#educational corruption

[townpostin]

CBI Investigation into NEET-UG 2024 Paper Leak Expands to Jamshedpur

New Findings Link Jamshedpur to the Ongoing NEET Paper Leak Scandal The ongoing CBI investigation into the NEET-UG 2024 paper leak has revealed connections to Jamshedpur, with new findings emerging daily. JAMSHEDPUR – The CBI’s probe into the NEET-UG 2024 paper leak has expanded to Jamshedpur, with investigators uncovering potential links to the city’s involvement in the scandal. For the past…

[satiresale]

اِس سال زکوٰۃو فطرانہ دیتے وقت، اُن غریب افراد کو بھی یاد رکھیے، جن کے بچے، ایچی سن کالج میں پڑہتے ہیں اور فیس نہیں دے سکتے!

SatireSale #PakistaniMemes #PoliticalMemes #AitchisonCollege #AhadCheema #GovernorPunjab #Education #EducationalMemes #Satire #PoliticalSatire #Remember #Like #Comment #Share #Facebook #FacebookPage #Funny #Comedy #Laugh

[reality-detective]

Well, well, well. They followed the money, and look what they found! 👇

$50,000,000 in unaudited US taxpayer money in one month alone went to a pro-terrorist group disguised as a climate change organization. 🤔

[americanmarketplace]

Time for a reminder: We are a (CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC) NOT A DEMOCRACY LET IT SINK IN !!!!!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.

Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).

The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.

The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.

In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.

At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.

A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.

Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.

Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1531684572479377409

British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.

For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.

Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aB1ztWDFr3MU6BsAMt6rWXOiXJ8sT3MY/view

But yesterday, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court, repeating all of these gross errors and finding for Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.

This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.

But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.

So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?

Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.

But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?

Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”

What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”

Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.

Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.

The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.

Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.

The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.

So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.

In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:

https://linkletter.opened.ca/stand-against-proctorios-slapp-update-30/

Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”

Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]

Image: Ingo Bernhardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/spree2010/4930763550/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Eleanor Vladinsky (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_flag_against_grey_sky.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[constantly-deactivated]

The 9th Circuit Court Rules mRNA COVID-19 Shots Not Vaccines.

Alex Jones: "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the COVID-19 mRNA jabs do not qualify as vaccines, a decision that could expose pharmaceutical companies who manufactured them to future liability lawsuits..." 🤔

[politijohn]

Source

[maelancoli]

i'm kind of late to this but i just finished reading the scholomance trilogy by naomi novik and i feel like it is such an underrated urban fantasy?? taking the chosen one trope and turning it on its head with a fmc who has been prophesied to bring death and destruction, who is imbued with terrible power, but cannot even properly use said power to solve any of her obstacles because it would obliterate them and her soul. it takes a tired trope and the idea of an 'overpowered mary sue' and throws it back in your face by showing how all the power and destiny in the world is useless against a system filled with corruption that has burdened you with an easy way out (evil/destructive magic) that you can't take so now you have to work twice as hard as everyone else just to do simple, constructive spells instead of flicking your wrist and being done with it.

[s0lren]

Sexual information post!

(This is not a post to make anyone feel bad or to scare anyone this is just to inform people on how to have safe sex since I feel like it's not talked about enough and it needs to be normalised)

Safewords are always important, especially when doing cnc and even during 'vanilla' sex

The stop light system is a great method

Green means keep going

Orange means slow down

Red means stop

If you aren't a fan of the stoplight system try using words that you would never use during sex but are also easy to remember, names of fruit are very common

Remember, ignoring someone's safe word is never okay, sometimes people can just not hear it but if it continues to happen it's not okay.

Aftercare is also extremely important.

Some people need aftercare all the time. Some people only need it sometimes. Other people don't need it at all. But it's always good to ask.

Aftercare is for both subs and doms. I've seen way too many people claim its just for subs which isn't true, aftercare is for everyone.

People can also need aftercare in different ways. Some people need something to eat and drink. Some people need some reassuring. Some people need to be left alone for a bit. No matter what kind of aftercare you need, it's valid.

