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

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

haufler.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 206 posts

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

#191

Post by frevd »

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

Make it a Javascript (just put into Favorites an icon that links to javascript:(function(){...})() which creates and inserts a script block into the currently open site (Yale site in this case) which loads the big .js from a server. Users browse the regular Yale page, click on their icon in the Favorites bar and the page extends so it can look and perform however you want it to look and perform - unblockable!

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

#192

Post by ganeumann »

tomp wrote: post #188
ganeumann wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of Speech is not a legal right, it is an ethical right. It predates its US First Amendment codification by several hundred years and is also legally expressed in many other countries. To use your words, may I suggest you do not couch your arguments in terms of fallacious claims about freedom of speech? I don't think commentators who decried Yale's hypocrisy were claiming that Yale violated the first amendment…

> legally expressed in many other countries citation? I'm only asking because that's not the case in most of Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country

Re: Europe: the European Convention on Human Rights says, in Article 10: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises."

All of the members of the European Union are signatories to the ECHR.

Also, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union says, in Article 11:

    1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
    2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
I'm not European, so my opinion on how closely governments stick to these laws doesn't really apply. I'm just pointing out the laws.

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

#193

Post by tomp »

ganeumann wrote: post #192
tomp wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> legally expressed in many other countries citation? I'm only asking because that's not the case in most of Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country Re: Europe: the European Convention on Human Rights says, in Article 10: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of…

Holocaust denial is illegal in many EU countries, and swastika/Nazi flags are illegal in a few as well. So, obviously, freedom of speech isn't the highest priority.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." (attributed to Aristotle)

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

#194

Post by ihsw »

smtddr wrote: post #7
gklitt wrote: post #4

Really clever response to clearly decouple the copyright issue from the freedom of speech issue. I'm curious to see how the university will react to this.

The data will stop being presented in a form that's easily parsed. Instead, it'll be in PDFs rather than within text+HTML that this guy's extension can move around. (And the counter to this is a server somewhere that the extension can send the PDF to, that runs pdftotext on linux... so he should prepare for that ...or just prepare to be expelled).

> The data will stop being presented in a form that's easily parsed. Instead, it'll be in PDFs rather than within text+HTML that this guy's extension can move around.

Five years from now this kind of information will be encrypted using EME modules, in fact this whole Yale saga would've been a non-issue from the start had EME been well established.

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

#195

Post by eropple »

jcc80 wrote: post #182
eropple wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got into Yale and you're wondering what advantages he has? Let's set aside for a second the high-end schools' tendency towards legacy admissions, which clearly isn't going to be biased towards the children of the upper class who are certainly not predominantly white and loaded (that smell is not the dog, folks, it's sarcasm). Have you seen the demographics of Yale[1]? Even just racial demographics put WTFs to this…

"You're wondering what advantages he has?" No, I wasn't. I don't pretend to know anything about this student. I suppose I could put him into a box and make a bunch of assumptions based on the obvious stats, but that's not how I view people. Every individual has their own life story. So, when I see a woman, a Hispanic person, etc. I don't see a victim or someone who's disadvantaged. You have a different view and that'…

That's a very convenient way to not have to address gaping societal problems.

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

#197

Post by unethical_ban »

pistle wrote: post #164
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a little tip for posting on HN: try not to use any emotion in your arguments unless you are looking for downvotes.

Thanks, but I'm not motivated either way by popularity. What all these kids at Yale are doing is misguided and a waste of their youth and skills. They could have stepped up to try to make a name for themselves by understanding more than just the technical bits. They could have spent just a little time to understand their non-technical landscape prior to showing off technically and crying to reddit Kony 2012-style. Th…

Bah. I had a similar idea at my university to provide instant-feedback course guides for all degree plans, class descriptions and online resources, etc.

The university went from "awful system implemented 20 years ago by Sungard" to "awful system implemented 1 year ago by Sungard". Don't pretend this YBB+ app, created by students, had any chance of being accepted by the university. Furthermore, it is a joke to claim futility and waste of talent for these men who built this website, created out of a real-world (first-world) problem and proven to serve user demands.

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

#198

Post by toomuchtodo »

daeken wrote: post #168
Shish2k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a monkey As a side note, it would be really useful if there was some way of quoting context that didn't trivially lend itself to forging context... (though admittedly that's a much smaller problem).

Simple solution: store the comment revisions, and when you go to a reply, allow the user to see the revision that was active when the reply was posted.

Or just disallow edits.

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

#199

Post by the_watcher »

ganeumann wrote: post #107
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…

Freedom of Speech is not a legal right, it is an ethical right. It predates its US First Amendment codification by several hundred years and is also legally expressed in many other countries. To use your words, may I suggest you do not couch your arguments in terms of fallacious claims about freedom of speech? I don't think commentators who decried Yale's hypocrisy were claiming that Yale violated the first amendment…

American freedom of speech is actually a legal right, and has been limited in application to public entities in the US (with limited exceptions).

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

#200

Post by the_watcher »

pistle wrote: post #164
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a little tip for posting on HN: try not to use any emotion in your arguments unless you are looking for downvotes.

Thanks, but I'm not motivated either way by popularity. What all these kids at Yale are doing is misguided and a waste of their youth and skills. They could have stepped up to try to make a name for themselves by understanding more than just the technical bits. They could have spent just a little time to understand their non-technical landscape prior to showing off technically and crying to reddit Kony 2012-style. Th…

This is entirely wrong. Why would they wait to climb the through the bullshit bureaucracy when they can build something that helps all the students now? What they proved is that Yale's administration is woefully out of touch.
Post reply on HN