Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 690 posts

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

#501

Post by aianus »

pishpash wrote: post #234
vasco wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exams have performance variance. Otherwise you're only getting a pass/fall signal in any case.

Grading assignments just punishes people that don't cheat on their homework. It's worse than worthless, it actively helps the worst students.

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

#503

Post by bklyn11201 »

gizajob wrote: post #378
freeopinion wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do they all pay for it then? Seems pretty universal in the UK too. Is it having the benefit of someone to blame when things go wrong?

When the IT department is also the developer of the software, instructors will demand their feature be included in the software: they need a gradebook column that counts as extra credit, missing work, a dropped score, and 40% of the final grade simultaneously, but only for students who email after midnight during finals week.

IT department will then build the feature as instructors are high-status and IT is low-status, and they aim to please. The software will collect hundreds of these over time. The institution will accumulate more developers, QA, a11y testers, PMs, instructional design consultants, and more PMs to deal with the instructors. The institution will then move to SAAS solution where the instructor is forced to join Canvas Jira and submit their feature request. A product manager at Canvas will then post to Jira and say thanks for your feature request, we will consider it. Game over.

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

#504

Post by brookst »

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

Though in a case like this attackers would likely revoke (or publish) the private key.

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

#505

Post by lokar »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #342
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 graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place.

I used LaTeX as a ugrad, it’s not that hard

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

#506

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#507

Post by JeremyNT »

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

Ah, perhaps we could put it on the blockchain! /s

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

#508

Post by brookst »

Hendrikto wrote: post #421
moralestapia wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student ... What seems easy on hobby projects gets way more difficult at scale. Source: experience.

For what they charge for these LMSs, they should definitely be able to sent some emails.

No concerns about privacy or regulatory considerations that might vary by jurisdiction? Just yolo it and deal with breech later?

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

#509

Post by mingus88 »

cube00 wrote: post #486
BooneJS wrote: post #150

My kids are in the middle of their finals week. What a mess. Universities know nothing, Canvas claims to be in a "scheduled maintenance", and one Prof claims to "not have any copies of material offline" which seems pretty negligent. Sounds like one section of a popular class will be doing paper exams while other sections had Canvas-based "half points for 2nd attempt"-type exams earlier today. How soon before names &…

> one Prof claims to "not have any copies of material offline" which seems pretty negligent It's not unreasonable that non-technical people would expect paid cloud services to be good custodians of the data entrusted to them. These services also do everything they can to encourage you to work within the online platform rather then working offline and then uploading. For example, there's no easy way to author a quiz,…

My daughter is in 3rd grade and has to do assignments online.

Last month it was a presentation. She had to make a poster that would be displayed on the big electronic "whiteboard" running Windows of some sort. The page layout software was so terrible that she repeatedly deleted the entire thing on accident moving text around.

This month, it was a short paper she had to write in Word, but through Teams. Literally, the Word icon is in the Teams sidebar, and she also had all kinds of trouble with it freezing or misbehaving.

In both cases, I advised her to write all the content in Notes in macOS and when she had it all ready to go we'd paste it into the crappy software so she didn't have to worry about losing any more work.

Long story short, she's non-technical and she's learned a very valuable lesson about these systems and how much trust to place in them.

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

#510

Post by lokar »

setopt wrote: post #389
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?

In my experience, it’s hard enough to make students check their school email in the first place. Let alone filter it.

As a ugrad, and later a PhD student teaching, everything is explained the first day. If you can figure it out you just fail the class (or go to office hrs to get help, etc).
Post reply on HN