
| Though in the case of internet shutdowns, desensitization
| and normalization are basically the same thing.
| toast0 wrote:
| From that stat page, Syrians have about 9 fixed broadband
| subscriptions per 100 people, and fixed telephone lines were
| only a bit more, but mobile phone subscriptions were more than
| one per person.
|
| To a first approximation, cutting off mobile data is cutting
| off the internet. The same is true in many other countries;
| there's just not a lot of people with home internet
| connections, and often those aren't part of government forced
| internet shutdowns (sometimes on purpose to try to let
| businesses still work, sometimes because it's easier to get the
| handful of wireless carriers to do it than the sometimes many
| wireline carriers, sometimes because the government forgot).
| But anyway, if you cut off 90% of the people, it breaks the
| utility for communicating with people within your country.
| bloak wrote:
| I agree that the shut-down seems over-broad, but, at the same
| time, might it be too narrow? Couldn't people also use "non-
| data" mobile communications, like SMS or even voice calls, for
| cheating?
|
| If they're not stopping voice calls and there's a working
| landline within 100 metres or so, an enterprising cheat could
| probably set up a private Wi-Fi access point connected to an
| old-school modem doing dial-up either internationally or
| locally to a shortwave radio shack.
| elliekelly wrote:
| People have been cheating on exams long before the internet
| existed. The only way to guarantee no one cheats on an exam
| is to never give the exam in the first place. I think exams
| are the "good reason" the government has given the public to
| justify shutting off internet access, I don't think it's the
| _real_ reason.
| lolc wrote:
| The obvious answer is to shield the exam rooms!
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Still not enough: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.j
| sp?arnumber=8820015
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| My proposed algorithm:
|
| 1. Shield the exam room against anything you can think
| of.
|
| 2. Find the few cheaters that manage to overcome your
| measures anyway. Give them STEM grants, recognition,
| whatnot.
|
| 3. Next exam round, find the people selling turn-key
| cheating solution and give them entrepreneurship grants.
| Flunk the people who bought the cheating solution.
|
| 4. Upgrade your countermeasures, go to step 1.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Given the year+ we've just had, I'm more surprised to see
| comments like this ignoring the possibility that perhaps
| students aren't sat in schools or exam rooms?
|
| If you had an entire country worth of students taking exams
| from home, absolutely possible given the past year, and you
| wanted, as a government to prevent them cheating by accessing
| the internet, what, I wonder would the most obvious solution
| be?
|
| For what it's worth, I still believe it's an utterly ridiculous
| measure, but how can we not be considering this possibility?
| halfdan wrote:
| Uhm. Without Internet they can't take tests from home unless
| you mail it to them - at that point cheating becomes much
| easier by just meeting up with your buddies and doing the
| test together.
| alias_neo wrote:
| If the servers for the exams are hosted in the country, why
| would they need "internet"?
|
| The gov only needs to block connections leaving the
| country, for example.
| quenix wrote:
| Students would still be able to cheat by collaborating
| with students and tutors inside the country, then.
| Johnwbh wrote:
| This is the Syrian government we're talking about here. Recent
| history may indicate that one shouldn't trust them to be
| entirely truthful about their reasons for doing things
| Off wrote:
| This happens here in Algeria too, when students pass the
| Baccalaureate exams, the Internet gets cut daily for a week from
| 8am to 5pm. It's been like this for 5 years now and nobody seems
| to care.
| andix wrote:
| How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is
| no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down.
| How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods,
| or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock
| down because of COVID.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Something tells me that Algeria probably hasn't moved its
| entire social infrastructure online quite as aggressively as
| the US. Presumably there is still some offline telephony
| (POTS? Cellular service? SMS?) that functions to do almost
| everything that you listed.
|
| Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we
| had consumer access to the internet, and both of those
| require communication with a centralized authority.
| 627467 wrote:
| People worry about government regulations to cryptocurrency
| adoption... This seems much more of a threat: trivially easy
| internet cutoff
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Government or no, the online-exam business is the hot new space
| that text-book companies are pivoting too.
|
| Teachers can use their service to grade student homework, and
| proctor (monitor) exams, complete with lockdown apps and eye-
| tracking via laptop cameras.
|
| Maybe these governments are effectively offering the same
| service.
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