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

How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

bustbyte.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 94 posts

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#61

Post by teppifk »

onemoresoop wrote: post #25
teppifk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything you study has the potential to make you a better, more well rounded, knowledgeable and less ignorant person. This is a pretty meaningless sentiment. There are plenty of things one can study that will lead to more ignorance and less well-roundedness. In the extreme, this is pretty much how cults can operate. I believe it also applies to a number of subjects in mainstream universities, but I am not going to…

You already did. Why not choose the right university/curriculum that you're interested in? Or you have a problem with most of them?

No I did not.

It's a university.. there are a broad array of departments and courses, and I am saying that a handful of them at a multitude of universities have the potential to close minds and lead to more ignorance - this broad statement isn't too controversial - witnessed by the very vocal debate about it. I am not going to jump into the pit of the specifics of that debate though.

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#62

Post by [deleted] »

XIVMagnus wrote: post #10
tomatohs wrote: post #9

When I was a junior, I mentioned to my housemate that I had forgot my Blackboard password. "It's just your birthday" he said, and I looked at him shocked. 30 Minutes later I was in my professor's account. Their birthday month and day were public on Facebook, so it was only a matter of guessing their age. I reported this to our IT department and they were not pleased. They let me know they had the power to expel me bu…

I have and forever will find it extremely stupid to threaten someone with expelling them for trying to HELP you do your job.

[deleted]

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#63

Post by zaroth »

_nickwhite wrote: post #15

When I was in college around Y2K, I took a "Foundations of Music" class offered online- an elective that taught, well, foundations of music, specifically how to read music. Students had to install this janky, low-quality, Windows Visual Basic application and do 100% of the coursework using it. This VB app would output a results file, and then we had to upload it to the professor. Well, I edited the file, and found th…

That was probably technically wire fraud, but an interesting story no less. Not to worry, the statute of limitations is 5 years. (IANAL)

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#64

Post by swsieber »

The funnest school computer exploit I figured out was how to run a game from a USB drive (circa 2007).

I was in an accounting class (using excel) and I tended to finish the earliest with our in-class work because of judicious use of formulas and copy-paste (instead of entering data twice for the two-ledger stuff).

The computers were set to disallow running unapproved programs, but I figured out that you could launch an executable from within a zip file (the computers ran XP IIRC). The only thing left to do was to configure the game at home (before zipping it up) to save files, look for other config, etc. from the the drive letter the thumbdrive would be mounted at at school because it of course couldn't save the updated settings to the zip file.

I had a good teacher - he let me sit at the back, and I just kept the volume down :)

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#65

Post by Ididntdothis »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #57
Ididntdothis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first response should be to be horrified about their own system and fix it quickly. Such a simple hack shouldn’t be possible.

For the most part people in IT departments aren't stupid, they know precisely how crap the software they're stuck using is, they just don't have any real input on the decision process. Blackboard, for instance, is notoriously awful but is everywhere in schools. This often applies to policies as well, unfortunately.

I agree but they still. shouldn’t threaten people who show these hacks with expulsion. The real bad guys will do their thing without telling anybody and you can assume that this is going on

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#66

Post by spike021 »

mdorazio wrote: post #52
Smithalicious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A moral of the story is that people will optimize for what's being measured, not what is intended. Machine learning does this even more so, with hilarious results.

Yup. Another example of this is when I was in college and other students would go on ratemyprofessor or look up grade distributions for different professors and class options to pick the easiest ones. The thought of, you know, actually learning something even if it was hard wasn’t even a consideration - they just wanted the GPA. This continues in the working world as well, unfortunately. Many employees will optimize…

That's not the only thing ratemyprofessor is useful for. Everyone has different learning styles. In college I did super well learning outside of class when needed, but being able to narrow down the professors to the ones I knew would be compatible with my in-class learning style was better than nothing.

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#67

Post by packet_nerd »

danesparza wrote: post #35
XIVMagnus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have and forever will find it extremely stupid to threaten someone with expelling them for trying to HELP you do your job.

School (the institution) is not about learning. School (the institution) is about conformity. And finding exploits is anything BUT conformity.

It should be about learning. I think finding exploits should be encouraged and rewarded.

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#68

Post by citilife »

mdorazio wrote: post #52
Smithalicious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A moral of the story is that people will optimize for what's being measured, not what is intended. Machine learning does this even more so, with hilarious results.

Yup. Another example of this is when I was in college and other students would go on ratemyprofessor or look up grade distributions for different professors and class options to pick the easiest ones. The thought of, you know, actually learning something even if it was hard wasn’t even a consideration - they just wanted the GPA. This continues in the working world as well, unfortunately. Many employees will optimize…

You don't say... https://easy-a.net/

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#69

Post by michaelbuckbee »

bredren wrote: post #33

When I was in high school, the “good” PCs were locked with a boot password. Only upper level cs students could use them. It was somewhat annoying to have to get our teacher to enter the password each time it froze etc. Partially because higher level classes were all individual study and often math classes were in progress in the same room. So it could take a while to get the teacher’s attention. So one time some clas…

This is very similar to how MFA bypasses are done now. The user will be tricked into viewing a site that looks like the correct one to input the MFA code but it will instead be captured and relayed through an attacker controlled connection.

Re: How we hacked Blackboard and changed our grades (2018)

#70

Post by pdonis »

Loughla wrote: post #19
danaur wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow could you explain?

The theory of higher education and a liberal arts degree, is what I'm assuming OP is talking about. The idea of a liberal arts degree at a university is to create a well-rounded individual. The idea of taking classes outside your major is to learn about life. The idea of even going to college (which is ENTIRELY optional) is to learn. Not just to pass classes and get an A. This is something that, traditionally, CS and…

> The idea of a liberal arts degree at a university is to create a well-rounded individual.

That was the original idea, yes. That does not mean that actual liberal arts degrees today at actual universities actually come anywhere close to doing that. For one thing, under that original idea, science was one of the liberal arts, and anyone who expected to be considered well rounded had to study it. How many liberal arts programs include any kind of serious exposure to science?

> see the other post about Sociology being useless

To the degree that it claims to be a science, I would argue that it probably is. It has basically no predictive power.

Post reply on HN