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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 As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.'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.
Hire a lawyer and sue the fuck out the school.
or she had someone else do it for her
You're trusting her version of events without getting the scoop from the university, due to privacy concerns. She can say whatever she wants. If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened.
None of that evidence proves that she didn't get a friend to hack into the system, look at the answers, and change her grades for her. Note that other students' grades were also changed; there was likely a "psst, pay me $500 and I'll give you better grades" type of scheme going on here.
If it's her first cheating offense, her completion of the courses in question should be vacated and she should just be forced to redo them. Zero tolerance policies of expulsion on first offense go against the point of education.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
In many cases security at an academic institute is a springboard to private as well as a wasteland of people without talent. On the other hand, a smart hacker would also find ways of altering access logs or create an alibi.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Hmmm. She really should insist on taking a comprehensive test at this point and proving herself. She has a 3.9 on the Masters and 3.5 on the Doctorate. While Tufts is not that top notch, it certainly is not a fluff school either. Simple testing should prove what she knows/does not know.
As it is, if somebody really knows how to crack, then they would purposely change their mac (easy enough to do). I would be curious about her relationship to the other grades that changed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
"Date stamps are easy to edit," said Knoll. "In fact, the photos you shared with me clearly include an 'edit' button in the upper corner for this exact purpose," she wrote, referring to the iPhone software's native photo editing feature. "Why wait until after you'd been informed that you were going to be expelled to show me months' old photos?" she said.
Why show the photos any earlier? It sounds like she didn't know she would be expelled until she was accused of this hacking. What did this genius expect? That Filler would just walk up randomly to people to share a photo of her on a weekend trip? I mean, would that not be MORE suspicious? "Excuse me, just in case you might in the future accuse me of hacking the university computers last weekend I thought I'd show photographic evidence I was out of town."
I thought these people worked at a school.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Or he does know that FB and Google can't see your MAC, which is why he said it wasn't legit.
Nobody who is innocent has an alibi ready to go. Real people in the real world don't have documentation putting them elsewhere most of the time because they don't expect to need it. People who have that documentation ready to go, especially for a large number of incidents, made sure they'd have it to prove their innocence which means they aren't innocent at all.
No college is going to accept credits transfered by somebody expelled for cheating. If she's lucky, the might accept some of the credits where there's no dispute of the accuracy, but colleges can't afford to accept transfers that would harm their accreditation.
It does sound like something is fishy here. Either the college is wrong or somebody used her device to change the grades for her while she was away from the device. Or there was some sort of massive error.
And people wonder why so many of us think that colleges shouldn't be responsible for handling sexual assault allegations.
News for nerds because:
1. School
2. Grades
3. Computers
4. Alleged hacking
5. Law
You really must be new here, most of those subjects are very nerdy.
If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened.
That's easy to say, but not so easy to do, particularly when you're now stuck in another country.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
My fave part: "“I thought due process was going to be followed,” said Filler, in a call. “I thought it was innocent until proven guilty until I was told ‘you’re guilty unless you can prove it.'”"
Really? I'm pretty sure the last few years has shown for universities it is "guilty until sentenced - maybe we'll revisit the evidence in a year or two,after your life is ruined".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree it won't be easy and will cost money. However it's the only way for anyone herself included to prove what actually happened with evidence. The school will not divulge everything it knows, nor will a 1-sided article be accurate.
We don't have the information required to make an appraisal of her innocence or guilt. Only court could provide that venue. The article does however make it a PR actionable moment for the school to respond to in public, but they're constrained by privacy laws and other rules, not to mention libel/slander laws should they say something that later turns out to be inaccurate. They are not currently under any obligation to explain themselves or their decision.
A lawsuit changes that, nothing else can. If she's truly innocent she should (has to) find a lawyer willing to work on contingency, they do exist. Loose op-eds will not shame the school into reversing themselves.
Not really. It's hard enough to sue a large entity that has an active legal department when you are a citizen of the same country. It's really really hard to do so when you are a citizen of a different country and you aren't even a resident here. Her student visa went *poof* as soon as she was formally expelled, so she had to go home already. So she is in another country, unemployed, and the proud owner of a five figure debt, Not suing doesn't really say anything about the potential merits of a suit.
Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student ...
This is why tertiary institutions shouldn't be allowed to act as the police. I realize, in this case, that much of the behaviour relates to academic integrity but the case should have been referred to the FBI.
Also, she should sue for defamation and loss of income.
With IP6 they can ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
grand larceny for taking the cash needs to go court
Currently, I don't expect to see any evidence. Neither can anyone here who wants to declare her guilty.
And I'm pointing out that we cannot really read anything into her NOT filing suit. So, the or not part of your statement tells us nothing.
