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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

#611

Post by dctoedt »

crazygringo wrote: post #584
ndriscoll wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the lawyers are incompetent morons. There's "no benefit" to telling the student their own grade at all when viewed from that perspective. You could just not give them any feedback. Or you could allow them to consent to it, which is what the law asks. It is a dodge. Society should not just say "oh those silly lawyers". These people are not being responsible. They are not doing their jobs.

No, the lawyers are not "incompetent morons", and I highly doubt you have the legal training and domain experience to be qualified to make that assertion. You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think. I've been in some of these conversations. Quite fran…

> You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. [¶] The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think.

The law is a lot like an app: It has to take into account a gazillion edge cases and corner cases — not to mention that people can be ignorant and/or malicious. It really is complicated, as you say above.

Well done on not hurling insults at @ndriscoll, BTW. Personal attacks don't persuade the target, and they can turn off onlookers who might be undecided. (Competent lawyers learn early that judges and jurors don't like personal attacks and can be less inclined to believe the attacker.)

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

#612

Post by phendrenad2 »

Loughla wrote: post #213
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…

[flagged]

That's what I got from it. But it's misdirected, the problem isn't being forced to use a platform, the problem is the platform.

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

#613

Post by hackyhacky »

freedomben wrote: post #564
hackyhacky wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing the reality of Canvas with a different, theoretical learning management system. In reality, Canvas does not have workflow and does not prevent race conditions in grading. I can certainly imagine an LMS that does these things, but Canvas does not. It would probably help if you had actually used Canvas before trying to convince us that it is non-CRUD.

You are still wrong. Just look at the code. As mentioned before, it's open source . Here I saved you a google search: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

I thought this was pretty hilarious:

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/pull/2630/changes/...

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

#614

Post by altairprime »

dang wrote: post #604
gsquaredxc wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to offer some additional reassurance: I send my friends articles I see on HN that might interest them. A (in my view) very good litmus test is when someone asks where I saw it, because this demonstrates some desire for continual learning. I find that anyone that asks that question seemingly trusts an interface like HN more because of it. My suspicion is that this is probably because at a certain point yo…

You succeeded in reassuring me further—thanks! This little subthread turned interesting, though it's teeming with sample bias of course. > Long-form YouTube is also something Yes, we hear that often too. I didn't mention it above because it's not text, but in terms of how people spend time and where they go to learn things, it's a huge alternative. I wonder sometimes how HN might interface with the videoverse. I can'…

Long-form YouTube is much more text than may be apparent on the surface. Discussions with hundreds or thousands of comments and with the same wide-ranging falloff curve of HN in how interesting those comments are (and, too, HN’s tendency to bubble up trite one-liners and me-toos due to sharing the integers-only voting system weaknesses).

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

#615

Post by altairprime »

bradley13 wrote: post #465
isityettime wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? What makes Canvas accessible in a way that HTML and PDF files are not? It's true that PDF readers aren't the best for screenreaders, but surely you can just upload a .html copy as well.

Why does everything have to be 100% accessible? I'm a prof. When I have a student with special needs in my class, the administration tells me ahead of time. I make the necessary allowances - and those differ from case to case, anyway: whether it's extra time in exams, or someone who is deaf, or someone who is blind, or whatever. When it happens, I make the necessary allowances. When I don't, then...I don't. The obses…

The attitude they’re contesting is that accessibility is a “minimum compliance” category: people tend to invest zero effort into accessibility until caught, and enforcement that waits for students to report suffering is terrible, so automated analysis of accessibility that is ‘always on’ dramatically raises the water level for all accessibility. It won’t reach 100% accessible but it’ll reach a lot higher than the 1% accessible it was otherwise, and that’s a valuable result worth obsessing over. Doesn’t have to be complex: “Your video was uploaded without captions”, “your PDF is missing a text layer” are probably the two most valuable and simplest to implement rejections on the table.

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

#616

Post by pfortuny »

apublicfrog wrote: post #424
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…

Can you explain for the billions of the rest of us why this is the "most stressful time of the year" for the group you're referencing? I assume that's American students and/or teachers?

