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Epic stuff, and I think this experience may well be more valuable than the homework you avoided. Basically you did harder homework in order to avoid easier homework. The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. (Although I also think watching a video and doing some multiple choice questions is the laziest low-effort homework assignment there is, and the damage may not have been all that big.) But you used logic and programming to work around a math problem, which are roughly in the same field, so I think that's fair. A slightly similar situation: my previous job was at a bank, and banks over here are bound by all sorts of ethics and rules, and are required to regularly train all their employees in balancing the interests of customers, society, and the bank. This bank did that by gamifying it: we had an app where we had to answer all sorts of ethical questions and make sure our score in the app was over 70% at the end of every month. A coworker used our testing framework to access the app, answer questions randomly like you did, and store the correct answer to use next time. It apparently worked very well, but using tech to avoid ethics questions is quite a different issue than yours. (He shared it with me when he left, and I tried it, but it didn't work for me.) |
This, when the scope is limited to yourself, it's very different from when it impacts others.
Back when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was super popular, I was in university and had read about ARP poisoning. Our school was pretty cheap, so all the dorms had hubs instead of switches. This meant that it would be, theoretically, possible to ARP poison an entire dorm, MITM attack and read all the text being sent on AIM since it was sent in the clear. I had a bit of a cyber security passion lab in my dorm room, so I wrote a PoC and ran it on a LAN air-gapped from the rest of the network. I proved that it should work for myself, having confirmed that similar cleartext messages would get passed to the machine intending to listen in between two other machines.
I told my classmate of my project and he expressed interest, so I gave him a copy. Fortunately, I didn't add any authorship info, mostly because I forgot to. I did caution him that ARP poisoning is a pretty "noisy" attack, and someone who was paying attention would notice it. He foolish ran it on the university network, and confirmed he was able to see AIM messages flying back and forth for all the dorm, as well as all the other traffic. It didn't take long for our school's IT to notice that one dorm was funneling all traffic through one machine. A week later he was banned from having a computer in his dorm room for a school year. Thankfully he never gave me up, admitting it was his stupidity that brought it on himself, but nevertheless it was a lesson learned - if you're going to play in the grey space between ethical and not, do so responsibility and don't share the exploits with others.