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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

#491

Post by butlike »

jodrellblank wrote: post #447
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…

> “ My gut feeling on this is that this is either resolved in hours (they have airgapped backups and can be working as soon as they can spin up new servers) ” What good is having airgapped backups and spinning them up, if they are instantly vulnerable to the same attack again? It does depend on what the attack is, but how do people approach that scenario?

That's an interesting question and one I'd like to know an answer to as well.

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

#492

Post by eiiot »

noitpmeder wrote: post #351
eiiot wrote: post #243

I'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…

And what's your opinion on the em dash?

That it tends to provoke unproductive comments like this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

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

#493

Post by lol768 »

matsemann wrote: post #410
p-e-w wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what surprises me the most is that it’s even legal for schools to outsource the core of what they do to some random tech company. Either way, they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it’s available, so this is 110% on them.

The alternative would be that each school develop their own platform for this, which also isn't very good use of their time and money? Edit: No idea why this was down voted so much. I'm not defending Canvas, just wondering what the alternative would be.

> The alternative would be that each school develop their own platform for this

I worked at a university which did exactly this, in the UK.

It was a bespoke platform which integrated incredibly well with the rest of the systems the university used because it was designed from the ground-up to meet the institution's needs, there were regular user groups involving academics to understand what features needed to be built/worked on etc. At one point it was all OSS on GitHub too, in case other universities could've found it useful. It handled plagiarism detection (integrating with Turnitin), marking, exam grids, coursework submissions and feedback, seminar allocations, personalised timetables & mitigating circumstances.

The in-house dev team was vastly cheaper than anything SaaS would've cost, as well. It also maintained software for on-campus parcel deliveries, online exams, opinion surveys, a mobile app for students/staff, the SSO system, the course catalogue, car parking permits, a content management system and more.

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

#494

Post by eesmith »

morning-coffee wrote: post #471
grey-area wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can see what that looks like in PLATO, which started in the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) .

"Courses were taught in a range of subjects, including Latin, chemistry, education, music, Esperanto, and primary mathematics. The system included a number of features useful for pedagogy, including text overlaying graphics, contextual assessment of free-text answers, depending on the inclusion of keywords, and feedback designed to respond to alternative answers."

"PLATO III allowed "anyone" to design new lesson modules using their TUTOR programming language, conceived in 1967 by biology graduate student Paul Tenczar."

"The largest PLATO installation in South Africa during the early 1980s was at the University of the Western Cape ... For many of the Madadeni students, most of whom came from very rural areas, the PLATO terminal was the first time they encountered any kind of electronic technology. Many of the first-year students had never seen a flush toilet before. There initially was skepticism that these technologically illiterate students could effectively use PLATO, but those concerns were not borne out. Within an hour or less most students were using the system proficiently, mostly to learn math and science skills, although a lesson that taught keyboarding skills was one of the most popular. A few students even used on-line resources to learn TUTOR, the PLATO programming language, and a few wrote lessons on the system in the Zulu language."

The full PLATO system included grade books, attendance tracking, and class scheduling, as I recall. Perhaps a University of Illinois alum can say more.

I would really like to know how much more useful the current systems are over, say, PLATO in 1992, when evaluated for pedagogy and course management benefits.

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

#495

Post by Daub »

mold_aid wrote: post #437
dotancohen wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 of my students, across all disciplines, don't have basic competence in Word or GDocs, software they've been using for years. It's weeks to teach them how to appy headings

I feel your pain, and my students are design students

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

#496

Post by m4lvin »

ktkaufman wrote: post #352
motorpixel wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good self-hostable FOSS version of Canvas/Blackboard?

Canvas is open-source and can be self-hosted.

As Wikipedia says, "some official plugins proprietary". So "can be" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I would at most compare it to saying that VS Code is open-source.

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

#497

Post by gwerbin »

camillomiller wrote: post #372
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…

To my European ears this just sounds like a disaster like this waiting to happen. God bless the annoying privacy OSS advocates and bureaucrats, I guess.

As someone else in the thread pointed out: Canvas is in fact open source, or at least source available on Github. And it's used all over the world, not just in the USA.

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

#498

Post by Nagyman »

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 feels like a poor statistical evaluation. Why not test along the way with progressive complexity/depth?

Using attendance is a carrot to get students to show up, which leads to better learning outcomes overall - which should be the goal.

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

#499

Post by ykonstant »

lacunary wrote: post #225
e28eta wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If only we had some way of signing messages

The technology isn't there yet (｡•́︿•̀｡)

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

#500

Post by gwerbin »

ecshafer wrote: post #288
onetimeusename wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

When I was in school, professors attitudes around attendance was usually "you're only hurting yourself, I don't care if you show up or not".

It's been long enough that I can't claim to be in touch with the current generation of teaching faculty. But it might be an element of that, combined with the desire to provide accessibility for the handful of students who do in fact need the accommodation.

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