It's okay not to cum.

For some people, especially AFAB people or people on medication, it can be hard to cum but that doesn't mean that they can't enjoy themselves. Just because your partner hasn't cum doesn't mean they haven't enjoyed themselves. You can get off without needing an orgasm and don't be disheartened if you or your partner doesn't have one.

Always be safe.

If you have multiple sexual partners always use condoms to avoid contracting anything, even if they claim to be clean don't go without one unless they have proof of being clean. This also applies to sex toys, if you are sharing them with someone else then use a condom and be sure to sterilise it after using just to be on the safe side.

STIs aren't always curable and can lead to health complications down the line so if you ever suspect you have one then go to the doctor before having sex with anyone, especially if it's unprotected.

Don't do the pull out method. There is a chance that sperm can leak with precum or you could pull out just a little too late. If you are worried about pregnancy just use birth control or a condom.

Reminder

Giving your consent shouldn't be a turn off

If you aren't sure that someone is consenting then ask, never do something with someone unless you are 100% sure they want to do it

It is not consent if they persuade you to do something

It is not consent if you are too drunk to say no

It is not consent if you are asleep

It is not consent if you are being blackmailed

It is not consent if you say no

It is not consent if you don't say yes

If you didn't want to give your consent then you didn't give your consent.

Even if you aren't sure that something wasn't consensual you still need to reach out to someone. Don't suffer in silence.

[rafiknytvphotoandfilm]

The more you find out, the worse it is!

[raincitygirl76]

For anyone getting excited over Hillerska being shut down by the school inspectorate, hold your glee. Lundsberg Skola is the Swedish boarding school Hillerska seems to based on. After years and years of warnings and fines re bullying and hazing, Lundsbergs was shut down by the school inspectorate on August 28, 2013.

It was supposed to stay shut down for a minimum of 6 months. Instead the school hired expensive lawyers, appealed, and were allowed to reopen on September 6, 2013. So it only took 9 days before they found a loophole. One can assume Hillerska will do likewise and everybody (except the third years) will be back in class in the second half of August when the new school year starts.

At Lundsbergs, the headmaster was fired and the entire board of governors resigned after the shut down. But they soon regrouped, hired a new headmaster, appointed new alumni and parents to the board, and debuted a shiny new anti-bullying policy. Whether it actually worked is unlikely. But the parents are mostly alumni themselves. They would’ve gone through the same brutal hazings and wouldn’t think they’d be such a big deal.

Here’s the Wikipedia page, scroll down to the Controversy section for the details on the abuse and bullying that the school was turning a blind eye to. The final investigation, the one that triggered the (temporary) shutdown, was when the younger boys were burned with hot irons by older boys at an initiation. One boy was burned so badly he needed to be hospitalized. The hospital called the local police, who called the school inspectorate. Note: that boy’s parents were not the ones to notify either the police or the school inspectorate.

Also scroll down to the Alumni section for a look at all the rich, influential and famous people (including multiple Swedish royals across many generations) who went there.

[shaadowmilkcookie]

hi sorry yall really havent been able to escape these guys huh??? ;u; i saw a cute yume october prompt list and i knew i wanted to try some of them! the day 1 prompt is ‘first meeting’!

primotalii broke into the blueberry yogurt academy’s library in the middle of the night just to……. read…? okay man.

[reality-detective]

Just a Reminder 👆

“We can lower the population if we do a really good job with vaccines by about 10-15%” - Bill Gates

Reminder not to take experimental injections pushed on you by those who are on record numerous times advocating for the depopulation of the planet.

It’s really not complicated stuff people. 🤔

[dosesofcommonsense]

Again, when modern society doesn’t read, they’re exceptionally easy to manipulate.

BLM proving just how bad the education system needs to be revamped.

[devotionthatcorrupts]

I think dean would let castiel watch him and sam fuck and call it educational

[constantly-deactivated]

Just a reminder...

2919 - Remember when ABC refused to air Amy Robach’s "We have everything" story on the Epstein client list? 🤔