I use a Firefox preference to pin my location to a spot near, but not at, my house:

user_pref("geo.provider.network.url", 'data:application/json,{"location": {"lat": 45.0, "lng": -122.0}, "accuracy": 128.0}');

I _believe_ this also stops wifi data from leaking anywhere.

    geo.provider.use_corelocation: true/false # presumably for tracking on MacOS

    geo.provider.use_geoclue: true/false # presumably for tracking Linux users with Geoclue2 provider [1]

    geo.enabled: true/false # presumably, turns the whole thing off

One time I worked at a zoom competitor, and our team got to prototype a "detect if these people are in the same room as each other" feature for dealing with echo cancellation etc, where everyone's laptop would emit a unique high frequency, and everyone's laptop would listen for other frequencies. Of course it worked in pristine conditions and fell down in the real world. But it was a fun experiment...

Maybe it’s because I studied in Austria where universities generally provide very little handholding to students but I don’t understand the point of compulsory attendance in university lectures. If students think they can pass exams without attending the lectures then they should be able to do that. I certainly did that once or twice when I realized I needed some more credits before the end of the term. It’s a different thing with lab/exercise sessions but your lack of participation there would be noticed anyway.

I've recently vibe-coded "where-am-i", a small CLI that returns your approximate location using the technology described here.

https://github.com/denysvitali/where-am-i

Tbh, I think this geolocation method is amazing, and I'm grateful it exists, because GPS indoor really sucks.

I assume that smart comp sci kids already have some sort of proxy running on an Android phone that publishes the current in-classroom WiFi environment, and a browser plugin or Linux hack that their stay-at-home friends can run that intercepts the geolocation calls and spoofs the responses with what the in-classroom android phone is seeing.

My PC doesn't have any wireless connections and the Geolocation API always fails. I guess I'd fail this course (which is apparently correct, as I was supposed to be attending in person with a laptop.)

Edit: Presumably it would be possible to hack the browser to return a false position.

Edit: Make it a convenient browser add-on, perhaps. There must be other applications.

Edit: pkulak points out that you just have to set a Firefox option. Why do I even comment on things I know nothing about.

Oh wow, it's the modern version of the clicker, the physical device assigned to you at the beginning of the term used for classroom participation and attendance checking, and which was most definitely defeatable via "the unpatchable strategy of Having Friends".

Now the question: can you spoof your location? Say you are an admin on your system (for instance you run a Linux distro), can you make your OS return the same list of SSID/BSSIDs as your friend who is in the classroom (or as you recorded the day before) to pretend you are there?

Would be a fun experiment, and a nice follow-up post :-).

As the article mentions this tech has been in widespread use for over two decades now. You have likely used it on your phone today without knowing it. GPS is accurate but also very fickle (takes time to get a lock, battery hog, doesn't work great when surrounded by buildings, doesn't work great when inside a building, doesn't work in bad weather). Wifi data is plentiful today in every urban setting, and you can get an exact location in under a second.

I held onto Symbian longer than I should have, but am surprised this practice hadn't crossed my path before now. IMHO it's insidious. It's one thing for a Google Street View car to war scan my WiFi router, but another for my own phone to secretly rat me out. Not that I use Location myself, but I can't stop other members of the household. I assume this is yet another practice that Android forks like GrapheneOS disables?

I've had companies send us laptops for VPN access that had LTE modems and GPS specifically for location verification before granting access to the VPN.

I don't think it's appropriate for a professor to use this feature. Am I in the minority?

> Apple’s instructional opt out page (appending _nomap) to the SSID.

this is good information.

on the other hand, it is pretty impossible to turn off wifi on some apple computers. (when I look at wifi, I get a greyed out off toggle)

You have to get into csrutil to disable the chips from powering up.

Is it common for North American universities to take attendance? Seems like a whole lot of effort to gain little and infantilize your students. They're paying tuition, and if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments. And if they don't fail their exams/assessments then clearly mandating lecture attendance for them wasn't necessary anyway.

