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The Great Firewall of Yale
- benmarks 13y agoThe experience seems like fair preparation for the reality into which their charges will graduate.
- Tossrock 13y agoI don't think blocking a specific set of IP addresses constitutes deep packet inspection. If they were reading the payload contents for strings matching the CourseTable site, that would qualify. Still, this is a stupid move by Yale.
- brianpgordon 13y agoIf they were only blocking based on IP address then students wouldn't be able to ping the server. So they're blocking on at least the TCP layer. ... not that that constitutes DPI either.
- pliu 13y agoThis looks like the block page you get from a Palo Alto firewall. The feature set includes traffic inspection, among many other things. We've got a couple where I work, they are pretty great firewalls actually.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ceph_ 13y agoThe type of block they're describing could easily be implemented in simple stateless firewall, something like iptables. No deep packet inspection is needed to block based off of header info like src/dst ip, port, or protocol. DPI specifically means examining the payload of the packet. This is not DPI.
- muppetman 13y agoYou don't think they probably force their students through a HTTP Proxy (which will have a different address) than the one a ping ends up originating from? I'm with the parent, I doubt they're doing DPI here.
- waps 13y agoIf that's the case, and it looks like it may be, then they should simply switch to https and things will work again. There's a million other reasons to use https as well.
- bhouston 13y agoHTTP Proxys can be transparent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server#Transparent_proxy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server#Transparent_proxy The way to get around transparent proxies is to use HTTPS btw.
- epmatsw 13y agoI'm sure no Yale student has ever heard of tethering and that blocking the site on the Yale network will effectively prevent very smart students from reaching this website. You would think that the Yale administrators would know better than this.
- silvertonia 13y agoI bet you a significant portion of the traffic is now coming over the mobile phone. If 40% of the students preferred that site, I'd bet its enough of an improvement to warrant some small-screen browsing.
- ihsw 13y agoIf anything, it's symbolic and indicative of future actions. The university has demonstrated 'defending itself' and now they have evidence of anti-authoritarian protest and dissent directed at the them, and the next logical step is legal action. This public shaming will be received as insulting and provocative, and the deans will attempt to assert their dominance through the courts. Preventing students from accessing the website is neither the goal nor is it a desired side-effect -- the goal is intimidation and generating evidence of wrong-doing. It's a game of poker for the administration and they showed their hand, and now they're waiting for the OP to call their bluff. This will not end well.
- dreamdu5t 13y agoWhat's the purpose of Yale censoring certain websites? I find it hilarious that people spend so much money to go to Yale, and some of that money goes to inspecting what they're browsing.
- daurnimator 13y agoSame could be said of governments and taxes
- silvertonia 13y agoYou expect me to go to private industry to find someone to monitor my life? Do you have any idea how much that would cost? Some things just make sense to do at national scale, even if there are a small minority who don't appreciate the benefits.
- sliverstorm 13y agoPreventing malware outbreaks on the Yale internal network? Many University networks are intentionally pretty open on the inside. Last I was at Uni, for example, CIFS was not blocked. CIFS is a common vector for malware to spread across a network. So, blocking access to known malware hotspots works as a form of preventative maintenance. With a student body of 5,000 you are virtually guaranteed to have a cohort of that archetype of user that acquires new malware on a daily basis. Edit: Obviously that isn't a good reason to block THIS website, just responding to the general question of filtering in the first place.
- Nanzikambe 13y agoIf it were only deep packet inspection, the solution would be simply to prefix https:// https:// and be done with it. As other posters have remarked, I suspect the article means an IP based block.
- dekz 13y agoThat is until Yale than set themselves up to forcefully man in the middle all outgoing https connections.
- jessaustin 13y agoHow can they do that without the cooperation of clients? This won't work in a university the way it works in a corporate environment.
- dekz 13y agoWhy would it not work in a university as it works in a corporate environment?
- milkshakes 13y agoin a corporate environment, you usually have control over the workstations themselves, and can inject your own mitm certificate.
