I've never done that... Just rename an image to doc/docx and remove the top part of the file (in your favorite text editor) that could help identify it's an image. You're then ready to upload your file to Blackboard (which is terrible) so that your Profs will actually assume Blackboard is at fault.

p.s. this works even with CS profs...

dd if=/dev/random count=3000 of=~/assignment.doc

i think one of the biggest differences between school and work is the deadline or due date and how it is perceived. most of the dates i have to hit now are the ones i give myself. when did your prof ask you "when do you think you'll be done with this class?"...

if i miss an estimate, i tell someone and we deal with it. the more i do that, the less i'm wrong with the estimate in the first place. (given, that's not so relevant in school as you have more than enough time, always;) i/we were there- went to college, had sideways priorities and schedule pressure. this kind of sh*t is for people that don't want to do the work in the first place...

bottom line- you think a good teacher doesn't know when they're getting snowed? you're wrong.

...and i say that as someone that, in school, didn't always want to do the work and still didn't lie to people when i missed deadlines and screwed myself.

i rant, but... as long as you care, even a little bit- TALK TO YOUR TEACHERS! they'll cut you ten times the slack that a corrupted file gimmick will ever win you.

As a person who deals with adult ADD, literally the biggest tool in my toolbox is an impending deadline with dire repercussions if I fail to meet it. The adrenalin clears my mind and allows me to concentrate. I'm glad I didn't know about this trick, otherwise I might not have ever been able to get my papers done!

Cool I guess, would never work for me my professors have always had a failsafe backup where online and hardcopy were turned in the same day. ESPECIALLY when using blackboard.

Can't you just take any random non-Word file that's about the right size, change the extension to .doc and you have a corrupted Word file?

I posted it because of the interesting, if unethical, business idea. The technical bits are probably unsophisticated.

Definitely interesting and unethical.

I wonder how much they make though?

Because you're lying to your teacher to get more time on your paper?

The person running the business isn't doing that though, the client might be.

The client may also have a very legitimate excuse for using the service that may fall into a grey area in terms of ethics.

Suggesting this is unethical is like saying handguns are unethical because people commit murder with them.

That would be true except the exert explicitly says that this product is useful to avoid deadlines.

Not to avoid them, to extend them.

You're not going to get much more than a day before someone calls you up and says, "Hey, the file's corrupt, send me another".

As a former TA, I would have instantly granted extension requests that had a real, legitimate excuse attached to them. The ones that irritated me were the ones who thought they were entitled to an extension "because, y'know, there was like a party on Friday night and I got so drunk I couldn't figure out where I was until midway through Monday."

> that had a real, legitimate excuse attached to them

So, in your opinion you believe that you as a TA have the right to know the personal details of students' lives if they need extensions? What if the matter is private?

If you don't want to tell me anything about why you want an extension, you have to accept the fact that the probability distribution over "I want an extension" absent any information is heavily weighted toward "I went on a bender and am too stupid to stay in school", and as such I was unlikely to say yes. I don't want details details; but "I broke my leg, this, this and this is going to be a week late, I'm sorry" as happened to a friend of mine is perfectly good.

No, if that was the case then the customer could ask for an extension. I believe the website author would agree:

http://www.corrupted-files.com/Custom_Order.html

Sigh. There was a time on this site when a simple question would never be downmodded to spam levels.

There's lots of ways to do it. My first thought:

dd if=/dev/random of=<mywordfile> bs=1024 count=1

Yes, but people don't know that.

Ha ha :) I find it interesting the site operator knows where he stands. On the custom order page:

Please Note: I had deadlines with professors too, but I still got my sh[i]t done on time - its called Red Bull. If you need an extension, just be honest and ask your professor before you use a corrupted file.

http://www.corrupted-files.com/Custom_Order.html

[Did you know you cannot escape the asterisk?]

Purported interview with the anonymous developer: http://fourpointreport.com/blog/?p=978

I could see a hash tool being useful here - maybe even some sort of upload applet that sends the hash too. If the uploaded hash matches the hash generated on your machine, you have less plausible excuses.

Of course, you could just use Scribd's iPaper to preview the doc - puts the owness on the student to verify.

Unfortunately, a low barrier to entry:

http://www.xnet.se/fd/

Pretty funny though.

I did this regularly in high school. It usually worked, although I failed a class as a direct result of this technique... so not recommended in general.

"We also upload new files periodically." - I'm curious why the don't use their file corrupting technology to generate different files for each user.

"We didn’t just change a .jpeg extension into a .doc." - I guess they're mangling a doc file in someway to make it a little more believable, in case a prof. gets out a hexeditor.

In unix, "strings corrupted_word_file.doc" should still provide almost all the text.

Office 2007 doc is a compressed XML file. strings wouldn't help much against that.

It's a zip format file, so it should still have correct headers to look plausible.

You do not even need to corrupt them. I wanted to open documents saved on a Windows 3.1 version of Word, and the modern Word software would not open them! This is not a good sign for the future ...

As Niklaus Wirth would say, "P. T. Barnum was correct"