TurnItIn.com - Beating The System Part 4: Denying Our Corporate Overlords
Posted Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:14:33 GMT to Posted in Geek, School, Ideas
As many of you might know, a while back Mike Smit started taking a hard look at TurnItIn.com a while back. For those of you who follow his site, he has more recently begun an information campaign, pointing out failings, problems, and concerns with the service. Even outside of his site, the issue has been getting a lot of attention, including being covered in the current issue of the Dalhousie Gazette.
One of the things Mike is doing is investigating how effective it is, and how difficult it is to trick the system. Currently has mentioned three ways to beat the system. One involves his own program that manipulates the document to make it pass. The second involves using MS Word’s built in hidden text feature. The third to date is using MS Words built in macro functionality. “How can we trick the system with free tool that are readily available?” However, not everyone can write software, or own MS Word. I began thinking to myself ‘how can I trick the system with free tools that are readily available?’. First step: take a look at OpenOffice. Can the same hidden text trick work? A quick test shows…......... no. Hidden text is a field attribute in OO, and a character attribute in MS Word. The two are not compatible. Macros? Keeping the macro as is and saving as a MS Word file doesn’t work. This is largely due to MS Word using their own scripting language or VB for their macros, while OO has their own scripting language, as well as using javascript and a few other options. Either way, the macro option is out, especially since TurnItIn.com doesn’t accept OO documents, making an effort to create a similar macro for OO pointless (at this time).
But wait…... what formats DOES TurnItIn.com accept? A quick check (verified by Mike a second later) gives me the following list: MS Word, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, and plain text. Plain text is out for obvious reasons, MS Word is being hammered by Mike’s own tests….... wait…... HTML? Instantly a few ideas come to mind. Idea the first: What happens if I replace all the spaces in a document with a & nbsp;? Thankfully TurnItIn.com DOES convert these to spaces. I would have laughed my ass off if they hadn’t.
Idea 2) What about inline style tags using spans? For example, this document. Note that this is what the professor would see. Now view the page source. You should see a number of lines like this:
<span style="position:absolute;left:-10000px">fgahlhgk</span>
“What is sad is the fact that we are not even trying hard yet.”
This basically takes these characters and shifts them WAY to the left out of site of people like your prof.
Result? 0% plagiarized according to TurnItIn.com. Total time required to figure this out? < 5 minutes. Tools required? Your favorite plaintext editor. So not only can cheap windows users use this technique, but now Linux users can too!!!
What is sad is the fact that we are not even trying hard yet.
You are fucking brillant. And I love the fact that you are not even trying yet.
I think the one thing the Mount did to make me proud I went there was ban Turnitin.com because it does violate intellectual property by keeping all papers submitted in its database. I wouldn’t want any of my papers there for anyone who uses it to see. It’s just creepy.
sounds awesome, but i’m not really too computer literate and if you wouldn’t mind sending me an email explaining idea#2 that would be greatly appreciated. thanks
oh yeah and it’s absolutely hilarious how you guys aren’t even trying yet… hahahaha
thanks again
i need, help..? how do i make a paper turned into turnitin.com come out to 0 plagiarized
Why can’t one simply put the whole essay in quotes? One open quote before the first word and one closed quotes behind the last word of the essay. From what I understand, Turnitin.com does not check anything that is in quotes. Thus, the entire essay will come up as 0% copied. And many teachers do not actually open the document to read it straight from turnitin.com. They simply check to see the percentage plagarised next to the title for the document on their Turnitin.com homepage. (http://www.fdewb.unimaas.nl/eleum/plagiarism/TURNITIN_resultreport.jpg) (http://www.fdewb.unimaas.nl/eleum/plagiarism/TURNITIN_resultscreen.jpg)
However, I’ve never been daring enough to try this trick.
George: The best way to ensure that your paper is 0% plagiarized is not to plagiarize.
Alphao: That is somewhat interesting, and I hope that it is actually false. If TurnItIn.com is defeated by putting quotes around an entire paper…..... that would just be sad.
That does sound pretty cool, but like jason i’m not to computer savy. Any further information i could get on idea #2 would be great! Thank you!
Just an FYI, the instructor can view a plagurism percentage with and without quotes. So when its 100% with and 0% without, your screwed.
Ive done this 2 times so far this semester. For the lines you plagiarized just change the first and last letter of each line. For example:
The report on Beef Jerky Export was steadily increasing during this year.
to
A report on Beef Jerky Export was steadily increasing during this period.
I don’t know why it works, but after getting two F’s from plagiarism I figured this out. I guess that once TurnItIn doesnt find a word that matches the first word in a similar sentence it moves on.
I doubt it. Maybe it works for small lines, but for any significant amount of text, I am fairly certain that TurnItIn would return the text as plagiarized.
PS: Good job on those 2 Fs. Anyone who plagiarizes deserves to fail, imo.
YO bithches dont plagerize and nothing wil happen get your lazy asses up and do the paper ypurself assholes!
sorry bout the language but its true
How do you view the page source? And I don’t get what you mean by “inline tags?” Explain, thanks.
hi, could you plase e-mail me the explanation od idea 2.
thanks.
Hello, Dima210 here, very interesting ideas, can you email me a more in depth explanation of idea # 2?