21–30 of 135 posts
I'm sure no Yale student has ever heard of tethering and that blocking the site on the Yale network will effectively prevent very smart students from reaching this website. You would think that the Yale administrators would know better than this.
I don't think blocking a specific set of IP addresses constitutes deep packet inspection. If they were reading the payload contents for strings matching the CourseTable site, that would qualify. Still, this is a stupid move by Yale.
If they were only blocking based on IP address then students wouldn't be able to ping the server. So they're blocking on at least the TCP layer. ... not that that constitutes DPI either.
DPI specifically means examining the payload of the packet. This is not DPI.
What's the purpose of Yale censoring certain websites? I find it hilarious that people spend so much money to go to Yale, and some of that money goes to inspecting what they're browsing.
Same could be said of governments and taxes
Some things just make sense to do at national scale, even if there are a small minority who don't appreciate the benefits.
I expect the official explanation to be something like "we cannot endorse an unofficial service that might give misleading information to our students." Every censor does it from an honest desire to keep this terribly misleading information away from the unknowing masses. I don't think Yale is blocking the service in a conspiratorial effort to stymie students, but from a not well thought out desire to babysit.
So it seems you've met a few Yalies? b^)
I thought my school was bad but reading this makes the administration at my school look like angels. When I launched a similar service at UNC Chapel Hill, the IT dept blocked requests from my server to theirs for scraping latest data. They claimed I was creating excess load, which is silly because if they really did the math, given how many people were using my service I was probably saving them resources.
There is no market in which you have to compete against the new (superior) competitor so the only tool you are left with are fallacies like referring to regulations and proper protocol.
If it were only deep packet inspection, the solution would be simply to prefix https:// and be done with it. As other posters have remarked, I suspect the article means an IP based block.
That is until Yale than set themselves up to forcefully man in the middle all outgoing https connections.
If it were only deep packet inspection, the solution would be simply to prefix https:// and be done with it. As other posters have remarked, I suspect the article means an IP based block.
That is until Yale than set themselves up to forcefully man in the middle all outgoing https connections.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is until Yale than set themselves up to forcefully man in the middle all outgoing https connections.
How can they do that without the cooperation of clients? This won't work in a university the way it works in a corporate environment.