The question is, can we patch our browser to respond with whatever we want when getCurrentPosition() is called?

Then we can be wherever we want, super precisely!

Does the "Stop broadcasting SSID" option in most Wifi access points / routers prevent wardriving or is the BSSID still leaked?

Times are getting so much tougher. I remember my early morning organic chemistry classes using top hat. I never showed up to class, but I had my top hat app open.

The answers were usually kept simple, so I'd guess things like 0 or 1 (the questions were never written in the app). I think I ended up with 60% or so on them, which was nice, since it was a bonus component meant to be a little boost to the grade anyways.

> Small digression: did you know that, until May 2000, GPS satellites (which are owned and operated by the United States Space Force) provided the general public a signal with intentional error built into it?

What the hell? Why?

Glad to see a fellow Madisonian make it to HN frontpage. Great work!

The root problem is that a lot of higher education is nurturing a culture of cheaters right now.

Your future doctors, scientists, government officials, etc... will have had to compete and gain coveted academic and career opportunities, in an environment that both has been heavily gamified, and is being overrun by cheaters.

Insulting measures like this TopHat practically endorses the culture of cheating, by telling students that they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task.

Schools with any integrity should be bending over backwards to find, nurture, and support students of integrity.

And to save those who only got admitted by being sketchy, but first semester is a chance to unlearn the bad lessons from before.

Not by treating them as criminals to be monitored, but by treating them like the respectable people they should aspire to be, and which the school expects and requires that they be.

And, for any hopelessly shitty students, who fail to honor this first semester extension of trust, the school should smack them to the curb. Lost tuition income, lost named buildings/chairs, and expensive lawsuits from helicopter parents, be damned.

TL;DR: location API exists. Wifi-based location exists. American universities apparently use this to take "secure" attendance.

Good article, but you could also just use a VPN to trick it.

My university didn't take attendance either, but some in my country do. As I understand it, the reasons are:

1. Some students think they can skip class and catch up through self-study, but actually they can't. The same I'd-rather-be-partying attitude that stops them attending lectures also stops them finding time to self-study. College is the first time students' time management is put to the test, and some students can't handle it. Giving them some external motivation to get out of bed does them a favour, in the long term.

2. Some courses are discussion-and-debate oriented. Less so in engineering, moreso in arts subjects. If Socratic debate is a key part of the class, students who don't show up will of course lose grades - and accurate record keeping makes sure that's done fairly.

3. Some governments require certain reporting to ensure people getting student visas are, in fact, students. Taking attendance for foreign students is one way to satisfy this.

4. When someone fails a course they'll often lodge an appeal. Perhaps they'll say the course was badly taught, or the exam covered material that wasn't in the lectures. Knowing whether the student attended the lectures helps adjudicate such complaints fairly.

A highly ranked university that attracts smart, self-motivated students has less reason to take attendance - whereas a university with lots of students skipping class, failing and complaining has more reason.

It was the same when I studied applied physics in England many years ago. No one checked or cared if we attended lectures in the physics and maths departments. In fact anyone could have attended the lectures even if they were not a student because there was always plenty of room. But the law department where my wife studied, at the same university, did check who was attending.

As for laboratory exercises in the physics department, they were in theory compulsory but still no one checked. The final year included a long experimental project that had to be documented and conclusions defended in a viva. Again no one formally checked that we actually did it but as we were grouped into small teams for this anyone who didn't pull their weight would have been reported by their fellow students and would not have had access to the experimental results which would have made it difficult to write it up and defend.

Compulsory attendance used to be far less common in colleges, but teenagers in America mature far more slowly than they used to and undergrads are still effectively children. Universities need to babysit them or they'll wreck the dropout rate

I take attendance (the old-fashioned way) in my college classes for a couple of reasons:

- Some students are "sponsored" by scholarships or organizations that request attendance data. - I want to know the attendance record for a student who is asking for an extension, or extra-credit work, or some other informal accommodation. - I like to draw fancy graphs correlating attendance and final grades.