European students are preparing for their finals.

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

#617

Post by filoleg »

Avicebron wrote: post #247
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.

What is the strategic response then? Assuming I'm a student and my grades are gone, and I want to graduate, shouldn't I pick pass/fail? Does a future employer look at pass/fail vs the grade? do they care? Are there even jobs that matter enough to care out there for them? This seems like, solving the problem but without actually seeing the broader goal or trajectory education is supposed to follow.

> Does a future employer look at pass/fail vs the grade?

I don't know for a fact how pass/fail is treated by employers, but there are indeed some that look at your college GPA even 10+ years after you graduated. I suspect they don't care about the specifics of how your overall GPA was derived though, so pass/fail likely doesn't matter (unless you did really well and expected the grade to boost your GPA, and then pass/fail essentially does nothing to the GPA, thus kinda eliminating the GPA boost).

I got asked for my undergrad GPA (I graduated ~10 years ago) more than once over the last year by some finance/quant firms.

As for whether "do those jobs even matter enough," I guess it is more of a personal subjective take. I found the work that the people at those companies did (and the problems they solved) to be very interesting and challenging, I found the people working there to be extremely sharp, smart, and genuinely nice to interact with (which is an ideal work environment for me), and I found the total comp to be great. Honestly, I cannot think of much more to ask from an employer.

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

#618

Post by setopt »

lokar wrote: post #510
setopt wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As an associate professor, I do explain things the first day, but I am certainly not permitted to fail students as a consequence of not checking their email daily.

Even if they didn’t hand in an assignment at all, without any reason provided, I’m required by regulation to offer them a second chance to pass that assignment.

The students’ rights are quite strong here (Northern Europe), which I generally support, but it has some downsides.

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

#619

Post by ndriscoll »

crazygringo wrote: post #610
ndriscoll wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society . This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse . And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law,…

The world is complicated. Laws like FERPA are written with good intentions, but there are a lot of gray areas open to interpretation, and bad actors will take advantage of those gray areas to bring lawsuits for selfish purposes that universities have to spend money to defend themselves and possibly pay expensive penalties over. So lawyers advise how to follow laws in the most risk-free way. Blaming lawyers or Instruc…

It's not a misunderstanding of everything, especially for schools that are government funded. They have a mission, they receive resources from everyone else to do that mission. If they are then worried about penalties for some frivolous side distraction, and choose to not accomplish their mission for fear of that, then why are we funding them to start with?

Frankly it's a perspective that I've only developed as I got older and realized that such excuses are poor, and that the real world has quite a few people in it who don't really care about the outcomes of what they're doing, or even understand why they're there. To me it feels adjacent to the adolescent view I often see on this site/reddit around "why is the company laying people off when they're making lots of money?" It's because those people aren't needed for anything, and those jobs aren't a form of charity. They exist for a purpose. If they no longer have a purpose, why would you keep paying that person?

If people are going to exist as obstructions to the purpose of the institution we're trying to serve, then they are useless. It's like a computer security worker saying the best way to be secure is to unplug everything, and push for policies that no one shall use computers for anything. Completely missing the point.

Finding ways to follow the law in the most risk-free way to the detriment of everyone is exactly missing their purpose in the world, and everyone should rightly call such a person incompetent and useless. It's casual acceptance of this kind of incompetence culture that slowly leads to societal decline. It's the same kind of thing as when Berkeley took down their lectures because of the ADA. How about the same state that ignores federal immigration and drug law say that actually they're going to keep giving away their free educational materials because they want universal education, and giving those lectures away is strictly better than not doing that, and if the feds want it made accessible, they can fund a project to do so?

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

#620

Post by wpollock »

ndriscoll wrote: post #586
crazygringo wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the lawyers are not "incompetent morons", and I highly doubt you have the legal training and domain experience to be qualified to make that assertion. You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think. I've been in some of these conversations. Quite fran…

The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society . This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse . And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law,…

> The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society.

An old lawyer joke: What do you call 100 lawyers drowning in the ocean? A good start!

(Told to me by my dad, a former attorney till he retired.)

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