pinakiz's blog

By pinakiz, history, 6 months ago, In English

Greetings,

I have been thinking about the cheating problem and I have a suggestion. CF should add phone number verification and allow only those users who have verified their phone number to participate in contests.

Phone numbers are not as easily available as emails, which will create a hindrance for making new accounts after a ban. Additionally, if anyone uses another person's phone number, they will be paranoid that the owner of the phone number can take over their account at any moment.

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6 months ago, # |
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It's not the year 2000. On the Internet, you can write "Free/A paid phone number for verification" and that's it. So its doesnt matter at all The system should work like in the Osu! game, who knows, he will understand. If you created an account on one PC and then created a second one and immediately set a big result(smurfing), then the system bans you (for multiaccount) and you need to write an explanation(maybe its friends new account or you forgot your password and email), and if you cheated, well, then that's hardware ban. In short, the best solution is a separate launcher, like in other competitive systems like faceit (a platform in competitive games), and like the cherry on the cake, verification by phone, which is basically everywhere.---------------- It is better to take photos of the face and passport even then. Or when passport hashing is invented, use it. Because now there is no point in fighting this, because now there is an adequate system, and more complex methods do not work due to the rapidly growing progress in the AI field.

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6 months ago, # |
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"Phone numbers are not as easily available as emails". Incorrect, it's easy to buy phone number for such verification and pay like 0.3$

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    6 months ago, # ^ |
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    can you please tell where it is available for 0.3$? I paid 1.99$ few days back

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      6 months ago, # ^ |
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      he isn't talking about buying a real phone number, he is saying you can get such phone numbers for 0.3$ for verification. There are services on internet that provide you a phone number to recieve otp for like 0.3$

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        6 months ago, # ^ |
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        Yep. I mean you can find: "get phone number for 15 minutes". The price is really low.

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          6 months ago, # ^ |
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          Ig the prices are low but, I don't think that someone who is cheating to get better rating or overall better account(most of them are) would appreciate the access to the phone number and OTP for the account being public and easily available. plus I think it could make catching cheaters much easier, we just have to try to use public phone numbers to log into codeforces. (I think permanent numbers will cost much more than that, and not worth trying cheating on)

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    6 months ago, # ^ |
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    At least cheaters have to pay for something. So that's not too bad an idea.

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    6 months ago, # ^ |
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    still better than mail which is 0$. Thats not a small amount in 3rd world countries, which is where most cheaters are from.

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6 months ago, # |
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While phone number may be easily available, I do support this. Having this is certainly better than not having this.

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6 months ago, # |
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Yeah, I think it should be implemented.

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6 months ago, # |
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I suggest permanent ban in the first cheating. After a contest one of two thing will occur:

1- The cheater get caught by plagiarism detection, get banned definitely and affect nobodoy after rating recalculation.

2- The cheater don't get caught, then any measure for prevent making new account will be useless.

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    6 months ago, # ^ |
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    true just ban them after the very first time so that people would fear before even cheating once

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    6 months ago, # ^ |
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    Not viable. What about the false positives? What about those innocent participants whose code was copied and mass distributed by someone else mid-contest? What about coincidental symmetry between multiple solutions due to a straight-forward approach?

    Spoiler
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      6 months ago, # ^ |
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      You can solve this issues, exactly equal as they are solved right now, give a deadline for the accused ones to proves their innocence,ignore straight-forward implementation problems(often 1 or 2).

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      6 months ago, # ^ |
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      "tackling teachers" is kinda crazy (rev 1)

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        6 months ago, # ^ |
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        some of them teachers do need tackling if we're being honest

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    6 months ago, # ^ |
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    Why an immediate ban? I think we can mark them as suspicious, and observe their behaviour over next contests. The system will act like if nothing happened, updating the ratings accordingly (but ignoring his performance), and if they keep cheating, when they finally reach some rating, (or some time has past), ban them. That way they will have to be very lucky and cautious to cheat, and also they will have wasted a lot of time.

    The core problem here is not about the cheaters, it's about implementing such a system in Codeforces, which I guess may cost some time and effort

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6 months ago, # |
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you'll never stop me though

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6 months ago, # |
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This, but it should be ID/Passport verification instead.

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6 months ago, # |
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is cf that serious?

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6 months ago, # |
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otps can be asked at different random intervals,, they wont be able to use the temporary phone number services

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6 months ago, # |
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problem is that many teenagers practicing for OI are getting into cp nowadays and often don't have phone numbers. I didn't have a phone number when I started cf.