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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

#591

Post by chopin »

GTP wrote: post #397
metaengies wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I partially solve this by using Thunderbird on my laptop. When I get emails on my smartphone (on the Gmail app), they unfortunately all go to the inbox. But the moment I open Thunderbird, it nicely organizes them for me.

Does Thunderbird have rules? I searched for this and didn't find them.

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

#592

Post by FloorEgg »

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 didn't say instructure engineers were bad.

What I meant is they aren't capable of building AI capable of replacing professors. I still consider it a reasonable assumption, as it has nothing to do with how well engineered canvas is. It's a different competency than instructure would have, and I've heard from insiders instructure has been spinning their wheels on way more trivial AI challenges. I also understand well how hard it would be to create AI that replaces professors and how the current best AI from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI is orders of magnitude away from being able to do that.

An engineering culture can change a lot in 10 years, and a company's engineers' ability to do stuff depends both on the individual engineers abilities as well as the company systems and culture.

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

#593

Post by recursive »

lokar wrote: post #534
skeeter2020 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're at the other end of the spectrum; unless you get work in academia this is not an advantange.

I use it to filter recruiters, if they can’t accept (a well typeset) PDF résumé, and insist on Word I know to skip them.

So are you getting a lot of offers this way? Anyway, I admire your dogma.

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

#594

Post by TheSkyHasEyes »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #89

1. It should be illegal for any company to pay ransomware attacks. Period. No pay out ever. 2. The penalty for being the attacker should be linked to the system they violated. If you do this to a hospital and someone dies you are life in prison / chair. The minimum sentence should be so painful that it deters the attack. No this will not stop this and companies need to be held accountable for their lack of security i…

This reminds me of the 'fine the johns to mitigate prostitution' argument.

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

#595

Post by addedGone »

roody15 wrote: post #577
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…

Think they will end paying the ransom quietly.

100%, else goodluck with the lawsuit coming from the students, as the schools are the one liable for not securing their system.

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

#596

Post by owlboy »

xd1936 wrote: post #519

Official cybersecurity insurance company required FAQ: https://www.instructure.com/incident_update

The way they describe it as an issue with free accounts seems vague and misleading. Why would _any_ account have this broad of access? Why would free ones be uniquely insecure vs official ones?

This suggests a bad actor at any institution could do the same thing done here. No?

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

#597

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #202
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…

> the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student with relevant records on completion of a quiz or whatnot. They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. (And universities don’t insist on it for who knows what reason.)

[deleted]

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

#598

Post by senkora »

walrus01 wrote: post #393
royal__ wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no need to reinvent any wheels by making a homegrown LMS. Moodle exists and is completely open source. Lots of large institutions use it. Even in the case that you need to do something really weird with it that isn't solved by one of the many plugins that exist, you're already 90% of the way there with its base platform, and only 10% remaining for DIY software development.

Canvas is actually also open source and can be self-hosted: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

(I don't have experience in hosting either software so I can't really comment beyond that)

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

#599

Post by TheSkyHasEyes »

samiwami wrote: post #335
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…

MIT has an incredible IT staff and they do some cool stuff. Every time I interact with any other organizations IT stuff I find it inferior. They just aren’t super big from what I gathered and probably don’t want to do the incredibly boring work of an LMS. The one they had before Canvas was very very inadequate. edit: also some of the more popular cs classes have custom websites and don’t really use canvas, but that i…

I didn't read their comment as a slight to the IT staff, just MIT's decision.

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

#600

Post by ecshafer »

tokai wrote: post #590
ecshafer wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Showing up to lectures is vastly overrated. Like note taking it's cargo cult behavior for middling students that care more about going through the acts of studying, than actual learning.

You'll note I didn't mention quality of education in my arguments. I am talking about the human experience. Though the studies typically show a correlation with grades and attendance.
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