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The Great Firewall of Yale

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Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#101

Post by bhickey »

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…

Sweat of the brow and database rights aren't recognized in the United States.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#102

Post by windexh8er »

shtylman wrote: post #72

I run a similar service for other schools (courseoff.com) and I have run into this before. I bet what happened was their site failed to cache the course data or seat information and was thus making lots of requests to the Yale servers. To Yale it might appear like a DoS from this site. Obviously I don't know for sure but I would venture to bet this block was more an automated response than malicious intent against th…

It's not DoS, you don't present a splash page for offenders in that regard. I know the platform (PAN-OS) very well and that page is a URL filtering profile splash. It's actually a custom URL category (shown at bottom) that they can update via white and black lists.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#103

Post by victorhooi »

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.

Hmm, how would this play with all those sites scrapping timetable information or pricing data?

Say you had an public online store selling products.

Could somebody take those prices, aggregate them and let people see?

My understanding was that you can sue over that and that sites like Kayak or CamelCamelCamel used APIs.

Can anybody comment on whether this is

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#105

Post by Nanzikambe »

dekz wrote: post #20
Nanzikambe wrote: post #7

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.

I'd be really shocked if that's the case, they're essentially sabotaging their own security by exposing a single surface for attack for MITM attacks.

Most corporate environments typically do not "proxy" SSL, I know this from experience administrating networks and later abusing this with an SSH tunnel on port 443 allowing me unfettered access.

I'd be very interested in technical details on how that's implemented if it is.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#106

Post by girvo »

ballard wrote: post #94
maurits wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it feels like people protecting their little kingdoms within a large organisation. 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.

Having worked in a large profit center IT dept at an Ivy League, I know first hand how many bad apps are developed and how many hundreds of millions are frittered away (or in some cases tantamount to stolen). I think working with students to open source and support apps is a way to go. The university concerns are: looking bad, students using an esoteric language, messy programming style or move on. If universities ha…

In my personal experience with education IT, all those concerns are problems with actual contractors :/

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#107

Post by jlgaddis »

javert wrote: post #84
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.

UNC invested in what was initially planned to be the most expensive academic ERP system ever, and which then went way over budget and schedule. The result? An even older version of PeopleSoft (which apparently is Oracle's second-tier offering) than what was being sold to other universities in prior years. It's barely useable at all. It's utter shit-ware. The prior in-house system, which was early-90s HTML presumably…

I worked at a .edu for ~8 years. While I never had to experience it firsthand (thank $deity), I can't begin to count the number of horror stories I've heard from my peers at other organizations with regard to PeopleSoft. I don't believe I've ever heard of an implementation even going "okay".

Side note: those of you building apps aimed at specific industries, consider education (both K-12 and higher ed). As I said, I was at a .edu for ~8 years and, in my current role, I deal with a lot of K-12 schools. Both will spend outrageous amounts of money for decent software applications.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#108

Post by dkural »

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…

How are the students interests, abilities, and future career paths served by taking bad courses from professors with no interest in teaching, because they're too busy giving interviews / doing research? Perhaps Yale should let the students balance all factors, including what their peers thought of the class. It's not as if the website casts a spell on their feeble brains and removes any consideration of critical thought. Is it Yale's duty to protect its customers from truths they "cannot handle"? Would you say Yale should ban Amazon book rankings, in case the student doesn't know how to handle a one-star ranking and decides to burn the book?

Many rankings are indeed subjective (books.. classes.. movies) - in fact that's rather the point: to render ones opinion.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#109

Post by jlgaddis »

It would have been really cool if the developers of this (really nice, AFAICT) site moved it to (or also made it available via) a Tor hidden service.

The students would regain access to their data (I realize that it has now been e-mailed to them) and it would be a great example of exactly how Tor can help "bypass" censorship.

Re: The Great Firewall of Yale

#110

Post by rattray »

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 also created something somewhat similar[0] for my school (Penn), and the only reason we didn't get shut down was because we don't make it easy to know how professor stack up against one another.

[0] coursegrapher.org

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