- dekz 13y agoIt 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. Either the user installs it or not, it's their choice. I am in no way advocating this abhorrent system of 'security'. Simply noting that it is obviously done in the workplaces and in many workplaces. That it can also be done here under 'security' pretences.
- diminoten 13y agoIs the course listing software open-source? I'd like to do this for another school...
- ngokevin 13y agoI made it for Oregon State University and Portland State University (GPA data only), you can check the source for a good data source. http://github.com/ngokevin/senioritis http://github.com/ngokevin/senioritis
- zaidf 13y agoI 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.
- maurits 13y agoTo 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.
- avanderveen 13y agoSemi-unrelated but, plenty of corporations see these fallacies as the best (and sometimes only) tools. In large markets money, political connections, and entrenched position are king. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism for details on political abuses, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry for examples of these fallacies. There's no such thing as open market as long as there is also government and regulation (not that government or regulation are bad or anything). But you're right, they're not the only tools. They're just (unfortunately) the strongest ones for those than can wield them.
- ballard 13y agoHaving 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.
- shaufler 13y agoMirror: https://s3.amazonaws.com/yalefirewall/index.html https://s3.amazonaws.com/yalefirewall/index.html
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 13y ago"Universities are a bastion of free speech." LOL.
- protomyth 13y agoHaving FIRE's[1] RSS feed[2] in my daily reading has dissuaded me from that belief. "Unlearning Liberty" by Greg Lukianoff (FIRE's President) has a chapter of Yale. 1) http://thefire.org http://thefire.org 2) http://thefire.org/feeds/news/ http://thefire.org/feeds/news/
- Steuard 13y agoThere 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.
- dictum 13y agoI expect the official explanation to be something like "we cannot endorse an unofficial service that might give misleading information to our students." Every censor does it from an honest desire to keep this terribly misleading information away from the unknowing masses. I don't think Yale is blocking the service in a conspiratorial effort to stymie students, but from a not well thought out desire to babysit.
- jessaustin 13y ago...the unknowing masses. So it seems you've met a few Yalies? b^)
- arkinus 13y agoNote that this site is also accessible at http://coursetable.com http://coursetable.com
- jahewson 13y agoThere 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.
- Smudge 13y agohttp://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 http://geocoder.ca/?sued=1
- pkfrank 13y agoDoes this apply even when the "copyright holder" has meaningfully manipulated the information in order for it to be in a useful form? Have they imparted some IP that is now protected in some way? IE, could I mirror deep-level sports statistics without attribution? One would think the agency I "took" it from had applied meaningful resources to extrapolating this data, which may be in fact be statement of fact. I'm purely playing devil's advocate.
- teraflop 13y agoMy understanding (as a non-lawyer) is that it depends on your jurisdiction. In the US, copyright normally only applies to works of creative expression, and not to facts or ideas. However, you can argue that the selection of facts that are compiled into a database involves creativity; in that case, the database as a whole may be protected, even though the individual facts aren't. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Compilations_of_facts_and_the_sweat_of_the_brow_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Sta...
- icambron 13y agoIANAL, but since the database is just (presumably) all of the classes at Yale, it's hard to see how their selection could be copyrightable. I haven't used the app, but it's quite possible they have course descriptions in there too, though, which are copyrightable. But then there's the separate question of why Yale wants to do any of this.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- epochwolf 13y agoThis is not news. Most campus have filtering software and the university administration will use it to block websites that make them look bad.
- grecy 13y ago>This is not news. If you're numb to it, then it's imperative that it is news. Imagine when the headlines read "Millions killed in Nazi camps" and people said "This is not news."
- nathancahill 13y agoGodwin's Law
- foxhill 13y agowe don't need to go far back. the most shocking realisation for me about the Snowden leaks was how apathetic people were toward their own civil liberties.
- Crito 13y ago"Chinese crack down on Tibet" "Not news." "Israel/Palestine peace talks halt." "Not news." "Millions die of malaria." "Not news." "Armed robbery at the corner of Ellis and Leavenworth St." "Not news." "Your kid flunked his math exam." "Not news." Just because somebody chooses to use Nazi Germany as an example, does not mean that they do not have a point. It certainly does not make them automatically wrong.
