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  Anonymous Coward, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 3:39pm

  
  

  Is that your excuse for the Hatch and Wexler items today? The computer ate your homework?

   

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  COD (profile), Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:04pm

  
  

  The commenters at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/corrupted_word.html did a brutal beat down on this service and all the ways it would be fairly easy for teacher / professor to bust you on it.

   

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  Anonymous Coward, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:09pm

  
  

  Or you could make your own corrupted files for free.

   

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  Noah Body, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:20pm

  
  

  Re:

  Don't tell the people selling the corrupted files, they might sue for trying to ruin their business model...

   

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  Anonymous Coward, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:45pm

  
  

  Re: Re:

  oh shi-
  
  You're right!

   

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  Jerry Leichter, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:25pm

  
  

  Old idea in software

  There are many "friend of a friend" stories about software companies buying time by shipping corrupted CD's (or, back in the day, tapes). I've never personally seen this done, but it's certainly been talked about.
  
  I *have* seen hardware companies play such games. To be able to mark some piece of hardware as shipped by the end of a quarter, a company shipped a university CS department a box containing the power supply and backplanes for a hypercube multiprocessor. The cards containing actual CPU's weren't ready, and were shipped months later. Meanwhile, the empty box was good for many a laugh.
  
  I suppose the service at issue represents yet another example of the consumerization of technology....

   

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  Emily, Jun 15th, 2009 @ 1:07am

  
  

  Re: Old idea in software

  "There are many 'friend of a friend' stories about software companies buying time by shipping corrupted CD's (or, back in the day, tapes). I've never personally seen this done, but it's certainly been talked about." This explains Windows Vista!

   

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  Anonymous Coward, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:30pm

  
  

  Would the Prof then send the file to "TurnItIn" ?

   

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  Otm Shank (profile), Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:34pm

  
  

  Hopefully for the student's sake the metadata is clean or also corrupted. And, you can only do this once, then they're on to you.

   

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  Nick, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:34pm

  
  

  $3.95?!!!

  Just take a random file and change The extension.

   

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  Anonymous Coward, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:41pm

  
  

  I thought Microsoft already had a patent on corrupted files.

   

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  Arudis, Jun 14th, 2009 @ 10:39am

  
  

  Re:

  buuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrnnnnn!

   

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  Andrew (profile), Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:50pm

  
  

  Of course, this is one nice little scam, as none of the files are unique. There's a set of six or seven different lengths - which is sent to everyone, resulting in everyone using this having the same filesizes and MD5 hash signatures.

   

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  Andrew (profile), Jun 12th, 2009 @ 4:57pm

  
  

  Re:

  Whoops, sorry, didn't realize that that entry was protected when I linked to it.

   

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  CleverName, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 6:30pm

  
  

  Just a hunch, but

  I dont think this is going to the next killer service

   

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  Rob, Jun 12th, 2009 @ 8:31pm

  
  

  Thats why the days of floppies were great.

  Just hand the CS professor a scratched up floppy...those things got damaged so easily, you could get away with it once or twice and no one questioned it.

   

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  Grae (profile), Jun 15th, 2009 @ 10:54am

  
  

  Even if this worked ...

  Assuming that professors/teachers didn't immediately catch on and bust someone for doing this and that it became widespread in use: wouldn't it just breed a generation of hard-ass profs/teachers that would have a policy of "the integrity of the files you turn in for your schoolwork is your responsibility, you will get an F for any corrupted files you turn in."
  
  In fact, I have to wonder if news of this service even existing will prompt educators to put this sort of policy in place preemptively.

   

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