Cheating... it just got much easier, and much harder

Fascinating things to think about in a just-released Chronicle article about cheating at Harvard: http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Cheating-Scandal/134160

Basically, it is suspected that a bunch of students violated policy by collaborating on a take home, open book, open notes, open internet exam. I'm not so much interested in the details of the case (it was a class in which students were encouraged to collaborate in groups across the semester, but then told to do the exam alone, but there is a grey are where you talk to people a little... but not too much... etc.). Instead, I want to think for a bit about the implications of the "open internet" clause in a "web 2.0" world. Here is the rub: Anything another student posts on the internet is now, by definition, openly available. This has profound implication for how we think about and evaluate cheating on out-of-class assignments, perhaps even undermining our standard criterion for cases when the internet is not allowed! It is almost as bad as the case in Roy Sorenson's insightful essay about what can happen when a professor gives "Permission to Cheat." Why does this such a mess, well: