How my school rejected an app made for students • Hacker News Board

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#31

Post by knappador » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 3:53 AM UTC

Hahhahaa this is a hilarious. I went to a school like this that was super paranoid and also had a counselor person. People put into these roles always came across as psycho and condescending to me. What a better way to bring young minds into the world than to fail to bargain or negotiate with them about their behavior, instead just waffling into that "in the real world" BS.

Ditch the proprietary soft when possible if you want to get as far away from BS as you can. FOSS is one of the few refuges where you can believe in humanity as much as you might. You have the "challenge" to think about how unethical your choice of platforms is ;-D

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#32

Post by Alupis » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 3:57 AM UTC

pistle wrote: post #30

Alupis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but here in the US, you violated no copyright laws (or any laws or ethical clauses for the matter) by simply providing access to pre-existing works, ie. the schools website data. If the school's website is publicly accessibly, as-in anyone can find it online, then it's public information and you can use it at your will so long as you state where the information came from (ie. not your ori…

You should probably get acquainted with the details around copyright and fair use before telling someone what laws they didn't break in their country or another's. This same story has played out at various levels and it gets repeatedly delivered to this audience through the prism of a "victim." Virtual pitchforks get raised, etc. The talented young programmer makes some assumptions and, benefit of the doubt, "naive"…

I'm sorry but I strongly believe you are incorrect.

I could make a paid HN aggregator... legally. So long as I provided proper attribution.

The OP provided attribution. The OP never claimed the data was his. The entire purpose was to aggregate the schools data into an easily accessible format for students.

Cultural norms or not, the OP violated no laws. It's pretty plain and simple.

Yes, the school could play games and break this parser if they decided. Worse has been done before. It would be a teachable moment... but not for the reasons you seem to be concluding.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#33

Post by sumukh1 » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:06 AM UTC

As a former student who created an iOS app for my school district - I really feel for you.

Creating the application & working with the district was a great learning experience for me - perhaps the most useful thing I did in high school. I'm sure you learned a good bit by creating the app - those skills will certainly help you in the future.

Luckily for me the staff/administrators we talked to really embraced the idea and brought me on and made it into the official iOS application for the school district and then open-sourced it. We pitched the ability to check grades, get push notifications, and check documents. It's important to note, however, that I went to school in Silicon Valley - so that's probably a factor.

You've already demonstrated a lot of skill by creating the app. (It looks a whole lot better than my v1)! - Chalk this up as a good learning experience - Keep it up!

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#34

Post by jeremycw » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:09 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #14

drchiu wrote: post #10

To the OP, I feel for you. Your app made someone over at the IT dept feel inadequate. Remember, some older IT person is trying to protect their job, no matter how crappy they're doing it. Your app, as you had mentioned, was much better than the one that they made. This, unfortunately, is the way the world is. Think about patent trolls, incumbents suing start ups that threaten to shake up the industry, etc. The way th…

I don't know where you live, but here in the US, you violated no copyright laws (or any laws or ethical clauses for the matter) by simply providing access to pre-existing works, ie. the schools website data. If the school's website is publicly accessibly, as-in anyone can find it online, then it's public information and you can use it at your will so long as you state where the information came from (ie. not your ori…

I feel it's not as cut and dry as you are trying to make it seem. Imagine if this were a 3rd party Facebook client that stripped out the ads, I bet Facebook would sue you. Just last year there was the legal battle between Padmapper and Craigslist. The case got thrown out [0] but only after Padmapper did some sneaky stuff so that it wasn't scraping craigslist directly. Also because craigslist didn't own full copyrights to the listings because they were user generated.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/30/craigslist-3taps-lawsuit-de...

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#35

Post by glassx » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:09 AM UTC

joshschreuder wrote: post #5

woah wrote: post #3

What was the "ASP.net view state parser"?

Blog post: http://theiostream.tumblr.com/post/73637206523/parsing-asp-n... And accompanying source code: https://github.com/theiostream/viewstate

It's been a while since I last had to parse ASP.NET pages, but AFAIK, the viewstate isn't meant to be parsed by clients, you just have to re-send it during postbacks. It's more like a cookie, or Rails' authenticity_token [1].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/941594/understand-rails-a...

EDIT: Oh, ok. Re-reading the article, he was parsing the ViewState because there was some data hidden in there (a serious flaw actually), instead of scraping the site normally! Clever!

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#36

Post by Alupis » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:20 AM UTC

jeremycw wrote: post #34

Alupis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you live, but here in the US, you violated no copyright laws (or any laws or ethical clauses for the matter) by simply providing access to pre-existing works, ie. the schools website data. If the school's website is publicly accessibly, as-in anyone can find it online, then it's public information and you can use it at your will so long as you state where the information came from (ie. not your ori…

I feel it's not as cut and dry as you are trying to make it seem. Imagine if this were a 3rd party Facebook client that stripped out the ads, I bet Facebook would sue you. Just last year there was the legal battle between Padmapper and Craigslist. The case got thrown out [0] but only after Padmapper did some sneaky stuff so that it wasn't scraping craigslist directly. Also because craigslist didn't own full copyright…

The OP didn't build the app to subvert the school's revenue model. That's the difference.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#37

Post by pistle » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:20 AM UTC

theiostream wrote: post #11

iancarroll wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, the app that I mentioned in the article (which could be considered as a competitor of sorts) is also being developed by the school itself. Which is probably why the school shut you down.