- grecy 13y agoHa, I had to Google that. Let me use one of the examples provided by Crito below.
- harvestmoon 13y agoI went to Brown and can't recall a single website being blocked by the school.
- stormbrew 13y agoSomething like this happened at the university in the city I live in. There was an apparently awful service for signing up for classes called BearTracks [1] and someone made a scraped version of it that was better called BearScat [2]. Eventually the university basically incorporated the better version into theirs (to, I understand, mixed results). [1] https://www.beartracks.ualberta.ca/ https://www.beartracks.ualberta.ca/ [2] http://www.bearscat.ca/ http://www.bearscat.ca/
- darkhelmetlive 13y agoI'm glad I was around as BearScat came out and before the killed it.
- ivanplenty 13y agotl;dr -- the crux of the issue (right or wrong) is making the evaluation information too public. From the news story: > "[Administrators' primary concern was] making YC [Yale College] course evaluation available to many who are not authorized to view this information,” > "[Administrators also asked] how they [the site operators] obtained the information, who gave them permission to use it and where the information is hosted." Edit: Agreed, I don't buy these are the real reasons.
- blahedo 13y agoThey claim that's the crux of the issue. But consider: if they're concerned about outside access, why are they blocking access to the site for precisely the set of people who actually are authorised to view the information?
- robitor 13y ago"It threatens the very basis of academic freedom and net neutrality" So pretentious, did a teenager write this?
- foxhill 13y agoi don't think that's pretentious at all. if my university implemented a scheme like this, i'd feel exactly the same way.
- jamesk_au 13y agoOne of the principal issues raised here - and not squarely addressed in the post or the article to which it links - is the extent to which average subjective ratings of courses and professors should be permitted to dominate the decision-making processes of students. Note that Yale's complaint included concerns over "the prominence of class and professor ratings", and the student developers' response was to remove "the option of sorting classes by ratings". Subjective five-point ratings can be useful in many contexts, but in the context of education they can also give rise to genuine pedagogical concerns about the way in which students choose their courses. Looking at the screenshot in the post, it is not difficult to see that the pattern of enrolments might very quickly become skewed towards those classes with higher average evaluation ratings (whatever such ratings might mean). If that happens, it suggests that some students may be making decisions about the courses in which they enrol based principally on factors other than their interests, abilities and future career paths, or without critical thought. Whilst other factors are relevant, including those for which an average of subjective evaluation ratings might be a plausible heuristic, that does not mean those factors should be the primary or predominant factors. Without seeking to defend or condone Yale's response, there is more to the story than the tale of student censorship presented in the post.
- Smudge 13y agoYale has the same student feedback/rating data available in their official online coursebook. From what I understand, ybbplus/coursetable was simply aggregating it in a way that made it easier for students to use. If there is something fundamentally wrong with subjective ratings, it seems strange that Yale would provide it in one context and censor it in another.
- khawkins 13y agoMaintaining data integrity is probably fairly important to them. By allowing a separate service which is used by a significant portion of the students, the system is open to serious exploitation. Professors can get black-balled by disgruntled system administrators or hackers, just by screwing with the numbers. Yale owning both the data and the interface is understandably important to them, though this might be an opportunity for the creators to work with the administration to reform the current system.
- poizan42 13y agoIf you actually go to http://coursetable.com http://coursetable.com you will be asked to login through Yale Central Authentication Service, which sends you to: https://secure.its.yale.edu/cas/login?service=http%3A%2F%2Fcoursetable.com%2F%3Fforcelogin%3D1 https://secure.its.yale.edu/cas/login?service=http%3A%2F%2Fc... I hope I don't give the administration any good ideas here, but I would seem that they have a much more efficient way to disable the site.
- uptown 13y agoYes, but CAS is a single sign-on system likely used throughout their internal network, so they're probably not able to disable it without disrupting authentication to a large number of other unrelated systems.
