Disabling Wireless Networks? 63
An Ominous Coward asks: "The University of Florida student chapter of ACM hosts a yearly programming competition for students throughout the state of Florida. It is based on the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and for the past ten years has been very successful, currently drawing a crowd in the hundreds. However, this year was the first we had a problem with wireless networks. We doubt that cheating was the intention, as no one had SSID broadcasting turned off (as far as we know). Wireless networking gear is quite inexpensive now. And while we don't believe it affected the contest this year, we would like to take precautions for future contests. Is there any way to disable all wireless networking in an area about the size of a large lecture hall?"
Re:This may be impractical, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be a lot of overhead. Are you going to check the specs of every system to ensure that it doesn't have a centrino processor(If someone were to cheat they would have no qualms about switching/removing stickers). I don't know how many powerbook/iBooks they get, but are you preparted to lift up the keyboard to look for an airport card on each one? Plus they could always sneak in wireless cards.
It's much more practical to find a way to disable the networks instead of the cards.
Re:This may be impractical, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The advantage of people using their own machines is they have their own environment, their own prefrences, and all the settings which they would like to use. If you're an emacs lover, what would you do if a contest stuck you with vi, or vice versa? What of all the small-time IDEs and editors which are adored by their users (both of them!)?
Bigass transmitter (Score:2, Insightful)
Or hire a bunch of evil nazi unabrow dykes to slap cheaters silly.