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I hate the attempt at framing this as a “guilty until proven innocent” the actual facts laid out its more of a “innocent until we had tons of evidence that we d

by hjk05 8y ago

I hate the attempt at framing this as a “guilty until proven innocent” the actual facts laid out its more of a “innocent until we had tons of evidence that we deem sufficiently proves you did it at which point you’ll need to mount a defense.”

metildaa 8y ago
Except the board deliberating and passing judgement had a victim of the hacking on it, and chose to completely ignore the fact that this student was in class with mamy witnesses when some of the hacking events occured according to the logs. This is pretty normal for K-20 committees though, they operate as extrajudicial kangaroo courts that can easily acrew students out of their education and labor.
- m463 8y ago
  > the board deliberating and passing judgement had a victim of the hacking on it now that you mention it, that's a starkly direct conflict of interest.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    Yes, even arbitration doesn't have direct, show stopping conflicts of interest like this. The K-20 education sphere loves its kangaroo courts though, most LGBTQ+ people I know have been cheated of their high school diploma by this scam perpetuated by school administrators. Don't be different in any way, lest an administrator chooses to boot stomp you amd refuse to acknowledge you ever took courses at their school.
    - TideAd 8y ago
      Do you mind saying more? I've never heard of this before.
      - metildaa 8y ago
        Most non-straight people I know did not graduate high school. Its a serious issue, and those that did generally flew under the radar and appeared straight until college. I know one trans person who was set to go to an Ivy League school (incrediby adept at mathematics) that got outed and has been relentlessly harassed by both their parents and school. I've been trying to encourage them to fire high school and go all Running Start, cause it ain't gonna get better wrt the school administrators being horrid. They likely won't graduate if things fail to improve. Edit: This is in Seattle Public Schools proper, Bellevue, Northshore and other districts are on point about expelling those that cop to not being straight or cis. Its been painful to watch bright kids get needlessly ejected from the system that is supposed to provide them an education.
dpwm 8y ago
It's worth noting the following facts: - There were a chain of human and technical vulnerabilities exploited - MAC addresses can be changed – nearly all ethernet controllers and some wireless chipsets support changing the MAC address; - MAC addresses are public knowledge. Anybody who ever receives a packet from your machine has your MAC address – and don't forget that Apple devices send tons of auto-discovery broadcast packets; and - Anybody suitably competent to pull off the technical side of the attack is likely to be able to spoof MAC addresses. It's worth noting that Knoll's letter also includes this gem of total misunderstanding: "... date stamps are easy to edit. In fact, the photos you shared with me clearly include an "edit" button in the upper corner for this very purpose." The article seems to me to be far more about low-burden-of-proof disciplinary panels – where the same people who set the rules interpret and administer the rules whilst trying to appear reasonable. The fact that a "defendant" asks for a date and time of alleged incidents before submitting evidence is not at all "puzzling" – the alternative is submitting every photo over a months-long time-frame, which is certainly not reasonable.
- ec109685 8y ago
  Your MAC address doesn’t leave your local network, so I am not sure how that can be used to track anyone?
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    I came here to comment that too. It didn’t sound like she was on a campus network from the article, so there is literally no way the university would know what MAC address was used.
  - dpwm 8y ago
    "said to be traced from either her computer — based off a unique identifier, known as a MAC address — and the network she allegedly used, either the campus’s wireless network or her off-campus residence. When her grades went up, sometimes other students’ grades went down, the school said." I'm guessing that the evidence they've got is that the IT dept have the MAC address that was used by the devices that connected to their network, and have associated MAC addresses with the IP addresses allocated. Then that IP was used to connect to their internal system to change grades. It's pretty flimsy evidence, as anybody who had received a packet from her machine on the same network (i.e. if she ever connected to the university, which she allegedly did) would know the MAC address. So when I say it's public knowledge, I suppose I should've said it's public knowledge given you can connect to the same network. It really wouldn't be that hard to frame someone that way, and things like iTunes library sharing really help – because they conveniently tell you whose library is being shared. It's quite possible that somebody who knew who she was and who knew her MAC address could have done this. That could have been somebody sat in the same class. It's also entirely possible that she had the technical skills to pull of the technical side of the hack (bypassing 2fa) and didn't know a thing about networking. It also sounds like they have figured out the IP address that she has used to connect to her own university intranet account and found that it matched the IP that accessed the hijacked account. That's again pretty inconclusive.
mindslight 8y ago
You clearly have no experience with university tribunals. The only path to getting a fair hearing is to retain a lawyer and threaten to sue the school. At which point there's a good chance the school's counsel realizes their case actually won't hold up in civil court, and the school backs off. The glaring question is what evidence is there that this was not done with a remote-access trojan on her computer? The article says that other students' grades were changed, and I can think of no better cover than making sure the blame falls on someone else.
- praneshp 8y ago
  > You clearly have no experience with university tribunals. The only path to getting a fair hearing is to retain a lawyer ... Very true. During my onboarding at Gatech, they clearly told us (in similar words): "Unlike courts, the burden of proof is on you, not on us. If caught hacking, you'll serve jailtime then come back to find us waiting."
  - ams6110 8y ago
    It's not quite that extreme, but the burden of proof is generally no more than preponderance of the evidence, i.e. more likely true than not true. This is the case for many associations that have internal discipline or jurisprudence for misconduct by their members. By the way, the reason to retain a lawyer is so that you don't unwittingly say something that could create criminal liability. Nobody has a right to attend Tufts and as long as they follow their policies a lawyer or court is not going to stop them expelling you.
dvtrn 8y ago
t its more of a “innocent until we had tons of evidence that we deem sufficiently proves you did it at which point you’ll need to mount a defense.” Shorter version: preponderance of evidence, which is usually the burden schools are most prone to adopting, isn't it?
- sfopdxnonstop 8y ago
  Yes, 51% of evidence. Also known as "random guess plus one percent."

