Sorry guys, I won’t do your homework or master thesis

plagiarism is rampant in the internet age, no doubt even most prominent German politicians have lost their jobs for that dirty little copy-paste action. It seems tempting to take a google result and include it in “your” work. But that is easy to spot. If there is no content in the above paragraph and now all of a sudden a solid well formulated statement is made the suspicious reader might just throw that piece at google. Some “smarter”people therefore change the wording of the rip-off or (if capable) translate form another language which is much harder to detect. Anyway this is not exactly topic of this post. What I find even worse than actively compiling a piece of text from different sources is being asked to do all the work!

My AES Core at opencores.org is very popular and I am really proud of it. I deliberately released the VHDL sources under the BSD license. You can even build commercial products! The only thing I asked is to give me feedback on bugs or an email if you encounter problems with the core to use it. But hey I won’t do your homework! I am quite fed up with emails like this:

I have seen your project at opencores.org. I am looking for a person, who would do a fault correction implementation of AES, sth simmilar to http://klabs.org/mapld05/papers/184_vladimirova_p.pdf

Cool sounds like a nice side-job, I haven’t been working on the core for some time. I replied suggesting a project on opencores raising issues about the liability. This is what I got back:

Thank you very much for your interest in the subject. I am sorry for my late reply, but I was offline for the whole weekend. Regarding me - I am a student and the modified AES is a part of my M.Sc. Therefore I would not like to make the project GPL. The liability of a non-responsive satellite is not critical.

Wtf? is he really asking me to do his M.Sc?

Do you think you can cope with the project ? What would be your financial expectations ?

Yes he is, even offering money.

This was not the only case, I have some more email-conversations, true most didn’t blankly offer money. But still asking for doing at least the homework with high urgency. Dear students,I am willing to help, I know life at university can be hard. But please at least read the documentation and get familiar with your tools!