Not if you use even an ordinary router with NAT. This remains one of the compelling reasons to use NAT, the level of visibility and exposure with an externally exposed IP address of any sort is much higher. There's less chance of a scan randomly detecting an IP address with IPv6, but exposing your IPv6 addresses directly to the Internet means that you're reliant on much higher levels of firewall protection and integration than with even a simple NAT setup. There is no reason to use IPv6 in any home environment where traffic is expected to reach _out_ to the Interenet, rather than to provide exposed services on any device in your local network.
Many developers of the "IoT", or Internet of Things, believe that all devices should be publicly accessibie. There are many compelling reasons to disagree with this.
Exactly this. The university is constrained by FERPA in terms of the information it can release, even in cases of academic misconduct. If the evidence that Ms. Filler claims to have never seen includes other students' grades or academic records, then it will require a subpoena for the university to produce it.
One thing in particular strike me as questionable. From the article:
Her insinuation that she was called into an ethics and grievance meeting of eight senior academics without advance notification doesn't pass the smell test. Having been personally involved in cases of academic misconduct at a private university, I assume that Tufts has a specific internal procedure that must be followed in cases like this. A student accused of cheating is first presented with the charges, and a hearing date is set at which the student answers those charges with evidence and testimony of their own. I would bet that Tufts can easily provide documentation that she was indeed notified well in advance of the hearing.
Contrary to what the Techcrunch article implies, faculty and staff are not going to accuse a student of such egregious academic misconduct without being very sure of their evidence, and being very careful to document that they followed their own internal procedures. Universities constantly deal with accusations of student cheating, and with students' parents who hire attorneys who threaten to sue the school. Holding a "surprise" hearing would be an invitation to a lawsuit, which Tuft's own internal attorneys would never allow.
Ms. Filler has the right to file suit against Tufts. What puzzles me is that she did not retain an attorney in this matter long ago. The initial accusations were made months before her expulsion. Or ... what if she did hire a lawyer, got nowhere given the evidence against her, and didn't tell Techcrunch?
She is now presenting her case to the court of public opinion, which may get her some offers of pro bono legal assistance. The question is whether such assistance will lead to any relief for her, once other people learn more from Tufts' side of the story.
I guess you missed the part about being unemployed and the proud owner of a five figure debt? Also, since the suit would be in the U.S., she would have to hire an American lawyer, from Canada, with no money.
different country may let her not pay back loans or little recorce or bankruptcy!!!!
Actually, I'm not giving her version of events a great deal of credence. But I trust it over the word of an arbitrary bureaucracy that acted to prevent official records from happening. Even then, I'd only trust the result somewhat, as those "official records" seem to generally and unaccountably always favor the bureaucracy. They need to be open an verifiable, or sealed at the request of the accused, before I'll trust them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you follow the RFC's then not all IPv6 MAC's... ::ffff:0:0:0/96 are private if the network admin and the router follows RFC1918
Your logic was fuzzy, I dusted it off for you. You mad?
I provided several good reasons why the or not clause was meaningless.
Saying that someone already in debt should automatically hire a lawyer when being told of an on-going investigation that she doesn't know the details of strikes me as a bit absurd. When I was in school I *wasn't* in debt, and I would still have been extremely reluctant to hire a lawyer. I would expect that the "investigation" would find that I was innocent, so why should I burden myself with debt. I generally trusted the authorities to "do the right thing".
If you think she should have automatically hired a lawyer, that tells me you've never lived on limited finances. I admit this is a bit of a projection on my part, but I can't imagine a student who hasn't grown up in a rather wealthy family thinking that the first thing to do is hire a lawyer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I had no idea Tufts was now the arbiter of public opinion. When did that happen?
Perhaps. Not sure how that works.
I think you're wrong when you say "...or she's got a very winnable lawsuit...". Courts have been coming to a lot of very strange decisions recently. The word "corrupt" often seems just one step from being proven. Why the hell should "round cornered rectangles" be copyrightable, when the damn things were used back in the 1940's by large numbers of people, and probably date back before the typewriter, to pick just one very strange decision.
Having what *should* be an airtight case doesn't mean anything when you're going up against someone who has an in with the decision maker. So they're telling her "Do you feel lucky?", probably while readying a spare six-shooter.
I don't necessarily believe her story, but I sure don't believe all the idiots who proclaim that if she's innocent she'll sue them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You are very definitely projecting. My family was about as far from wealthy as you can imagine. Fortunately, an engineering degree lets you pay off student loans pretty quickly.
But put it this way - if I had been accused of academic misconduct while earning my Ph.D, with my entire future hanging in the balance, you can bet I would have reached out to friends, family, charity legal aid, or whoever else I knew to get advice on how to defend myself.
You are assuming that "hiring an attorney" would involve tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps it would in the long run, if the case went to court, but paying for an initial consultation would be money well spent when compared to having my life destroyed.
