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

Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 690 posts

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#561

Post by beej71 »

blahedo wrote: post #176

Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide…

> I've never liked or trusted Canvas's gradebook, and so although I do upload grades to Canvas so students can see them, my primary gradebook is always a spreadsheet I maintain locally.

That makes you one better than me. :( One thing's for sure--I'm never trusting it again.

I already had almost all my materials outside of Canvas and just used their API to upload it. So at least that's safe. But the grades... dang. Luckily we're only halfway through our quarter and it's not finals week.

Our instance is still down, but your update gives me hope.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#562

Post by crazygringo »

Neikius wrote: post #474
Kiro wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a popular opinion but I agree. I live in a country that has a very extensive principle of public records, and often times these leaks disclose much less than you would get by simply calling the authorities and ask. Now, whether that's good or bad is a different story.

Leaking school or medical record can have serious personal consequences that cannot even be enumerated

It can, but not for most people. For most people leaking that stuff would still have damages of zero dollars.

Which is what the comment above was referring to. "Most people". Not "all people".

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#563

Post by jameshart »

bawolff wrote: post #268
jameshart wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminal law isn't about making things alright for the victim. That's what insurance is for. Even if you leave your door unlocked, if someone walks in and steals your stuff, it's a crime. The state has an interest in prosecuting crimes even if the victim didn't do everything they could to prevent it .

The company is not the victim here. Its users are. [I suppose my previous comment was a bit ambigious - i meant something bad happens to someone else not to yourself] A better version of your analogy would be if your landlord failed to repair your front door in a reasonable period of time and as a result soneone walked in and stole your stuff. Yes the theif is the primary responsible party, but the landlords negligen…

Some liability, sure. Civil, not criminal, though, right?

But the post I was responding to said it should be a crime to have unsecured systems.

That is equivalent to saying it should be a crime to leave your door unlocked.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#564

Post by freedomben »

hackyhacky wrote: post #556
jameshart wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very common error to look at a specialist piece of software, superficially consider the basic data structure it appears to have and think ‘seems simple enough. Basic CRUD app.’ But it’s rarely the case in practice. In a sibling comment right here for example someone bemoaned the difficulty in Canvas of having two TAs simultaneously grade separate parts of the same assignment. That sounds like something that g…

I think you are confusing the reality of Canvas with a different, theoretical learning management system. In reality, Canvas does not have workflow and does not prevent race conditions in grading. I can certainly imagine an LMS that does these things, but Canvas does not. It would probably help if you had actually used Canvas before trying to convince us that it is non-CRUD.

You are still wrong. Just look at the code. As mentioned before, it's open source. Here I saved you a google search: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#566

Post by Mezzie »

jameshart wrote: post #532
ericpauley wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What component in particular goes substantially beyond CRUD?

It is a very common error to look at a specialist piece of software, superficially consider the basic data structure it appears to have and think ‘seems simple enough. Basic CRUD app.’ But it’s rarely the case in practice. In a sibling comment right here for example someone bemoaned the difficulty in Canvas of having two TAs simultaneously grade separate parts of the same assignment. That sounds like something that g…

LMSes have to balance a lot of directly competing needs.

It has to be simple enough for the average person to use (both on the learner side and the instruction side) and have enough complexity to allow for a lot of flexibility in setup because every organization is slightly different. They have to support 50 million file formats and everything has to be backwards compatible until the end of time and everything has to load properly and quickly on 50 million different device/OS/browser combinations. Yes, there's SCORM as a standard, but even that is rickety, and an LMS that doesn't support non SCORM files is dead in the water anyway.

They're simple(ish) in code, and a nightmare in requirements.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#567

Post by hackyhacky »

freedomben wrote: post #564
hackyhacky wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing the reality of Canvas with a different, theoretical learning management system. In reality, Canvas does not have workflow and does not prevent race conditions in grading. I can certainly imagine an LMS that does these things, but Canvas does not. It would probably help if you had actually used Canvas before trying to convince us that it is non-CRUD.

You are still wrong. Just look at the code. As mentioned before, it's open source . Here I saved you a google search: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

"Look at the code" is not a reasonable response to "Is this app CRUD or not?" You've already been asked to provide specifics about which componenent(s) of Canvas are allegedly non-CRUD, and simply repeating your claim without answering the question does nothing to advance your case.

It's a simple question. Since you claim to be an expert on Canvas, I'm sure that you can point me to the relevant features much faster than I can sort through thousands of lines of code, looking for the one line that says "def not_crud_function()". CRUD or not-CRUD is a judgement about the purpose of a program, not its implementation.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#568

Post by Mezzie »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #170
moduspol wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a college IT department around that time and the common belief was that all LMSes suck. There are just too many different ways that too many different people want to do things that it's just bound to be hated. Kind of like Jira / Asana for software dev project management.

LMS’s are a lot like programming languages. There’s the ones people complain about and the ones no one uses.

I'm an LMS admin and yeah, that sounds about right.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#569

Post by hackyhacky »

Mezzie wrote: post #566
jameshart wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very common error to look at a specialist piece of software, superficially consider the basic data structure it appears to have and think ‘seems simple enough. Basic CRUD app.’ But it’s rarely the case in practice. In a sibling comment right here for example someone bemoaned the difficulty in Canvas of having two TAs simultaneously grade separate parts of the same assignment. That sounds like something that g…

LMSes have to balance a lot of directly competing needs. It has to be simple enough for the average person to use (both on the learner side and the instruction side) and have enough complexity to allow for a lot of flexibility in setup because every organization is slightly different. They have to support 50 million file formats and everything has to be backwards compatible until the end of time and everything has to…

Everything you say is true, and yet it's clear you've never used Canvas.

Canvas is decidedly, not fast, fails to display even trivial files (such as source code) as well as more complex files that should just be handled by the browser (such as video), and it has a non-intuitive, verbose, and tiresome interface that would have felt old-fashioned 20 years ago.

Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

#570

Post by whyenot »

mbreese wrote: post #445
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Canvas before, but all the LMSes that I've used allow students to enable emails whenever anything is updated, including when grades are posted. This is off by default because it's often 10+ emails a day, because many teachers post notes once a day, and with 5 classes, that adds up pretty quick. I personally have it enabled because it's pretty manageable with some custom Outlook rules, but setting this…

Canvas will send emails when grades are posted, but not what the grade is. Or at least that’s the way in the configurations I’ve seen. So, that wouldn’t help in a case where no one can access the canvas gradebook.

Isn't that due to FERPA related concerns?
Post reply on HN