yep, i work for a major university and our canvas instance is down. this is really, really bad. edit: here's the list of impacted universities (unsure if they all have their canvas instances offline, but i'd be surprised if not): http://91.215.85.103/pay_or_leak/instructure_affected_school...
Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
321–330 of 690 posts
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canvas has an easy way of checking if a pdf or other course material is accessible, so many universities are forcing faculty to put all their materials on Canvas. That way if a pdf or powerpoint is not compliant it is immediately flagged. The goal is to reach a "100% accessible" metric. Note that little of this really helps the students that it is supposed to help, because as you wisely point out, raw HTML is almost…
That really sucks. I'm visually impaired and many members of my family are/were blind. I think accessibility is really important, but it's so painful to me to feel like people's limited energy is being directed towards performative measures, useless rituals, vanity metrics, etc. Nobody has infinite energy, and disabled people don't have infinite social capital. It's a shame when energy from that shared pool gets spen…
I was only a lowly TA so I saw these issues from afar, but I would add that, on a more optimistic note, I don't think I've ever met an instructor who wouldn't do whatever he or she had to do to support someone with special needs. As you suggested, metrics do not tell the whole story and certainly metrics for the sake of metrics are not helpful and may in fact be dangerous.
That said there is certainly a lot more work that needs to be done in this area. Hopefully these regulations over time bring out practical positive change. Time will tell.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#3231. It should be illegal for any company to pay ransomware attacks. Period. No pay out ever. 2. The penalty for being the attacker should be linked to the system they violated. If you do this to a hospital and someone dies you are life in prison / chair. The minimum sentence should be so painful that it deters the attack. No this will not stop this and companies need to be held accountable for their lack of security i…
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Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#324So many universities used to run homegrown or on-prem student systems. This is the downside of consolidating in the cloud. If the infrastructure is compromised, it affects everyone, not just isolated or single installations. I wonder how they are feeling about that decision now? I guess they can say "not our fault" so they might be feeling better than if it was a vulnerability in their own system.
Is there a good self-hostable FOSS version of Canvas/Blackboard?
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is open source, so you could send pull requests with improvements: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is... haha i went to go check and they haven't merged a PR since 2017
Look by is:closed instead. They don't merge the PR directly.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#326A friend who teaches at MIT said they were hit by this. I found it ironic and a little sad that a place like MIT doesn't have an IT staff that can maintain their own on-prem solutions for things like this. But it turns out that MIT used to have their own homegrown system, and recently switched to Canvas. Bet they're regretting that now. The build vs. buy decision seems to have swung very hard toward buy in the last d…
Homegrown systems are expensive to maintain and usually still fail to match up to the commercial options available at this point. LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software. I worked on my university's own version as an undergrad.
… so?
My highschool, for a while, had a website, which was eventually replaces by a large corporate CMS. Was the website as complicated or complex as the CMS? No, you would have needed to know HTML to publish to it. The CMS was no doubt "more user friendly", I suppose.
But … the original site had a soul. It was unique to the school. There was a student directory! All lost, because the CMS meant utter standardization between all the schools using it (their pages were all identical, except for each got like a different picture of the school as the banner at the top) and the CMS did not do directory anything.
Of course, the directory largely didn't matter in the end. (This was when you needed people's landlines! Quite laughable nowadays…) But it was still sad to see it lost, and several of us students worked on it, which provided us with some early real-world experience.
A large number of my college professors published their own sites, too, where they'd put their lecture notes, homework, etc. I loved those far more than I loved "Canvas" or whatever the ugly LMS we used was.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school? This would undermine Canvas's lock-in.
i cannot believe how much benefit of the doubt people are giving canvas ed tech is the WORST performing VC sector the ONLY game in that town is vendor lock-in! are people joking? c'mon, canvas is a huge piece of shit. the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first, rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free.
Canvas is AGPL licensed. Moodle is GPL. Universities or anyone else can already contribute to big name LMS.
Canvas is used by Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, CalTech, etc. If they each paid 10 FTE, they could set up a foundation that could govern the development of a top-tier LMS. Every tier-1 state institution could contribute 5 FTE. Even little JuCos could chip in an employee here and there. You'd pick up hundreds of capable employees at a fraction of what those schools currently pay to Instructure.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#328Somehow I have less distaste for ShinyHunters than I do for the companies who don't secure user data
When you picture the attacker, don't picture a bored nerdy teanager. Picture a selfish, $$ motivated psychopath.
Let's not side with the parasites.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#329Nothing to see here folks. Just another predicable data breach from allowing companies to do whatever the hell they want with sensitive personal information.
This will keep happening, more and more, and never stop, until we create a software building code and legally require it for all online businesses.
Universities, Parents: ya'll actually have the political and economic power to get a software building code passed. This incident isn't the last.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#330I'm a student at Stanford — this is hitting the whole school hard. Unlike a lot of schools on the east coast that are affected (Brown, Harvard, MIT) we are on the quarter system so we're just ending Midterms right now. We're also lucky enough to have our CS department entirely independent from Canvas, but most of my humanities classes are not so lucky. One art history class is having us submit our midterm papers by u…
I really feel like SH fucked up by sinking this low hitting students and Americas young minds like this.... One thing to target coroporations but leave the students alone....
It's not so bad, I'd say the Christmas PS3 hack was worse