But other than that, I don't care if students are in class or not. They're adults. Learning is their responsibility.

I graduated University in the US in 2004. I never took a class that had mandatory lecture attendance.

I was punished by getting into grad school, going to the "meet the faculty" party, and having my Algorithms professor greet me with "oh, you're the one who never came to class". (I can't resist pointing out, now that it's safe, that it seemed like his TA taught quite a few of his classes...)

You misunderstand. The customer is the government, which pays for student education through 'student loans'. The government is an absentee farmer who pays a farm labourer to produce a crop many years in the future. The labourer would rather take the money and plant nothing, so the absentee landlord farmer wants him to send photos of the seed being planted.

But why won't the crop grow on its own? It is strongly incentivized to live! And yet it does not. So you need to send photos of tilling the soil, planting the seed, watering, so that one day we might come there and see a harvested crop.

> if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments

My (UK) University was very clear that attendance was not mandatory, but if you weren't attending lectures you were not going to get any extra help from the lecturers etc

I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take, but it's nice if you _know_ rather than _guess_ who bothered to make it in to class.

It's a protection for the faculty and students.

If you fail someone who rarely attended class, and they claim that they did, asked you for support, and never received it, how might you defend yourself?

If you have an excellent student who encounters a hardship, how might you petition for leniency to allow them to drop without penalty beyond a cutoff, or delay submitting final grades until they can complete makeup work?

In my experience it’s common for large intro level classes. While I personally never liked these policies, I do think it’s beneficial to the average student to incentivize attendance. Think 18 year olds who aren’t able to self regulate or fully understand the consequences until it’s too late. A “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality just hurts the average quality of education.

I think it's worth pondering why you feel paying tuition enters the assessment of the situation. The justification would seem to stand on its own either way, right? Or would your opinion change if tuition was free?

If you require attendance to graduate, then your degree signals conformity and grit, and thus has some value to show to employers who care about those stats but can't really measure them any other way.

I have an inside perspective on this via an academic integrity company.

A couple weeks ago there was an exam in an R1 institution that double booked the facility so one section did the exam in person on campus and the other did it "from home". The score distribution of the in person exam was a typical bell curve, and the distribution of the online exam looking like a power-law curve with over half the students scoring 100%.

Thankfully this outraged the professor, and through a variety of means (which I will not disclose publicly) over 25% of the students were caught red handed. Actions are being taken against them, though I'm not sure how far they will go. The evidence against them is overwhelmingly conclusive. In some cases the evidence led to more evidence of cheating in other courses. It seems clear that more that 25% cheated, but I guess catching some is better than none.

As someone who is keenly aware of this crisis, I feel tiny bursts of relief when I see these small wins, though it does feel a bit like bailing an ocean with a teacup.

It also doesn't help that our outrage-driven media overwhelmingly exposes us to cheaters.

Everyone's heard of Theranos, Enron, Martin Shkreli, and Bernie Madoff. This week, my 70+ year old aunt asked me about Charlie Javice and Frank. Yet, there are thousands of very successful people quietly building their castles who live and die in relative obscurity because their stories just aren't that thrilling.

If you spend a lot of time interacting with people in the latter category, or if you have them as your mentors, then you will be exposed to a model of what success through hard work and integrity looks like. If you don't, then it's very easy to think everyone successful is a cheater, and that cheating is the only way to break the ceiling into success.

It’s not about individual people - it’s just scale, paired with Goodhart's law.

No number in a spreadsheet will tell you who’s the genuine student. The moment you’re ranking like that you lost.

Long term human interaction in reduced groups is far better at creating genuine environments. But of course, that system doesn’t scale, and it’s a breeding ground for nepotism.

In this moral framework, would it be acceptable for the lecturer to take attendance orally, or is that also insulting?