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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

#341

Post by shakna »

dotancohen wrote: post #336
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Canvas before, but all the LMSes that I've used allow students to enable emails whenever anything is updated, including when grades are posted. This is off by default because it's often 10+ emails a day, because many teachers post notes once a day, and with 5 classes, that adds up pretty quick. I personally have it enabled because it's pretty manageable with some custom Outlook rules, but setting this…

> setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students. Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? What are they learning? Where will they be qualified to work?

Most managers I've met, struggle with setting up email filters, and have to ask tech support to do it for them. These students will be qualified just fine.

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

#342

Post by weird-eye-issue »

dotancohen wrote: post #336
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Canvas before, but all the LMSes that I've used allow students to enable emails whenever anything is updated, including when grades are posted. This is off by default because it's often 10+ emails a day, because many teachers post notes once a day, and with 5 classes, that adds up pretty quick. I personally have it enabled because it's pretty manageable with some custom Outlook rules, but setting this…

> setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students. Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? What are they learning? Where will they be qualified to work?

Most graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place.

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

#343

Post by ghqst »

gigel82 wrote: post #34

Damn, all schools in our district in Washington moved to Instructure last year. They moved away from Teams because it objectively sucked, but I haven't heard of widespread compromises like this in Microsoft's systems so...

Well instructure is slightly better than the somehow legal torture of having to use the "product" Microsoft Teams

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

#344

Post by jesse_dot_id »

kelnos wrote: post #141

A 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…

CYA is a powerful drug for the C Suite

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

#345

Post by gsquaredxc »

dang wrote: post #301
DaSHacka wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You honestly don't wanna know If my peers are any indication, a whole lot of TikTok, Reels, Twitter, Discord, and other such mind-numbing platforms. The types of platforms I would consider 'substantive' (or, at least, more substantive than those platforms) are definitely on the way out. The few times friends have seen me browsing Hacker News or a certain Mongolian basket weaving form, the first thing they comment on…

This is actually reassuring. We don't need all your peers! We just need you and whatever smart cohort you're bonded with. It's true that HN looks old - it looked old before you were born, probably - but (a) I have no idea how to change it, and (b) HN is a long bet on plain text. If the smartest young people lose interest in reading, I'm ok with HN dying for that reason. I just don't want it to die for any cheaper rea…

I would like to offer some additional reassurance: I send my friends articles I see on HN that might interest them. A (in my view) very good litmus test is when someone asks where I saw it, because this demonstrates some desire for continual learning. I find that anyone that asks that question seemingly trusts an interface like HN more because of it. My suspicion is that this is probably because at a certain point you see stuff like Agner Fog's work, LWN, or a number of other minimalist websites and realize that a website that is popular despite the lack of overindulgence in UI must be popular because of the content. It doesn't hurt that the best courses in my university experience have had websites that have not changed much since the late 1990s (one did change the lime green text on turquoise background on their page after the recession to a color scheme that didn't cause headaches in students).

I do find that my peers that now read HN used to be judicial about curating a Reddit feed and mostly otherwise limited on other sources. Short-form content is addictive and as nearly as unavoidable as sugar, but many of my brighter peers work on reducing that intake. Long-form YouTube is also something I find to be a marker of someone who is seeking knowledge. Many of my peers do scroll Twitter and TikTok all day, but I find that those who are easiest to chat with are those who have already scrolled HN today and want to discuss a particular article they know I would have seen. I've had conversations that start with "Did you see that TikTok?" and conversations that start with "Did you see that article on HN?" and the latter is always more engaging.

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

#346

Post by russfink »

breakingstuff wrote: post #158
kayyyy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used both as a student and a TA I find blackboard miles better, much easier to find what i'm looking for and my professors seem to have better luck laying out their course on blackboard than canvas.

I actually disagree, based on my time using Blackboard as an admin, student, and teacher. Although my experience is a few years out of date, I found the interface cumbersome and the performance slow.

It depends on what vintage of Blackboard your IT team has installed. We moved from a circa 2011 BB instance to Canvas in 2022, and it was hands down superior. A different university is running the most recent BB and it’s similar to Canvas.

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

#347

Post by goobatrooba »

vasco wrote: post #228
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…

> let classes that normally count for a grade just submit grades as pass-fail. Because what else can you do? Schedule a single exam and that's your grade for that subject? That's how it should work anyway, credits for work during semester (or worse attendance) are not needed to evaluate if someone learned the material, give them an exam and done.

That's just bad outdated practice. It leads to cramming and less remembering than of the demand is for students to do work and show learning and effort throughout the year.

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

#348

Post by jer0me »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #286
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

That sounds like “circa 2010” to me. And Canvas was launched in 2011, according to the article you linked.

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

#349

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

dotancohen wrote: post #336
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Canvas before, but all the LMSes that I've used allow students to enable emails whenever anything is updated, including when grades are posted. This is off by default because it's often 10+ emails a day, because many teachers post notes once a day, and with 5 classes, that adds up pretty quick. I personally have it enabled because it's pretty manageable with some custom Outlook rules, but setting this…

> setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students. Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? What are they learning? Where will they be qualified to work?

I'd hope/assume that any Computer Science students would be able to do this, but most Biology/Education/English/Art students probably couldn't.

I mean, anyone smart enough to attend university could probably figure it out if they really wanted to, but there are hundreds of other useful things that they could learn too. There are only so many hours in the day, and given that most students don't get that many emails, I can hardly blame them for not wanting to prioritize learning how to filter emails.

(I personally have over a hundred lines of Sieve filters, but I'm definitely not a typical student)

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

#350

Post by jazzyjackson »

DaSHacka wrote: post #271
SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective?

Exactly this, when was the last time a HN user had to interact with the prototypical 60-year-old set-in-their-ways professor? Extremely non-tech savvy, hates computers, and is gonna grumble "What the hell is a PGP? Better not be another one of those phone code things." as you try to pitch this highly-technological solution to a largely niche problem domain.

I mean a cloud based learning management system also seems to be a very technological solution to the very old problem of checks notes grading quizzes?
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