defnotmee's blog

By defnotmee, 3 years ago, In English

So, on the last round i wasnt at home, and therefore had to use another person's computer to do the contest. Waking up to close to the start time made me not be able to set up the IDE properly, so I thought "why not just use ideone"?

But what is Ideone anyway?

Well it says its an online compiler, so it must be a great alternative to a text editor to test things locally. However, little did I know that it was, in fact, a trap meticulously crafted by the devil, as I received those kind messages from codeforces:

There are 5 more of these.

Well, let me explain. This is what appears when you go into ideone:

Notice something wrong? Right at the corner of the screen there is a grayed out page called "recent codes", where you can see the recent submissions from people (for absolutely no reason). In fact, any code you post there is available for everyone to see! Such a distinguished feature! The only way to circumvent this is by noticing that that miniscule globe image right below the text box means that the whole world is seeing your solution.

Let's compare it with another site, pastebin. This is what appears when you access it:

Not only is it not a compiler to trick people doing coding competitions, but also its written public instead of an image you have to guess means public, and the public pastes appear on the same page as the one youre typing on, and they dont actually put stuff from people who arent logged on there. Considering logging on there is basically impossible (at least for me), most people are completely safe and happy.

So ok, ideone is bad and made you look like a fool, but why is it evil?

Well, let's find who is behind ideone (aside from the devil of course).

According to https://craft.co/ideone , it's Sphere Research Labs. Sphere... can you guess what it relates to? Yes, Sphere Online Judge, or SPOJ. We don't even have to go as far to confirm its the same company who takes care of both of them, look at the second result on google.

SPOJ itself said it!

And what does spoj have to do with it? See, SPOJ is an online judge, but it has another distinguished feature, it doesnt let you see other people's codes no mather what, which severely hampers the ability to learn coding tricks by looking at good corder's solutions. If the implications are not obvious, I'll let the words of the great brunovsky my own:

That settles it. The Sphere Research Labs are in fact a company design to destroy the lives of coders little by little. Not only do they do the shittiest judge imaginable (SPOJ, that has no one using it but still takes 3 hours to process your code that takes half a second to run, in addition to not having c++17), but at the same time create a trap website (ideone) in such a way that codeforces has to not punish cheaters so harshly, because they can just be someone who used it.

Extra Spice:

Looking at some of the submissions that were plagchecked with mine, we can see some interesting stuff, like this code for A, which was submitted a single minute after mine, and is in fact, completely identical. Not only that, but this freshly created account copied my codes for A, B and C, each of them shortly after i submit into codeforces. It is of my firm belief that this man, along with many others, is actually a bot (which can or cannot be setup by Sphere Research Labs) targetting naive people who trust ideone with their codeforces solutions, making them lose the rating they rightfully earned.

That being said, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

UPDATE:

Guys, good has won this battle. Sphere Research Labs has commented on this post and as of now, private is now the default version of ideone.

As means of reconciliation for the mean comments I've made about them, ideone will be now my go to online compiler, as well as the place i will be pasting code when i need to send someone.

I would like to thank everybody that helped on this cause and gave me contribution, we wouldnt have done this without your help. Im genuinely super happy. Have a great night everyone, history has been made today!

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +30 Vote: I do not like it

Auto comment: topic has been updated by defnotmee (previous revision, new revision, compare).

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +42 Vote: I do not like it

adding an c, p, and t makes ideone an anagram for deception

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
    Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +42 Vote: I do not like it

    The string "ideone" in decimal is

    105 100 101 111 110 101

    whose average is 104.6666666666666.....

    Now, if we do average = average-floor(average)

    It becomes 0.66666666666.....

    multiplying it with 1000

    666.6666666...

    Flooring it gives 666

    Coincidence?
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3 years ago, # |
Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +2 Vote: I do not like it

Just a suggestion for anyone trying to use an online IDE except ideone. Try jdoodle

Some of it's features I like are

  • Inbuilt Dark Mode

  • Vertical Screen Split Similar to Sublime

  • No login required to compile

  • It doesn't make your code public(Atleast in my experience)

  • Nice and fast .

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -14 Vote: I do not like it

Nice blog but man you are a stupid conspiracy theorist.

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +7 Vote: I do not like it

Now you just told to cheaters a new way of cheating.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +62 Vote: I do not like it

    Alternatively, im warning people how to not give codes to cheaters, like i did ;)

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      3 years ago, # ^ |
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      I am saying is that many coders don't know this fact like you even I don't know but now lot of cheater also came to know that, during contest maybe they can get a correct solutions like this. So Please don't use Ideone during contest.

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        3 years ago, # ^ |
          Vote: I like it +10 Vote: I do not like it

        If you make an account on Ideone, your code is by default privatized. I use it every contest.

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +14 Vote: I do not like it

I still dont know how to search code for a problem on ideone in live contest. Do you just go over all public codes and guess if its solution to a particular problem ?

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
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    It's not particularly difficult to implement a bot, which would try to compile public ideone codes and use samples from the ongoing competitive programming contests to test them. If some of these codes respond with the correct answers, then they are possibly leaked solutions. Then a human may take a look at them and do additional tests if necessary.

    Intentionally spamming ideone with incorrect solutions (which happen to produce correct answers only for the samples) may be an interesting experiment. Similar to https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/95415?#comment-844371

    Still I'm surprised that ideone is a known offender and nothing is done to improve the situation. Has anyone even tried to talk some sense into them? Codeforces mentions ideone.com in the plagiarism notification messages (see the screenshots from this blog), but it's too late for the affected victims. Maybe Codeforces should warn people about ideone.com in the contest registration form?

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      3 years ago, # ^ |
      Rev. 2   Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

      Well, they do have a "feedback" page there, so i tried asking them to make it clearer that the code would be published, still waiting for a response. Maybe if more people do that there is a chance.

      The submitting wrong solutions idea seems good, im going to actually try that next rounds (probably not gonna spam it) when i have the opportunity (assuming they dont miraculously stop the bots)

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +13 Vote: I do not like it

Codeforces has its own online IDE. https://mirror.codeforces.com/problemset/customtest

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +171 Vote: I do not like it

TL;DR: source code run on Ideone isn't public by default anymore.

Hi :) Filip from Sphere Research Labs here. That was a lot to take in, but I guess we don't have a choice but to accept that we are evil now.

We wanted the code on Ideone to be public by default because many developers, not necessarily competitive programmers like you, use the "recent codes" to seek inspiration on how things can be done in an online compiler.

Anyway, we've made the "secret" visibility default on Ideone now so that newcomers won't publish their code by accident anymore. Note that if you've been using Ideone before, you might still have the "public" setting saved in the cookies.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
    Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +52 Vote: I do not like it

    Can you look into SPOJ solutions visibility as well ?
    Why can't we learn from other users' submissions ?
    Those classical problems' submissions need to be made public. (_Upvotes please_)
    Please make it happen

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +17 Vote: I do not like it

    S2

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +64 Vote: I do not like it

You only proved your inability to turn on secret mode

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +6 Vote: I do not like it

cpp.sh is where it's at

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6 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -11 Vote: I do not like it

I think that Ideone has a free to code format in online platform which contains your data and spread out your codes everywhere around internet.