It could probably change the language selector.

If I’m an elite hacker spy who works for the hacker spy division of the Chinese army, am I going to change the system language of the thing I am hacking to Chinese and forget to change it back?

Nah, that’s an NPU.

Probably.

I mean if you put up an Internet-facing unauthenticated file acceptor it will quickly become stuffed with all sorts of garbage and aspiring malware. You definitely don’t want to hook that up to an untar and exec loop, even with some notion of sandboxing. It will just start mining Bitcoins or sending spam or something.

But if it is built properly, with only authorized users being able to upload stuff, and a basic understanding of not dropping stuff where the web server will happily execute every PHP web shell someone sticks in the slot, and the leverage to threaten people into not uploading pictures of their own or others’ butts or Iron Man (2009), I don’t see why all but the file-uploading professionals should immediately give up.

You could definitely build something like this. You definitely want either human review before execution or a fair amount of sandboxing for whatever your students submit.

Do you want students trying to brute force or exfiltrate whatever test data lives in the server? If not, either they should just have the test cases already, or they can get back how many/which of the secret test cases they passed along with their grade, so showing them the results live might not be so important. Unless you want something like “you have 3 tries to pass the secret tests so you can get a hint that your own tests missed a case and go back and try to guess what it was”.

You also might want to invest time first in test harnesses for the students to run themselves, because you want them to learn good practices like coding against a test suite. If nothing else it makes it easier to make the auto-grader later if the students’ code is all already hooked up to the same test framework.

Teaching students how to use fully use a multi-user Unix system can for some topics put unnecessary faffing about between the students and what they are trying to learn (are you teaching front-end web dev or something?), but in a lot of cases your students might actually be better served by something that makes them touch the deep magic than by a slick web UI that handles everything for them, as long as you turn it into a learning experience and not a protracted period of bafflement.

Does your school not already have some kind of shared CD department server/Unix environment for the students that could get you out of account management?

Also, the Right Way to get the code to the server is probably going to be Git and not a tarball. The students could/should be set up with a Git forge and indoctrinated in never leaving their code on their laptop to be sat upon and lost.

Furries at least have a decent chance of having claws and/or fangs.

Just because someone does something instead of fighting a war doesn’t make whatever they actually did do right. They could also do neither thing. Especially if the alternative to war turns out to not actually achieve the goal the war would have achieved, leaving them in the same position of deciding whether to do a bad thing or not, after having already done another different bad thing.

I didn’t ask whether it was better or worse than declaring a war; it’s clearly less bad than starting a war.

But that doesn’t mean it’s right. Maybe doing neither a war nor sanctions, but something else, or nothing, is the right thing to do.

Does that work?

Is it right to tell random people “hey you, it’s your job to break local laws and topple your dictator, we could invade you with actual trained military people but that would be inconvenient for us”?