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

The Great Firewall of Yale

162.209.96.128

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 135 posts

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#61

Post by jimmytucson »

zaidf wrote: 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.

I was just thinking, "they wouldn't have done this at Carolina" but I guess I was wrong. When I was there you could run a torrent server out of Old West and no one cared.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#62

Post by thinkcomp »

Harvard did this in 2003. It even went so far as to accuse me of using the word "The" improperly, in a copyright line where I properly attributed credit to "The President and Fellows of Harvard College," when http://www.harvard.edu at the time said the exact same thing (and apparently still does). I left Harvard early (with a degree), and then I wrote a book about it.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html

Some things never change.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#63

Post by khawkins »

Smudge wrote: post #54
jamesk_au wrote: post #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 "th…

Yale has the same student feedback/rating data available in their official online coursebook. From what I understand, ybbplus/coursetable was simply aggregating it in a way that made it easier for students to use. If there is something fundamentally wrong with subjective ratings, it seems strange that Yale would provide it in one context and censor it in another.

Maintaining data integrity is probably fairly important to them. By allowing a separate service which is used by a significant portion of the students, the system is open to serious exploitation. Professors can get black-balled by disgruntled system administrators or hackers, just by screwing with the numbers.

Yale owning both the data and the interface is understandably important to them, though this might be an opportunity for the creators to work with the administration to reform the current system.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#64

Post by pkfrank »

jahewson wrote: post #18

There is no way that a valid copyright claim can be made over the underlying data because it is a statement of fact . Such a work is not eligible for copyright protection.

Does this apply even when the "copyright holder" has meaningfully manipulated the information in order for it to be in a useful form? Have they imparted some IP that is now protected in some way?

IE, could I mirror deep-level sports statistics without attribution? One would think the agency I "took" it from had applied meaningful resources to extrapolating this data, which may be in fact be statement of fact.

I'm purely playing devil's advocate.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#65

Post by teraflop »

pkfrank wrote: post #64
jahewson wrote: post #18

There is no way that a valid copyright claim can be made over the underlying data because it is a statement of fact . Such a work is not eligible for copyright protection.

Does this apply even when the "copyright holder" has meaningfully manipulated the information in order for it to be in a useful form? Have they imparted some IP that is now protected in some way? IE, could I mirror deep-level sports statistics without attribution? One would think the agency I "took" it from had applied meaningful resources to extrapolating this data, which may be in fact be statement of fact . I'm pu…

My understanding (as a non-lawyer) is that it depends on your jurisdiction. In the US, copyright normally only applies to works of creative expression, and not to facts or ideas. However, you can argue that the selection of facts that are compiled into a database involves creativity; in that case, the database as a whole may be protected, even though the individual facts aren't.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Sta...

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#68

Post by dekz »

milkshakes wrote: post #48
dekz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poli…

We are, of course, talking in only hypotheticals. Unfortunately, this is a trend that is becoming more popular in the private business sector on their networks. I cannot foresee a indicator that would prevent this trend crossing over to universities.

Individuals at their workplace do also have user managed devices, they also are 'outraged'.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#69

Post by jamesaguilar »

jamesk_au wrote: post #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 "th…

I don't think that "protecting adults from themselves" is sufficient justification for restricting free access to information.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#70

Post by rajivm »

uptown wrote: post #52
poizan42 wrote: post #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.

Yes, but CAS is a single sign-on system likely used throughout their internal network, so they're probably not able to disable it without disrupting authentication to a large number of other unrelated systems.

But they could easily disable CAS for this specific service. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't need University approval to integrate with CAS.
Post reply on HN