[doublerabbit]

It's not that Cameras didn't exist, more that the technological features were not sophisticated enough to enlist cheating compared to now. A personal OCR Python library wasn't a thing back then.

Not saying that cheating was impossible but uneasy unlike to now where there's a library for everything.

[xattt]

AABBY FineReader was very pirate-able since the early 2000s. The workflow would have been a bit clunky, but it was still very doable.

[ffsm8]

Nobody argued that it was impossible before. Nor did I claim that there were no cameras before 2005.

Cameras just weren't as ubiquitous as today. Unironically arguing that point is silly. They just weren't (I know you didn't, but we're in a comment chain that made that argument).

Yes, in most groups of people, there were a few of them that had cameras readily available, but it wasn't the norm for everyone.

What was available (not just cameras, but ocr etc pp) was a lot less accessable then it is today - where you just point your phone at it and it transparently extracts you the full text of whatever is on screen/lens, consequently the issue got a lot more problematic and widespread, which was the only thing what was put forward here.

[throwaway290]

if you are dedicated and smart enough to invest in a small camera pirate OCR software you can probably just do the assignment in the first place...