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Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

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Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#281

Post by onetimeusename »

Gabriel54 wrote: post #190

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…

Live streaming of class through Canvas is very popular. Quite a few people just watch from their dorms. So maybe people will have to come back to class, that will be entertaining. The class rooms are almost standing room only (sometimes they are) on the first day of class and then gradually thin out. Sometimes 10 or so people show up out of a class of 100. If Canvas is not back up soon I think it could actually be disruptive for that reason also.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#282

Post by dghlsakjg »

allthetime wrote: post #227
dghlsakjg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty famously, aviation incident investigations are almost always not done with prosecutorial intent, and more about truth finding. It leads to people involved being cooperative to prevent future problems instead of ass covering to prevent jail. Aviation’s safety record is not coincidental.

In a darker reading; strong aviation safety is mostly motivated by not killing customers. An airline or plane maker who kills more customers than others will rapidly bleed those same customers and lose them to less lethal competitors. If no one cared about dying people I imagine aviation safety wouldn’t be so impressive. As someone else here said, software, for the most part, is a deeply unserious industry. The stake…

Sure, fatal stuff is bad for the bottom line, but that is a vanishing minority of what gets investigated.

You may not be aware, but there are thousands of non fatal incidents reported per year that just don't make the news.

There is a strong culture of self reporting instilled right from basic flight training, even when there is no damage or injuries, and even when the incident would have never been noticed by the authorities. You are almost guaranteed not to face consequences if you are open and honest about an incident. The FAA openly says that they would much rather educate than punish, and they tend to do that with pilots who own their mistakes. As long as there is no intent behind the fuckup, pilots are unlikely to lose their job, let alone their license.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#283

Post by JumpCrisscross »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #123
scheme271 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, who determines that the infrastructure wasn't properly secured? Who is willing to risk prison because some intern accidentally committed an API key or made a dumb mistake. Conversely, what's the chances that no one actually gets prosecuted regardless of how sloppy their security practices are?

> who determines that the infrastructure wasn't properly secured An investigative body, the same kind that determines the who, the why, and the how when an airliner crashes or a bridge collapses. Obviously a lot of work needs to be done to get from point A to point B, and it won't happen overnight, but software development is currently a deeply unserious profession and at some point a genuine software engineering pra…

> An investigative body

This just in: Anthropic, Harvard and Jimmy Kimmel have been investigated and found guilty of not securing their infrastructure.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#284

Post by yongjik »

SoftTalker wrote: post #226
blahedo wrote: post #176

Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide…

> they have airgapped backups and can be working as soon as they can spin up new servers ... and assuming they have a documented, tested, and trusted restore process.

Reminds me of the incident last year when a South Korean government's server room caught fire, which contained the government equivalent of Google Drive, and the only backup was in the same room, and they all burnt down together.

Some data was permanently lost, and then officers told reporters that multi-regional backup was not yet built because it was too hard at such a massive scale... of 858 TB.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#286

Post by JumpCrisscross »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #57

I remember circa 2010 a friend of mine at college was like “blackboard sucks, let’s build something new”. At the time I poo pood the idea and lo and behold canvas came out a year later. Outside looking in, they been crushing it.

> circa 2010

Instructure, "the developer and publisher of Canvas," was founded in 2008 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructure

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#287

Post by AmblingAvocado »

e28eta wrote: post #212
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student with relevant records on completion of a quiz or whatnot. They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. (And universities don’t insist on it for who knows what reason.)

Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable.

DKIM signature could be used to verify that Canvas' server sent the email with the given content

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#288

Post by ecshafer »

onetimeusename wrote: post #281
Gabriel54 wrote: post #190

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…

Live streaming of class through Canvas is very popular. Quite a few people just watch from their dorms. So maybe people will have to come back to class, that will be entertaining. The class rooms are almost standing room only (sometimes they are) on the first day of class and then gradually thin out. Sometimes 10 or so people show up out of a class of 100. If Canvas is not back up soon I think it could actually be di…

This is awful to hear. The idea that students are just half assedly streaming the lectures is really just ruining things in the long run. This is a bit old manny, but showing up to lectures is good. You go to class, you get face time with professors, you can ask impromptu questions, you rub elbows with classmates, you talk on the walk between classes, you maybe run into a cute girl. Friction like walking to class and finding a nook in that annoying hour gap you have, are the things that make life enjoyable.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#289

Post by podiki »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #285

https://status.instructure.com/ implies Canvas became available again about thirty minutes ago from the time of this post. Is this accurate? Or is this still an ongoing issue?

Ongoing. It is not "down" but purposefully offline for "maintenance." Main status does show the LMS (all the course stuff) down, and my instance shows "up" but that's because (I assume) you can reach it and the maintenance page. But that's not useful, if technically not "down."

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#290

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gchallen wrote: post #201
Gabriel54 wrote: post #190

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…

They have not succeeded in forcing me, yet. But it's sad how many computing faculty apparently can't operate the basic online infrastructure needed to support their courses. Not that universities make it easy for us. And of course the other serious concern I have with Canvas is that they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements. Many of my colleagues engage in dark humor about…

> they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements

Instructure (Canvas's developer) partnered with OpenAI last year [1], about a year after KKR and Dragoneer (PE firms) acquired it [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rayravaglia/2025/07/23/instruct...

[2] https://www.pehub.com/kkr-and-dragoneer-complete-4-8bn-take-...

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