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Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

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Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#111

Post by mbrutsch »

ggchappell wrote: post #13

An interesting and apparently well executed effort. But, to be honest, your arguments reek of ignorance. > This is an unfortunate outcome, since Yale’s copyright assertion muddles the argument that Yale’s actions violate Peter and Harry’s freedom of speech. No it doesn't. Whatever Yale's responsibilities in the freedom-of-speech realm may be, they are entirely ethical in nature, as freedom of speech in the legal sens…

Why do you grant "academic freedom" some sort of special status, while decrying freedom of speech? Yes, Americans tend to confuse the legal principle with the ethical one, but both are equally valid.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#112

Post by [deleted] »

ars wrote: post #105
mhp wrote: post #104

"If Yale grants students access to data, the university does not have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data." I disagree strongly with this statement. If the data is owned by Yale, they do in fact have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data. Although it's frustrating to see copyright holders doing illogical or inefficient things with their copyrighted data, it is their rig…

No it isn't. There is no such right. Copyright holders want such a right, but they don't have it. The entire concept of copyright in the first place is artificial - there is no moral copyright. So the only rights you have are the ones copyright gives you, and no more. Not to mention there is no database right in the US, so they don't even have a copyright on the course database in the first place! (They do on the des…

[deleted]

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#113

Post by cynwoody »

ricardobeat wrote: post #73
pingswept wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That function just retrieves the rating for one course, based on the course ID that the user has retrieved by searching for some courses. It is certainly requesting data from Yale's server, but I wouldn't call it scraping. To qualify as scraping (at least as I've done it), you'd have to iterate over all possible IDs and store the records in a database. For example, consider this basketball scraper: https://github.com…

Scraping = extracting data from a third-party website. Even if you had a site on a specific course, fetching data for a single resource, it's still scraping.

Since it's extracting additional data from the second-party website, I would classify it as enhanced browsing, not as scraping. Enhancing the browsing experience is the purpose of browser extensions.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#114

Post by cynwoody »

room271 wrote: post #89

How did this make it onto Hacker News? Squabbles like this happen at every university (or at least the ones I have been to). Universities are often quite conservative places with a tendency to restrict student activity beyond what is sensible and students often fight back. This is a run of the mill occurrence.

I can think of at least two reasons for it to be on HN:

(1) Replicating as a browser extension the functionality to which Yale objects qualifies as a damn good hack.

(2) The original issue is about internet freedom, a matter of concern to the HN community.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#115

Post by Crito »

pwang wrote: post #62
cliveowen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could read it that way, or you could say that this miniscule altercation between a student and the dean of an Ivy League university, both part of an elite group that knows little about the real struggles the rest of the world faces on a daily basis, has been elevated to something important while its not and it's been given way too much attention than it deserves. How many college campuses and universities in the…

> a spoiled kid living a cushioned life inside a cocoon Oh, I wasn't aware that you knew the author of blog post and software. Was he really very spoiled as a child? (I'm assuming you knew him, based on your comment, because surely you're not blanket-judging everyone who goes to a top-tier or Ivy League school as a coddled little brat with a silver spoon and an insular view of the world? Such a judgment would not eve…

The basic idea here is that cliveowen becomes distressed when people that he is jealous of dare complain about anything. There is nothing deeper going on here.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#116

Post by Morphling »

babs474 wrote: post #19

Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts. 1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-s…

Just because the Extension is removed from the "play store" doesn't mean it's unattainable. You can still distribute Chrome Extensions from a third party site, of course they can take steps to get your take it off of your site, but one would assume that college students who want to use this could simply share it via email or simply on a USB stick.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#117

Post by alanh »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #75
ricardobeat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scraping = extracting data from a third-party website. Even if you had a site on a specific course, fetching data for a single resource, it's still scraping.

Scraping = extracting data from a third-party website. That definition would seem to include some journalistic quotes.

It would, it that were an automated process. Can we satisfy your quibble by using the word "automated" before "extraction"?

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#118

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ggchappell wrote: post #13

An interesting and apparently well executed effort. But, to be honest, your arguments reek of ignorance. > This is an unfortunate outcome, since Yale’s copyright assertion muddles the argument that Yale’s actions violate Peter and Harry’s freedom of speech. No it doesn't. Whatever Yale's responsibilities in the freedom-of-speech realm may be, they are entirely ethical in nature, as freedom of speech in the legal sens…

In Europe we have database rights (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive) that can be used to prevent others from using your data - under quite narrowly defined conditions AFAIR.

Copyright doesn't protect from reuse of data, it's there to protect a particular artistic expression, a particular form if you like. I don't think the USA have anything akin to the European database rights?

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#119

Post by cynwoody »

babs474 wrote: post #19

Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts. 1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-s…

>Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-savvy user.

I would post a video demonstrating step-by-step how to install non-approved apps in Chrome. Download the app. Open chrome://extensions. Tick Developer mode. Drag the app from your Download folder to the extensions page. Enjoy those nicely summarized ratings!

Actually, here are two existing videos on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf9mthhfzpY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVj_FJwI2Rw

Hopefully, if a user is savvy enough to get into Yale, those instructions would suffice.

Re: Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement

#120

Post by Imagenuity »

ilaksh wrote: post #55

Make it a userscript instead of a Chrome extension and then Google can't block it from their store because it will be distributed openly. http://http://userscripts.org/ http://userscripts.org/about/installing

GreaseMonkey and Scriptish userscripts are run in the Chrome plugin TamperMonkey https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgf...
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