41–50 of 107 posts
A school that tracks attendance cannot be called a college or university. Kindergarten, I can swallow.
What makes this even more sloppy for the school is that I know for a fact that Firebase will send your admin account an email when it detects that you have weak security settings on your database. It also sends said email repeatedly, once per day. I know because I intentionally have a developer db that is read access for the whole world and I get that email every afternoon. The admin of this app either is not compete…
Or it's being filtered into their junk folder.
I'm not making excuses for them, btw (there's just so much else wrong here): just pointing out that this happens quite often with even legitimate automated messages.
An Android dev finally enlightened me where Firebase shines: offline sync of mobile to a server by eliminating lots of explicit CRUD calls and error handling.
The media would have a field day and say that he hacked his school database. It's crazy how so many institutions are doing the digital equivalent of leaving an unlocked car in a bad neighbourhood and no one holds them accountable. Most people understand the concept of an unlocked car, not many understand that he didn't do anything special to hack his school db. He just strolled right in.
At the time we had recently covered data protection in IT class, so we wrote up a document explaining what we did, and why it was bad, and gave copies to a few people in prominent positions (principle, head of IT, IT teacher) as well as posting it (with instructions redacted) on an internal message board.
Well of course they didn't take it very well. They threatened to expel us and call the cops, and suspended us for a week until they decided what to do. In the end a well written warning from my friend's parent made them drop the issue and let us back in. I doubt they did anything to change the "security".
A school that tracks attendance cannot be called a college or university. Kindergarten, I can swallow.
I'm not sure if you are in the industry, but attendance tracking is high up on most institutions lists of metrics to track. Aside from helping out the usual back office data, it's often a key indicator for students who are in trouble. The institution can then reach out and assist these students.
Has Joshua asked you to play a game of global thermonuclear war yet?
A school that tracks attendance cannot be called a college or university. Kindergarten, I can swallow.
Here in India, the University I attended requires a minimum attendance of 75%, or they won't allow you to sit the end of semester exams. Your attendance even accounts for 5% of the score of your end of semester exams for that course. Quite insane when you think about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you are in the industry, but attendance tracking is high up on most institutions lists of metrics to track. Aside from helping out the usual back office data, it's often a key indicator for students who are in trouble. The institution can then reach out and assist these students.
They might just not be from the US. Here in Germany, tracking or forcing student attendance is subject of large discussions and generally often frowned upon (or forbidden by regulation) in the University setting these days.