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The Great Firewall of Yale

162.209.96.128

41–50 of 135 posts

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#41
post #3

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.

You don't think they probably force their students through a HTTP Proxy (which will have a different address) than the one a ping ends up originating from?

I'm with the parent, I doubt they're doing DPI here.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#43
post #34

This is not news. Most campus have filtering software and the university administration will use it to block websites that make them look bad.

> This is not news. If you're numb to it, then it's imperative that it is news. Imagine when the headlines read "Millions killed in Nazi camps" and people said "This is not news."

Godwin's Law

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#44
post #4

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.

If anything, it's symbolic and indicative of future actions. The university has demonstrated 'defending itself' and now they have evidence of anti-authoritarian protest and dissent directed at the them, and the next logical step is legal action.

This public shaming will be received as insulting and provocative, and the deans will attempt to assert their dominance through the courts.

Preventing students from accessing the website is neither the goal nor is it a desired side-effect -- the goal is intimidation and generating evidence of wrong-doing. It's a game of poker for the administration and they showed their hand, and now they're waiting for the OP to call their bluff. This will not end well.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#45
post #42

"It threatens the very basis of academic freedom and net neutrality" So pretentious, did a teenager write this?

i don't think that's pretentious at all.

if my university implemented a scheme like this, i'd feel exactly the same way.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#46
One of the principal issues raised here - and not squarely addressed in the post or the article to which it links - is the extent to which average subjective ratings of courses and professors should be permitted to dominate the decision-making processes of students.

Note that Yale's complaint included concerns over "the prominence of class and professor ratings", and the student developers' response was to remove "the option of sorting classes by ratings". Subjective five-point ratings can be useful in many contexts, but in the context of education they can also give rise to genuine pedagogical concerns about the way in which students choose their courses.

Looking at the screenshot in the post, it is not difficult to see that the pattern of enrolments might very quickly become skewed towards those classes with higher average evaluation ratings (whatever such ratings might mean). If that happens, it suggests that some students may be making decisions about the courses in which they enrol based principally on factors other than their interests, abilities and future career paths, or without critical thought. Whilst other factors are relevant, including those for which an average of subjective evaluation ratings might be a plausible heuristic, that does not mean those factors should be the primary or predominant factors.

Without seeking to defend or condone Yale's response, there is more to the story than the tale of student censorship presented in the post.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#47
If you actually go to http://coursetable.com you will be asked to login through Yale Central Authentication Service, which sends you to: https://secure.its.yale.edu/cas/login?service=http%3A%2F%2Fc...

I hope I don't give the administration any good ideas here, but I would seem that they have a much more efficient way to disable the site.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a corporate environment, you usually have control over the workstations themselves, and can inject your own mitm certificate.

It doesn't matter whether you control the user environment to covertly install the MITM certificate. You simple notify your network users this is happening with instructions on how to install the certificate. Either the user installs it or not, it's their choice. I am in no way advocating this abhorrent system of 'security'. Simply noting that it is obviously done in the workplaces and in many workplaces. That it can…

> It doesn't matter whether you control the user environment to covertly install the MITM certificate. You simple notify your network users this is happening with instructions on how to install the certificate.

Respectfully, I disagree. This is certainly possible, but from an operational perspective this would be a nightmare. Even setting aside the likely backlash that would follow in response to such a sweeping policy change, university networks largely consist of diverse, user-managed devices, and supporting a transition through such a change would have a non-trivial cost.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#49

tl;dr -- the crux of the issue (right or wrong) is making the evaluation information too public. From the news story: > "[Administrators' primary concern was] making YC [Yale College] course evaluation available to many who are not authorized to view this information,” > "[Administrators also asked] how they [the site operators] obtained the information, who gave them permission to use it and where the information is…

They claim that's the crux of the issue. But consider: if they're concerned about outside access, why are they blocking access to the site for precisely the set of people who actually are authorised to view the information?

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#50
post #9

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.

the people that decide the policies that IT services implement are usually the ones that know least about IT.
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