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Tufts Expelled a Student For Grade Hacking. She Claims Innocence (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it. A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.' That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind. Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students' grades.
The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.
There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.
There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
The article is making it sound sad that she only had 4 months left on her degree. That probably caused Tufts to have to act sooner. Expelling her is probably significantly easier than revoking her degree if issued. If she was a first year, they probably could have taken more time.
But now, if she is later exonerated, they can let her back in for her last set of classes a year late.
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Well, we can speculate but she will be the one who tells her story. Oops sorry to burst your collective know it all bubbles. Here's a hint: she left and went home without challenging it? Hmmmm probably guilty of something
I think the fact that she got expelled proves her innocence. If she could hack the system, she would have deleted that.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Changing a MAC may not be enough to gain access to a local network. wi-fi access can also require a local software token to register the host,
From the article: "Tufts said she stole a librarian’s password to assign a mysteriously created user account, “Scott Shaw,” with a higher level of system and network access."
Apparently librarian has the power to create network administration accounts so I suspect we're not dealing with a paragon of information security here. It would be mighty interesting to see all the MAC address logs from all the on-campus wi-fi routers and see if this MAC address was ever observed being in two places at once.
The times the fitness tracker recorded her being asleep are meaningless - anyone could've been wearing it. But the times she was being physically observed, and particularly the instance of physically observed + not on computer are intriguing. It would also be interesting to profile the interaction of the times she was being physically observed versus the interactions taking place in the "hacking". If you're being physically observed to create an alibi, then you're using a script to do your hacking in the background and that's generally going to look much less stochastic than live human interaction.
The fact her grades were changed (along with others) is evidence. Her laptop *was* used for some of this hacking, even she is not denying this.
I honestly don't know to believe her or not; lots of the alibi material also could be rigged.
At the very least there should be an investigation that would let her return if they find someone else did it. But to say there is no evidence, is really going too far the other way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can learn some things for free. Others, like being a veterinarian? No only is there a significant amount of hands-on experience, but you also have to know whether you are physiologically capable of working with hurt animals.
Speaking for myself... in the Army, I was once attached to Engineering Battalion for a while. After an industrial accident (80s, Communist country) I had to help in containing and suppressing a serious fire, and getting some hurt people to a field hospital (to this day I suspect it was a field hospital only because they wanted to keep the extent of the casualties secret)
Guess what. I was fine fighting the fires, I was fine looking at cremated bodies and smelling cooked human, and I was fine carrying and driving badly hurt people. But when they asked me to help during cleaning the wounds, by the second patient, the nurse told me to get lost before I puked on his patients. I went away, I sat down, and I must have passed out, because I lost a quarter hour.
You do not want to waste months studying, and then realize that you lose your composure working deep in someone or something's body. I also I doubt you can practice medicine, even veterinary medicine without a degree.
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Also, speaking as someone who in College has busted cheaters and got them expelled: cheaters often work in groups. We once caught someone who had made his girlfriend attend an early exam, take her copy of the final out, and give it to him, so he would have an advantage for the later exam that used the same questions.
The girl was good looking enough so that we, the TAs, noticed that we had not seen her before, wondered whose section she was in, and counted the exams. Three people got expelled - the cheater, his girlfriend, and the friend who worked on the quiz. Yes, they were stupid enough to try to turn the copy she had taken from the first exam... not realizing that every quiz had its unique binary id on each page, spelled with dots and spaces.
So my guess?
If the university is secure enough to kick her out her without fearing a lawsuit, they figured out that someone was doing it for her, which is why she has such solid alibis, and she refused to rat him out. These things are not handled lightly.
No good deed goes unpunished...
I'd like her to sue Tufts, and I'd donate $50 towards that.
Privacy begins with
Worked in the physical therapy department of an acute care hospital for a while. Every summer we'd get a few folks volunteering to get their hours in to apply to go to PT school (easier to get into med school - similar pre-reqs, far fewer seats per year).
Every year I'd take 'em into the whirlpool room to work on a burn victim, or some poor old stroked out person iwth massive bed sores, or someone about to loose a leg from diabetic ulcers and complications thereof...
And every year one or two of 'em would quit and change majors....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Isn't that a "Right" down there in the Excited States?
Or does that not apply to Colleges and Universities?
It's a shame she doesn't have the money to fight this, or a decent lawyer could likely get her a HUGE settlement, with compensation for everything she has to endure over all this B.S.
Looks like she'll be suffering under the (potentially) false accusations (and summary conviction) op these offenses against the institution.
I'd just like to know: Just how much evidence contrary to the accusation does she need to be exonerated, or is she just doomed?