391–400 of 690 posts
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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.
> LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software it's MIT.
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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.
> it was too hard at such a massive scale... of 858 TB There are probably many S3 buckets in existence that are bigger than that. Not saying that they should've used S3, but it's definitely possible configure multi-regional backup (and a government can afford it).
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…
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.
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> LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software it's MIT.
But it’s not like MIT gains anything from rolling their own LMS.
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…
So 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.
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> 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?
> Where will they be qualified to work? Going by a certain story 2 years ago, their concern should be that they're overqualified for Meta. It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers. So you can't really just put a filter that drags all the 100 low-priority alerts in what would count as a first degree abstraction o…
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> It should be illegal It should be illegal to host insecure services, especially when you're dealing with PII. Breaches keep happening and nobody gives a fuck, because the worst that'll happen is you might lose a handful of customers and buy some "credit monitoring". Incidents like this should be followed by an audit and charges being laid. Send corp officers to jail for negligent security failures. If you can go to…
I don't think that criminal negligence is the most helpful legal tool for incentivizing improved security. It's too hard to prove negligence. Instead, there should be standard civil penalties for leaking various degrees of PII paid as restitution to the affected individual. Importantly, this must be applied REGARDLESS of "certification" or whether any security practices were "incorrect" or "insufficient". Even if the…
For most individuals impacted by these hacks, appropriate restitution would be $0. Anything more than that would go beyond making them whole.
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…
Just to add one more data point, we also use Canvas at my university. The deadline for submitting who are eligible (i.e. passed compulsory assignments and labs) to take the exam was yesterday, and I couldn’t meet that deadline because Canvas went down. I usually do corrections offline so I have backups of my own evaluations, but these are courses with many teachers and many TAs, so Canvas is the way we sync our asses…
Either way, they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it’s available, so this is 110% on them.
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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?
Yes. And most of the general population. They can do it once they know it exists, most people just are not aware it is a thing at all.
>What are they learning?
Here, their "major" as you say in the US. Someone in econ, biology or even CS is not going to learn Outlook rules. Maybe IT or business will have a sentence on it.
>Where will they be qualified to work?
Any office job. Any job really.