- rajivm 13y agoBut they could easily disable CAS for this specific service. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't need University approval to integrate with CAS.
- philip1209 13y agoSwitch it to Cloudflare to obfuscate the source
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- thinkcomp 13y agoHarvard did this in 2003. It even went so far as to accuse me of using the word "The" improperly, in a copyright line where I properly attributed credit to "The President and Fellows of Harvard College," when http://www.harvard.edu http://www.harvard.edu at the time said the exact same thing (and apparently still does). I left Harvard early (with a degree), and then I wrote a book about it. http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html Some things never change.
- zobzu 13y agoit's so disgusting that this stuff even happen.
- shtylman 13y agoI run a similar service for other schools (courseoff.com) and I have run into this before. I bet what happened was their site failed to cache the course data or seat information and was thus making lots of requests to the Yale servers. To Yale it might appear like a DoS from this site. Obviously I don't know for sure but I would venture to bet this block was more an automated response than malicious intent against the site.
- Crito 13y agoThe article indicates otherwise. The issue isn't that Yale cut off the sites access to the school's servers. The issue is that Yale cut off their students access to the site. Furthermore Yale and the site were apparently in dialog before the block, and Yale raised copyright concerns (probably bullshit, unless they were copying course descriptions or something like that (I suspect course descriptions were involved initially): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#Unit...).
- bentcorner 13y ago> Over 2,000 students out of a campus of 5,000 were using it as of today noon, when the Yale administration began censoring it using traffic inspection. They had contacted us warning that we were using copyrighted data. It doesn't seem automated, and if there was a DoS wouldn't they just go out and say so?
- jsrozner 13y agoThe data was scraped quite some time ago. There is no issue with a DoS on the Yale servers.
- shtylman 13y agoThis is very unfortunate that they are doing this if the data was scraped and not hitting their servers. Is it that some part of the data they think is copyrighted (like grades) versus just courses?
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- takeda64 13y agoIt looks like http://www.coursetable.com http://www.coursetable.com is filtered on WebSense.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
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- nmodu 13y agoIf I'm paying $58,000 to attend an institution (rather, if my family is sacrificing $58,000 for me to attend an institution...or,worse yet, if I am taking out $58,000 worth of student loans per year), I should be able to use a course listing service so that I can tailor my academic experience however I chose. THAT is how we open this debate, not with comments about who the proper copyright holder is or whether or not this constitutes as deep packet inspection.
- elwell 13y agoNo, if you choose to go to Yale and pay 58k/yr then you get the product they give you. It's up to them to design the product (your Yale education). It might lead to unhappy customers, but I don't see how entitlement can be argued.
- nmodu 13y agoI disagree. Completely. First of all, I object to your classification of a 4-year educational experience as a "commodity" that is offered on a "take-it-or-leave-it" basis. In fact, every student is guaranteed (and therefore, entitled to) the right to chose the classes that he takes. Yes, there are gen-ed requirements. Yes, there are majors. But, generally speaking, a STUDENT is responsible for tailoring his education. The value of the "product" lies within the choices that it offers students (both in terms of courses/professors and in terms of post-grad prospects). If Yale prescribed to your notion of higher education, each student would be handed a list of pre-determined courses that he would have to take each semester. Instead, Yale students are allowed to chose their own courses/majors, and in some cases are allowed to create their own majors. Why? Because "choice" is the underpinning of the liberal arts philosophy. So, within this context, I believe that I should be able to use a well-designed course listing platform as I am considering what courses to take. Especially at 58k/yr.
- Zaephyr 13y agoHaving been around academics, they don't seem to understand that students are the paying customer, for whom the university is working.
- auctiontheory 13y agoYale Daily News reporting: http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/01/14/yale-shuts-down-yale-bluebook/ http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/01/14/yale-shuts-down-yal...
- ballard 13y agoThis 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.
- ballard 13y agoHas there been an official response?
- windexh8er 13y agoIf anyone is curious that's a Palo Alto Networks NGFW block page. Yale is at least using some great hardware!
- jrs235 13y ago"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.