by hjk05 8y ago

metildaa 8y ago

Except the board deliberating and passing judgement had a victim of the hacking on it, and chose to completely ignore the fact that this student was in class with mamy witnesses when some of the hacking events occured according to the logs. This is pretty normal for K-20 committees though, they operate as extrajudicial kangaroo courts that can easily acrew students out of their education and labor.

m463 8y ago
> the board deliberating and passing judgement had a victim of the hacking on it now that you mention it, that's a starkly direct conflict of interest.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Yes, even arbitration doesn't have direct, show stopping conflicts of interest like this. The K-20 education sphere loves its kangaroo courts though, most LGBTQ+ people I know have been cheated of their high school diploma by this scam perpetuated by school administrators. Don't be different in any way, lest an administrator chooses to boot stomp you amd refuse to acknowledge you ever took courses at their school.
  - TideAd 8y ago
    Do you mind saying more? I've never heard of this before.
    - metildaa 8y ago
      Most non-straight people I know did not graduate high school. Its a serious issue, and those that did generally flew under the radar and appeared straight until college. I know one trans person who was set to go to an Ivy League school (incrediby adept at mathematics) that got outed and has been relentlessly harassed by both their parents and school. I've been trying to encourage them to fire high school and go all Running Start, cause it ain't gonna get better wrt the school administrators being horrid. They likely won't graduate if things fail to improve. Edit: This is in Seattle Public Schools proper, Bellevue, Northshore and other districts are on point about expelling those that cop to not being straight or cis. Its been painful to watch bright kids get needlessly ejected from the system that is supposed to provide them an education.

dpwm 8y ago

It's worth noting the following facts: - There were a chain of human and technical vulnerabilities exploited - MAC addresses can be changed – nearly all ethernet controllers and some wireless chipsets support changing the MAC address; - MAC addresses are public knowledge. Anybody who ever receives a packet from your machine has your MAC address – and don't forget that Apple devices send tons of auto-discovery broadcast packets; and - Anybody suitably competent to pull off the technical side of the attack is likely to be able to spoof MAC addresses. It's worth noting that Knoll's letter also includes this gem of total misunderstanding: "... date stamps are easy to edit. In fact, the photos you shared with me clearly include an "edit" button in the upper corner for this very purpose." The article seems to me to be far more about low-burden-of-proof disciplinary panels – where the same people who set the rules interpret and administer the rules whilst trying to appear reasonable. The fact that a "defendant" asks for a date and time of alleged incidents before submitting evidence is not at all "puzzling" – the alternative is submitting every photo over a months-long time-frame, which is certainly not reasonable.

ec109685 8y ago
Your MAC address doesn’t leave your local network, so I am not sure how that can be used to track anyone?
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  I came here to comment that too. It didn’t sound like she was on a campus network from the article, so there is literally no way the university would know what MAC address was used.
- dpwm 8y ago
  "said to be traced from either her computer — based off a unique identifier, known as a MAC address — and the network she allegedly used, either the campus’s wireless network or her off-campus residence. When her grades went up, sometimes other students’ grades went down, the school said." I'm guessing that the evidence they've got is that the IT dept have the MAC address that was used by the devices that connected to their network, and have associated MAC addresses with the IP addresses allocated. Then that IP was used to connect to their internal system to change grades. It's pretty flimsy evidence, as anybody who had received a packet from her machine on the same network (i.e. if she ever connected to the university, which she allegedly did) would know the MAC address. So when I say it's public knowledge, I suppose I should've said it's public knowledge given you can connect to the same network. It really wouldn't be that hard to frame someone that way, and things like iTunes library sharing really help – because they conveniently tell you whose library is being shared. It's quite possible that somebody who knew who she was and who knew her MAC address could have done this. That could have been somebody sat in the same class. It's also entirely possible that she had the technical skills to pull of the technical side of the hack (bypassing 2fa) and didn't know a thing about networking. It also sounds like they have figured out the IP address that she has used to connect to her own university intranet account and found that it matched the IP that accessed the hijacked account. That's again pretty inconclusive.

mindslight 8y ago

You clearly have no experience with university tribunals. The only path to getting a fair hearing is to retain a lawyer and threaten to sue the school. At which point there's a good chance the school's counsel realizes their case actually won't hold up in civil court, and the school backs off. The glaring question is what evidence is there that this was not done with a remote-access trojan on her computer? The article says that other students' grades were changed, and I can think of no better cover than making sure the blame falls on someone else.

praneshp 8y ago
> You clearly have no experience with university tribunals. The only path to getting a fair hearing is to retain a lawyer ... Very true. During my onboarding at Gatech, they clearly told us (in similar words): "Unlike courts, the burden of proof is on you, not on us. If caught hacking, you'll serve jailtime then come back to find us waiting."
- ams6110 8y ago
  It's not quite that extreme, but the burden of proof is generally no more than preponderance of the evidence, i.e. more likely true than not true. This is the case for many associations that have internal discipline or jurisprudence for misconduct by their members. By the way, the reason to retain a lawyer is so that you don't unwittingly say something that could create criminal liability. Nobody has a right to attend Tufts and as long as they follow their policies a lawyer or court is not going to stop them expelling you.

dvtrn 8y ago

t its more of a “innocent until we had tons of evidence that we deem sufficiently proves you did it at which point you’ll need to mount a defense.” Shorter version: preponderance of evidence, which is usually the burden schools are most prone to adopting, isn't it?

sfopdxnonstop 8y ago
Yes, 51% of evidence. Also known as "random guess plus one percent."