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How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

twilio.com

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Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#131

Post by WalterBright »

telesilla wrote: post #124
makr99 wrote: post #25

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

I got tickets to a certain-to-sell-out concert doing the same thing. My friends were shocked I got them A-class seats. I'm teaching their kids to know that they will have more control over their world than they might imagine.

This works until the technique gets popularized, then it won't anymore.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#132

Post by toolbox »

teddyc wrote: post #37

I used to work in University IT and registration time is the worst. The systems never handle the load well and everyone freaks out. I think your work might anger the sysadmins b/c of the increased load.

At my University, where I both worked and studied, we had a second semester senior post his automatic registration script to the school's Facebook group. This sent up alarm bells and I sent emails to warn the appropriate people, but it was the night before registration. The load immediately and totally crushed the system, and registration had to be rescheduled. They switched around some tags on the page (the script did very fragile webscraping), and that was enough that there were no more issues. The student had to fight an academic misconduct trial for it as well. A painful situation all the way around.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#133

Post by newuser2345 »

cgmg wrote: post #56
_sbrk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because of US broken immigration system Immigration is working just fine: It is a rate-limiting mechanism to prevent massive immigration of every "me too" person from other random countries. You're just like everyone else, and everyone else wants to get in, too. Just like a lifeboat, the US can't let everyone in at once or we'd sink. Buy a parka and enjoy Canada!

"Just like a lifeboat, the US can't let everyone in at once or we'd sink." Actually, the consensus among economists is that immigration makes your own economy better off. It has a net positive effect on productivity and prosperity. In other words, your "rate-limiting" analogy makes zero sense. You want more immigration, not less.

Indigestion can kill a culture, hence a rate limited.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#134

Post by deathanatos »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #125
tnecniv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my school, they would waive requirements if you take a higher level course in the same track. For example, if I just took CS102 that requires CS101, I wouldn't have to go back to satisfy the CS101 requirement. Obviously everywhere is different.

How... are you taking CS102 that requires CS101... without taking CS101? Are the requirements not actually required?

IDK about the parent's school, but my at university (RPI), when I was there, students could simply opt to skip "CS101", and move to "CS102". I think it was also encouraged (but again, not required) to have taken one of the AP CS tests if you did so.

I think you could also opt out of "CS102" if you desired. It was on the student to determine how much they knew. The school just understood that a number of CS students had been doing this for some time on their own, and had mastered some of the basics.

I skipped the "CS101" course, which was mostly intro to programming, control flow, etc. I decided against skipping the "CS102" course; the first half wasn't that exciting (I knew how linked lists, vectors, hash tables worked) but trees got me (and some of the more exotic stuff at the end of the course), so I'm glad I took it.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#135

Post by ollin »

agentd00nut wrote: post #18

Wondering why you didn't also automate the process of actually signing up for the seat? Getting notified that a seat is open is helpful but automatically taking the open seat sounds a lot more helpful. Though at that point you'd have a lot more luck with selenium or some other web driver.

I was able to get auto-registration working with mechanize a few quarters ago (similar setup to OP); I got into two classes that way! I was just using SMS/emails from UW's provided notification system to trigger the script, though, so I don't think I was actually any faster than other students-just less stressed about watching for notifications.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#136

Post by grecy »

e12e wrote: post #41
makr99 wrote: post #25

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

Nice story, and great that Twilio worked out for you - but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for. I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup - and twilio is an interesting hack around that. But there really should be an easy way to make just as much ruckus from a simpl…

> but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for.

Except when you are asleep.

And when it comes to immigration, you are happy to be woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call when it means the difference between failure and success.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#137

Post by grecy »

makr99 wrote: post #25

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

May I ask what PR stream you applied under that "opens randomly"?

After years of hard work I successfully got in via Provincial Nomination.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#138

Post by joombaga »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #110
joombaga wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup Doesn't the asynchronous nature of an IM make it less urgent than a synchronous phone call?

The industry I'm in is all SMEs - they regularly complain about people messaging them [ie SMS, aka "text"] out of work hours. Like "a customer texted me at 9pm about something how inconsiderate". They don't seem to understand it's absolutely considerate and that the idea is they respond when they next want to make themselves available. Mind you some people will get annoyed if they're not texted back straight away; wh…

Yeah I've heard the same sentiment. I think people feel rude phoning because they feel rude ignoring calls, so if they call they're making the other party feel responsible for answering. This is silly of course.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#139

Post by jlgaddis »

e12e wrote: post #41
makr99 wrote: post #25

I was in the US and want to immigrate to Canada because of US broken H1B immigration system ( for me it will take 9 years to get a greencard). Here is what I did - The immigration website of Saskatchewan province opens up randomly to apply for immigration. I missed it many times because there is no indication other than the "Apply" button being enabled and a small text in their homepage which says "Applications are n…

Nice story, and great that Twilio worked out for you - but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for. I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup - and twilio is an interesting hack around that. But there really should be an easy way to make just as much ruckus from a simpl…

I use Pushover for (personal) things like this.

Re: How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

#140

Post by raybb »

ArlenBales wrote: post #116

If you're using Python, please don't reinvent the wheel and write your own scraper. Use Scrapy ( https://scrapy.org/ ). It's one of the most tested and powerful scrapers out there.

For a use case like in the article would it make more sense to use beautifulsoup or is there an advantage to scrapy?
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