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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

#471

Post by morning-coffee »

grey-area wrote: post #439
dumbfounder wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a hybrid approach. Scramble to create a final exam/project and give them the option to do pass/fail or a real grade, their choice. And then wish for the death of saas and a day where you can deploy your own software you can control and modify as you need.

Universities are not going to write their own software, and no they can’t use ‘agents’ to write and maintain it for them either.

It's somewhat ironic... if a University's CS department was charged with developing and maintaining the system, what an awesome learning tool it would be. CS students would maybe even be invested in the outcome by having to eat their own dogfood and then really appreciate it what it's like in the real world.

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

#473

Post by u_fucking_dork »

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?

Anywhere. I straight up don’t check my email at work. If people need me they have to teams message me to tell me they emailed me. Don’t have time to sift through all the bullshit generated emails. Jira, GitHub, confluence, servicenow, workday, etc. amounts to an incredible amount of junk I just can’t be bothered with.

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

#474

Post by Neikius »

Kiro wrote: post #405
walletdrainer wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there’s a tendency here to seriously overestimate how damaging these leaks are to individuals. For most individuals impacted by these hacks, appropriate restitution would be $0. Anything more than that would go beyond making them whole.

It's not a popular opinion but I agree. I live in a country that has a very extensive principle of public records, and often times these leaks disclose much less than you would get by simply calling the authorities and ask. Now, whether that's good or bad is a different story.

Leaking school or medical record can have serious personal consequences that cannot even be enumerated

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

#475

Post by mbesto »

freedomben wrote: post #428
FloorEgg wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the engineers at instructure are not capable of building systems that can do that. You give them too much credit.

Former Instructure engineer here. Ive been gone almost 10 years at this point, but some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were at INST. I'm not sure where your stereotype even comes from, because Canvas is not trivial software. You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code before criticizing it because any good engineer would do that.

> some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were at INST.

> You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code

Can you look at any codebase and tell me it's written by some of the best engineers and it's not trivial?

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

#476

Post by iamflimflam1 »

bradley13 wrote: post #459
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…

I'm in Europe, and we don't use Canvas (at least, I've never heard of it). However, we have similar diseases. In my particular school, it's a massive SharePoint site plus ever more stuff in Teams. Plus Moodle, plus other services. The MS services have not improved teaching at all. What they do, is fragment communications, and add ever more places people have to look, in hopes of finding things. But the administration…

Teams and SharePoint eventually infect any organisation that uses Office.

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

#477

Post by trillic »

mbreese wrote: post #445
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…

Canvas will send emails when grades are posted, but not what the grade is. Or at least that’s the way in the configurations I’ve seen. So, that wouldn’t help in a case where no one can access the canvas gradebook.

yup you just get an email saying "A new grade has been posted for EECS 420"

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

#478

Post by w4der »

freedomben wrote: post #428
FloorEgg wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the engineers at instructure are not capable of building systems that can do that. You give them too much credit.

Former Instructure engineer here. Ive been gone almost 10 years at this point, but some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were at INST. I'm not sure where your stereotype even comes from, because Canvas is not trivial software. You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code before criticizing it because any good engineer would do that.

I don't care how good you think it is, the fact that it (back when I used to be a TA) would break if two TAs tried concurrently grading different parts of an assignment of a student is bonkers. The workaround for that was to use a Google Sheet document so TAs just looked at the submission in Canvas, then filed in their grades and feedback on the sheet. The issue is that Canvas, as far as I could tell, did not support mass uploads from a csv, so we had a script which would read every entry on the csv, map that to the student's ID and grade them, which made it look like the TA which had generated the API key graded all of the students (and would get all the backlash from poor grades).

I completely agree that it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid for how diverse the needs of different courses might be even inside a single faculty. And saying "It's AGPL, just self host and add your requirements to it" is not really useful, that would mean way more money and effort than what a university's overworked IT dept. is capable of.

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

#479

Post by weird-eye-issue »

smcin wrote: post #469
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't even reply to you.

I'm not confused. Your comment stated that college doesn't add much to a person's employability. (If you had wanted to be less obfuscatory, you could simply have said "a [HS] education is already adequate qualification for many jobs; college doesn't add much"). That was your claim. (I don't think your claim is correct of many OECD countries' colleges, but it was the claim you made.) You then replied to J-Kuhn to say…

It's a little weird how I ignored your comment and replied to somebody else and then you felt the need to reply to me again and again

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

#480

Post by butlike »

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…

> And if that's true and we wake up tomorrow with this unresolved, I really have no idea what a lot of professors at my university and across the country are going to do to submit grades that are fair and reasonable

I have an idea for the midterm (pun intended): Maybe don't jump feet first into the deep end of a single point of failure going forward.

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