This is an unacceptable, naked abuse of power. Any education institution blocking any site on political or anticompetitive grounds flushes away any vestiges of ideals of free speech and open learning. The administration should have known better or it may find itself replaced for acting incompetently.
The Great Firewall of Yale
91–100 of 135 posts
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#92There 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.
That's often true, but it's not nearly as simple as you imply. http://www.copyright.gov/reports/dbase.html
D&B and Lexis-Nexis have aggressively defended the copyright status of various aspects of their respective databases of facts, for example.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#93I 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.
the people that decide the policies that IT services implement are usually the ones that know least about IT.
From my experience working several times with a large state university, this is absolutely true. The managers and administrators in the university IT division tend to be lifetime employees, who have absolutely zero perspective on IT except what they've experienced internally. Nepotism is rampant, incompetence the norm, and the whole environment is incestuous, corrupt, and highly political.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#94I 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.
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 had more open APIs and data like the city of San Franciso, more apps could be developed to make use of the data in novel ways, as opposed to permission-based "culture of 'No.'"
Also this incident makes Yale look really bad... This could end some careers.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#95Has there been an official response?
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#96If anyone is curious that's a Palo Alto Networks NGFW block page. Yale is at least using some great hardware!
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#97"They had contacted us warning that we were using copyrighted data" last I understood you can't copyright data or facts [in the US]. You can own copyright to a particular published format though. One can't copy and publish a phone book verbatim but you can certainly scrap a phone book for its data/facts and publish them in a different format.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#98I 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…
Haha you nailed it. I met with their main tech boss who was an older gentleman who basically kept telling me that the new system they have planned to roll out(from Oracle) will have the features that my site had. My site basically texted students soon as a class opened up. It got crazy traction.
I'm also well aware of the grading scandal as I still run a grade distribution site called blinkness.com which is heavily used on campis(even though I left unc years ago). We have a feature on the site called "Top A classes" and the professor in question always ranked very highly :)
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#99"Universities are a bastion of free speech." LOL.
There are valid objections to that claim, no question. But students asserting this in their defense nevertheless has a great deal of power, because universities still want to be bastions of free speech. It is close to the core of the self-image of university and college faculty members (and an awful lot of the administrators, too), even when the reality falls short of that ideal. So these words make a very strong moral argument in context, and might succeed in building on-campus support where other arguments wouldn't.
Re: The Great Firewall of Yale
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It doesn't matter whether you control the user environment to covertly install the MITM certificate. You simple notify your network users this is happening with instructions on how to install the certificate. Respectfully, I disagree. This is certainly possible, but from an operational perspective this would be a nightmare. Even setting aside the likely backlash that would follow in response to such a sweeping poli…
For what it's worth, at my university, UNC Chapel Hill, there are two networks, one of which requires you to install a custom root certificate, and is the network that the university prefers you connect to. For devices on which this is not possible, there is another network which only requires that you register your device's MAC address to your university id for access. Regardless of which option you choose, you are…
Oy. Students at your university certainly have my sympathy.
I've always been leery of the mitm cert, not only from the users' perspective, but also from that of the organization. If a rogue administrator used the cert to set up a "real" mitm for a local bank's site, I think the school would be on the hook for that. That's just one example; one could imagine other variations on that theme. Whereas, if the school simply acted as a normal ISP, that whole class of vulnerabilities simply doesn't apply.