Their app's feature set consists of contact information, maps to the school, a gallery of static photos about the school, and webviews that display their website's content directly. It doesn't even comprise grades, memos and so on, which is what my product's focus is. That's why I don't think that's the reason.

So, you requested written permission... didn't get it... charged for your app... and now they are just a bunch of luddite meanies turning you into an evil villain instead of fawning all over you?

You are serving as a proxy for credentials into a system where the school is legally liable to protect the privacy of the students, families, and staff. Yeah. You get shut down NOW. It doesn't matter where your code is or how great your work is. you are taking control of something that they are required to protect.

If someone can hack iOS or your app and steal credentials, who's ass is on the line for discovering, disclosing, remediating, rebuilding trust, resigning, etc.? All those people have enough work without your app. They are responsible for what they create. They can't be responsible for your work. If they knowingly let it exist, they will have to take responsibility for any fallout that may come from it.

Who is going to be handling all the calls when people change their passwords at the site, but your app locks their accounts out by trying to use the cached credentials?

They have plenty to lose with your app. You are learning many things.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#38

Post by pistle » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:36 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #32

pistle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably get acquainted with the details around copyright and fair use before telling someone what laws they didn't break in their country or another's. This same story has played out at various levels and it gets repeatedly delivered to this audience through the prism of a "victim." Virtual pitchforks get raised, etc. The talented young programmer makes some assumptions and, benefit of the doubt, "naive"…

I'm sorry but I strongly believe you are incorrect. I could make a paid HN aggregator... legally. So long as I provided proper attribution. The OP provided attribution. The OP never claimed the data was his. The entire purpose was to aggregate the schools data into an easily accessible format for students. Cultural norms or not, the OP violated no laws. It's pretty plain and simple. Yes, the school could play games a…

You can believe to any degree you like, but there would be no concern about "fair use" in the copyright law lexicon if it only took "proper attribution" to re-purpose others' content for commercial or non-commercial use. The content of the school's site is quite likely copyrighted and they can control the form and location of copies of their content/data.

Try this... Play an artist's song, in its entirety, on a radio station. Tell the audience where that song came from. Play another song... attribute. Never pay ASCAP license fees... see how long you are on the air.

Or... copy/paste the entirety of a newly released book to your tumblr. Attribute accordingly. No worries, right?

The original creator has copyright. They license or transfer it, frequently contractually, to publishers who control the rights to how copies of the material may be created and distributed.

There are fair uses for portions and/or derivatives of content, but this use would not fall into those categories. Let's not forget that the kid sought and was denied permission for his app. He just assumed that silence in his time window implied permission. That's not nearly long enough for copyright to expire.

Also, they could feasibly be dicks and say that his viewstate parser was a copyright circumvention technique putting him in the crosshairs of DMCA 1201 - Circumvension of Copyright Measures.

So, you are plainly and simply rejecting a lot of readily available information on well-understood restrictions around copying other peoples' content.

Maybe you are confused with Creative Commons licensing or something?

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#39

Post by krrishd » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:37 AM UTC

dethstar wrote: post #6

"This goes to show that as much as schools attempt to mask the image of a great environment for students to thrive, learn enterpreneurism and so on (mine does that a lot), they’re traditionalists to the point that it doesn’t make any sense. What do they have to lose with my app? How is that classification as copyright infringement even pertinent? They apparently just must have control of anything that has anything to…

To the point of your edit, I'm actually working on something along those lines - http://openSourceSchool.co

The code isn't on Github yet, but I've developed an open source website framework and mobile app framework for schools and other educational institutions, because ed tech kinda sucks from what I've experienced. Hopefully I'll be working on larger aspects if schools would allow non-trivial software to be developed by students who could do it better than the school.

Re: How my school rejected an app made for students

#40

Post by MattHeard » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 4:40 AM UTC

loumf wrote: post #13

aeontech wrote: post #2

Sorry to hear it. You're completely right, there's nothing unethical about what you did, and if you did get sued for it in "real world", any competent judge would laugh the plaintiff out of the room. If you really want to fight for it, perhaps you can get support from the student body and the teachers that have liked the app before? If not, well, at least you learned a lot by completing it, congratulations on that!

IANAL, but websites are allowed to control (via their terms of service) whether you can scrape them and use their data. There is a difference between accessing a website via chrome and via a native app that uses the website as a service.

There is an even bigger difference between accessing a website via Chrome and via a native app which costs 99c.