How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back keystrokes (2014)

http://features.jsomers.net/how-i-reverse-engineered-google-docs/

by twampss • 11 years ago

77 17 11 years ago

features.jsomers.net

vmarsy• 11 years ago

(2014) should be added to the title.

There was some previous discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562483

bobmagoo2• 11 years ago

That would make for a hell of an anti-plagiarism tool. If you were a teacher and took 30 essays written in gDocs, threw them into the change timeline that he built, the copy/pasted ones would hugely stick out. It would even catch the folks that put a paid/plagiarized essay up on one screen and type it out again given all the natural backspacing and editing.

phn2• 11 years ago

It falls apart if someone makes the document in any other tool and then pastes it on gDocs.

Unless you make it a requirement to do the entire thing on that platform...

bobmagoo2• 11 years ago

Yeah, you'd have to, but gMail/gDocs is pretty prevalent. I know a bunch of schools already use it for their email/office suite so it wouldn't be too hard to make that requirement. I really like it because it's grabbing metadata out of something people already use rather than having them use some horrible web app from the 90's that was contracted out by a now defunct company.

ljk• 11 years ago

then someone can have the pre-written document in the other window and just type and pretend to revise the essay on gDoc!

caseysoftware• 11 years ago

I was thinking along the same lines. One of the ways I saw paid essays work is that someone would buy the item and then tweak the phrasing of sentences and choice of words to make it a little more unique and tune it for the target level. It tends to obfuscate the plagiarism and makes it fit the style of the purchaser.

This tool even blows that out of the water.

I wonder how long before some groups recommend/require something like this to provide evidence of originality.

ngoel36• 11 years ago

I once had a friend who would put essays into Google Translate, translate to French, then that to Spanish, then back to English - then manually fix the syntax, etc. People will go to great lengths.

LukaAl• 11 years ago

Not sure about that. You assume everybody will be happy to work in GoogleDocs to write their assignment. But that's not true. If you are a commuting student you probably want to write it in an offline tool (even the notepad is fine). Also, sometimes, especially if you need to be creative, to plain old paper are a much better tool to write the first draft. Finally, I like to use a spellchecker a little bit better than the one provided by Google Docs, so I will probably run the text in it and then copy back to Google Docs. Never in my flow I cheated (unless using a spellchecker is cheating that could be true for an English class). But it will be very difficult for me to prove it because you assume cheating is using a different tool from the one you try to force me. That's not fair!

tsunamifury• 11 years ago

Copy and Paste probably a terrible signal of plagiarism in the modern writing workflow -- which involves tons of editing, multiple documents, and more legitimate use cases for it than illegitimate.

ethanbond• 11 years ago

Maybe in large academic publications. A middle school, high school, or even undergrad book report style document? You betcha copy/paste would be indicative of something, especially if a few students copy/pasted a lot more than the class average.

Also, this is just one signal and would be powerful as the preliminary one. There would probably be a few false positives, but nearly no false negatives. It's not like kids are going to be expelled for copy/pasting documents, but it certainly warrants more suspicion.

th3iedkid• 11 years ago

Are there any machine learning applications on these play-back time-series ?

imperialdrive• 11 years ago

Kudos to the OP and Author - One of the best posts this year. The writing, samples, typography, everything about this was damned good - all that effort! Now I can make the drive to work with something to think about :)

RyanMcGreal• 11 years ago

I read this thinking, "This reminds me of Etherpad," only to reach the part of the story that describes Etherpad and how the author incorporated and improved on its ideas. Great piece.

bdavisx• 11 years ago

Google Docs is using what's called EventSourcing, in case you aren't aware of that. It's one way to make collaborative editing possible (probably the easiest?).

http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

vacuo• 11 years ago

This is simply fantastic. I always thought operational transformation was pretty difficult to implement robustly, but looking at Google's implementation lets you build interesting experiments without getting all those details right -- like building the world's best writing time machine. It reminds me of Cory Doctorow's approximation built on git: http://craphound.com/news/2009/02/13/flashbake-free-version-...

I think there are great possibilities for building on this idea...

How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back keystrokes (2014)

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