- GhotiFish 13y agoNow I'm not sure if this is a slam dunk. My friend works developing a fantasy sports startup, he's talked about all kind of legal grey areas around the legality of where you get those stats. He didn't go into specifics though.
- jrs235 13y agoThere may be terms of use/service when using (agreeing to use and access) data/fact providers. You might be violating a contract but not copyright.
- xerophtye 13y agoWow. This really makes me appreciate what we had at my college. For nearly a decade now, the OFFICIAL portal for the university that lets students and teachers manage courses and assignments (submissions included), has been the one that was originally developed, and still managed by students. We have a webmasters club for that whose responsibility it is keep it up and running and add features to it as they see fit. The university has been nothing but supportive of this, including assigning it an yearly budget for hosting and other expenditures.
- songco 13y agoGFW don't show any "blocked" message, it just "reset" the connection...
- girvo 13y agoFrankly, if colleges receive public funds, they shouldn't be allowed to claim "copyright" on something like timetable information, in my opinion. Actual intellectual property, maybe, but this? Not a time table. That's just silly.
- jlgaddis 13y agoIt would have been really cool if the developers of this (really nice, AFAICT) site moved it to (or also made it available via) a Tor hidden service. The students would regain access to their data (I realize that it has now been e-mailed to them) and it would be a great example of exactly how Tor can help "bypass" censorship.
- elwell 13y agoAnd their visitors would go from 2,000 to 2 overnight.
- TylerE 13y agoI forwarded the link to a friend who works in the admissions office at Yale. Can't promise anything but she said she'd be asking some questions.
- lightblade 13y agoI'm surprised that we haven't DDOS them yet, lol.
- sgarg26 13y agoI understand that Yale and Harvard have a rivalry and compete for students. Out of curiosity, how might Harvard have handled a similar situation?
- klapinat0r 13y agoTo focus only on the actual website issue: Could it be in order to govern the information, rather than "copyright" per say? My thinking is that, from Yale's perspective, having a 3rd party (and especially a student) be the go-to source for course info might be a bad shift in power. When it's all in good kind, it may not look bad, and even if it is well intended, there are a few problems that could arise: - Bugs in crawling code causing some course information to be false, omitted or stale. - Changes in OCI causing said crawler to keep stale data and fail to update. - Students complaining to Yale with wrong information. all the way to the more paranoid: - 3rd party maliciously falsifying information. - Generel confusion as to which information is reliable, driving students to have a more, rather than less, difficult time finding and verifying class scheduling. I'm all for net neutrality and strongly against censorship in all forms, but "playing devil's advocate" can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason to shut the 3rd party page off for Yale students?
- dalke 13y ago> can't there be a somewhat "legitimate" reason Of course there can be legitimate reasons. If the 3rd party inserted wrong data, or did 1,000 requests per second, causing high load on the servers, then I would call it legitimate. However, the ones you've listed are not legitimate, because of the term "could." Anything could go wrong. An editorial in the local newspaper could have wrong information about the courses, but that doesn't justify the university excluding that edition of the newspaper from campus stores. Things go wrong all the time. Someone may have printed out an old copy of the schedule, and based decisions on that. Or left a page on the screen for a week. Which means the system must already have support for people using stale information. Anything else is unreasonable. So long as the additional burden is not substantially higher than background, I don't believe there is a "legitimate" justification here. As for copyright, this sounds very much like like Feist v. Rural. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed."
- Ihmahr 13y agoSo MIT murders a student (Arron S.), Yale does some ridiculous censoring... What's next?
- dkural 13y agoMIT did not murder anyone. This is a liberal definition of 'murder'.
- zamalek 13y ago> Universities are a bastion of free speech. Incorrect - universities are now a business, nothing more. You can have your free speech so long as it makes the shareholders happy. Having students confused and lost (or being unable to chose the best education for themselves) is a fantastic way to have them repeat courses in the long run. Tertiary education is no longer what it used to be. It is now exactly the same type of delusion that women face in terms of having to be slim; or consumers face in terms of having to have the latest iPhone or what have you.