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Building An Uncensorable Course Guide At Yale
Former Googler and Foursquare employee Sean Haufler is now a student at Yale studying CS and Economics, but he hasn't put away his real-world software skills for academia. When two other Yale students named Harry Yu and Peter Xu were threatened with the school's punishment committee for designing a site that extends and improves the presentation of data from the school-controlled course selection guide (the Yale Bluebook [available only at Yale]), Haufler decided to create a similar site which he hopes will force the school's hand to either allow or deny this kind of data-mashing presentation. He acknowledges that there are legitimate questions about copyright, but Haufler's site treads lightly in a way that Yu and Xus did not: "Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It's 100% kosher." And if the school disagrees? "If Yale denies this right, I'll see you at the punishment committee." Of note: the Yale Bluebook site itself grew out of an independent student project, but was later acquired by the school. Update: 01/20 00:26 GMT by T : Correction: Unlike Yu and Xu, Haufler's approach is not a full-fledged separate site, but rather a Chrome extension that presents the data from Yale's own site differently, rather than at any point re-hosting it. Mea culpa.
I almost read that as Harry Yu and Pother Yu.
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It's not a replacement website, it's actually just a Chrome extension that appears to helpfully mangle the official website.
"Uncensorable" is a bold claim, which ought to be backed by some sort of substantiation. I see nothing of the sort in the summary.
I would just read TFA, but I expect it will be nothing but spammy hype and advertising.
Is there anything to this, or is it exactly the load of bull it appears to be?
Stuff that matters only to a handfull of Yale students.
Nobody likes a smartass. Not even at Yale.
Seriously, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that making an improved X has a side effect of making original X look shit and everyone associated with creating it look stupid.
Except, of course, if X is Coca Cola.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do this kinda shit after you graduate, not before.
The justification for banning the site was it "let students see the averaged evaluations far too easily". Is this what Yale thinks of its math education, that Yale students can't calculate an average unless their browser does it for them?
RTFA is a conspiracy between a select few Slashdot submitters and readers.
I'm thinking that somehow you're all working with the NSA and building karma!
I'm on to you!
Direct infringement is not the only kind of Copyright infringement. There are such things as contributory and vicarious infringement. Just ask Grokster, Limewire, ISOhunt, etc...
So if someone Sean Hauflerizes beta.slashdot.org so that "it extends and improves the presentation of data", will slashdot or dice sue?
Waiting to see if Yale follows through with punishment. Though the difference is Yale has Sean's money, while dice doesn't have mine.
Could someone contribute an executive summary? All I can gather is that Yale had its own "ratemyprofessor" implementation, it wasn't very accurate, and some students made a better one which was then blocked by Yale's network. Surely it's not really that simple? Where is Yale's statement on all of this as I'd love to know the rationale for blocking the site.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Do most universities over-react as Yale did -- or did the guy possibly just choose the wrong school for someone that isn't content to wait around for someone else to do things for him?
When Iwas a Berkeley undergrad in the late 90s, students creating new services or improving existing ones (without breaking rules against cheating or similar, of course) at Berkeley seemed far more likely to be praised than punished. That might be because the school still had mostof its Internet services handled by EECS majors hired for work-study jobs rather than paying outside companies to do the work (as is common now), or because it openly wanted students that felt driven to use their abilities/talents to improve the world around them. I have no idea whether Cal is still like that, however.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
You wrote
"My intent behind Banned Bluebook is to demonstrate two points to Dean Miller and the Yale administration:
If Yale grants students access to data, the university does not have the right to specify exactly how students must view the data.
Censorship through IP blocking and Deep Packet Inspection is not only unethical, it’s also futile.
"
It is Yale data. They can tell you to F*ck Off.
Don't like it, think it is unfair,
Good.
Pick a StateU closer to your home and follow their rules.
He'll be lucky if Yale's disciplinary board is the only kangaroo court he faces. If Yale is sufficiently annoyed they'll call in the Feds to go all Aaron Swartz on his ass.
If you want to see these metrics more broadly in higher education, submit comments as part of the federal government RFI on higher education metrics. The response period closes soon!
Like they did before. All the professors told them it was a bad idea when the site was proposed. Someone should tell the people in charge of Yale that they have pretty smart professors. They would be more efficient and do a better job if they took their advice.
Students evaluate classes and professors in extremely bias ways. Usually based on well they did in the class. Class was too hard for some entitled rich teenager? I can see the review now... "This class sucks!" Do you remember college? Put yourself in the role of a professor. Would you really want your annual evaluation based on the thoughts of a bunch of immature emotional teenagers? The entire idea of using student evaluations is flawed. Sharing the data openly is just plain dumb.
However, it should be breakable: if Yale changes their website so that the extension no longer matches it and thus cannot scrape it, it should break.
Then it just turns into a pissing contest over who's willing to update their site/extension for longer.
Or maybe the extension is updated to cache the data on your computer and manipulate it there.
Cat and Mouse games will not suffice. Yale is going to have to face this head on.
Somebody explain to me just WHY Yale would have a problem with the same data presented differently. If they're going to this kind of trouble to stamp it out, it must pose a threat of some sort, so what is it?
Seriously. Yale has a "Punishment Committee?" WTF do they do there? Run laps? Write things not the board a hundred times? Spankings?
I haven't been there but I had no idea they did kinky stuff like that. Does the Committee have an uncensored web site?