Same opinion. Seems contradictory that they would simultaneously describe her actions as those of as a super hacker, but then not question whether she's ever exhibited a level of technical knowledge to do something like this, or if she did do it she forgot to cover her tracks??? My guess is that there was some sort of relationship with faculty involved(very common) and they wanted her destroyed after the relationship turned sour and threatened their career. Whatever the nature of that relationship is, it seems she might be ashamed to go public with that information(probably a married man). But, hey, I'm just going off scant evidence and assumptions.
Give it a try. Find a lawyer in another country that will represent you for free using only the telephone.
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
Canada may save her form having to payup or at least have an easier time of getting out of it / under the law.
Easier bankruptcy and lower max Garnishments %
http://canadastudentdebt.ca/cs...
With IP6 your IPS controls you local sub net range unless you use nat. and with an laptop that goes from hot-spot to hot-spot will pick up different ip's at each one.
boycott going to college.
Easier said than done. Not going to college will by extension mean not being able to go to medical school, engineering school, and eliminate oneself from many occupations which require post-baccalaureate degrees.
With the Internet nowadays, you can learn about ANYTHING you want, for free.
No you can't. Its littered with paywalls, required texts, and even online college lectures aren't available for all the courses required to graduate.
There's a difference between saying "debt slavery for multiple decades does not make college a worthwhile endeavor" and saying "college is a waste of time (although for some people, it can be)".
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
She was studying at vet school. Nobody is going to let you be a vet without a degree, at least in most developed countries.
What's fishy is why is a Canadian spending money to go to the US for veterinary school? Canada doesn't have veterinary schools?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The university's side is not told here. The university will not reveal information to TechCrunch. So all we have here is the expelled student's version of events. It would be very strange indeed if it didn't suggest her innocence when she's the only person telling the story.
Vet schools are hard to get into. Canada has six, IIRC.
I agree that things sound pretty fishy in her account. If all that was done to her, she would probably have a solid case and would probably sue for damages as well. But it sounds far more likely that there is solid evidence and procedures were followed. That still does not mean she is guilty and she could just remember things wrongly. She could also have been framed. One possibility is that those changing the grades got wind of an investigation and were looking for a scapegoat and she qualified. If you want a scapegoat, you always want somebody that makes a good victim. It is not that hard to hack the laptop of a non-expert and use it to access an already placed backdoor if you have some help on-site to do it. It is also not hard to leave false evidence behind and/or remove the evidence of the intrusion into the laptop.
That said, even a thorough, expensive, expert investigation may still not be able to determine the truth. It is all digital and that allows perfect falsification of evidence if you know what you are doing. That should mean a preference for "not guilty" and all that happens is her grades get reset to what they were before. That they kicked her out may just be because they also saw somebody not really able to fight back or because they thought they had solid evidence.
In the end, who we absolutely know screwed up here is Tufts: They hat IT security bad enough that they could be hacked and grades could be changed. That should definitely not have been possible. Everything else in this is murky at best.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. She may have been selected as the scapegoat pretty early in the scheme. Or she could be guilty. But if she was framed, this does not sound like it required more than intermediate hacking skills, if that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A what? There's no prize for guessing how much student debt you racked up.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I was quite surprised how many of my sons classmates were planning on going to university in the States. Some had scholarships of some type. Anyways it is not that uncommon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Her insinuation that she was called into an ethics and grievance meeting of eight senior academics without advance notification doesn't pass the smell test.
Agreed. Where I work the discipline process is well scripted and students are given multiple opportunities to explain the evidence against them all with advance notice. Also, her claim that she is "guilty until proven innocent" is also false.
There is a preponderance of evidence apparently proving that she is guilty so yes, she does need to explain how this evidence does not imply that she is guilty. The most serious evidence is that her grades were improved using her laptop. It is possible that her laptop was hacked but then why would a random hacker improve her grades?
Finally, the letter indicating that the hospital records of her rounds do not match the one she provided also raises some serious doubts about her alibis. It seems likely that there is more to her account than meets the eye, either that or there is some tech-savvy individual who seriously has it in for her which would suggest that she probably knows them.
There are some round here (rtb61 springs to mind) that appear to have several. Maybe they could donate some of their spares?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe she was framed. You gotta admit it would be a great way to get rid of her.
Yes, it would take a pretty motivated person to do something like this, but I've known people who wouldn't be above this kind of behavior if they had the skills to pull it off.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Contingency, pro bono, they exist. How fucking stupid YOU must be lol.
"That's right. Because an iPhone has curves around all edges for your comfort. And comes in a wide variety of fashionable colors..."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
"It's never twins." - Sherlock
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Let us know if you get better.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
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.
-----------
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...
In the end, who we absolutely know screwed up here is Tufts: They hat IT security bad enough that they could be hacked and grades could be changed.
Back in the early 90s, I was at MIT. Athena (the MIT network) was getting hacked so freaking often that the IT staff and the Student Information Board were playing catch up all the time.
Fake login screens, packet sniffing, brute force attacks on the cache, man in the middle attacks, attacks on the backups and then forced restores, including through physical damage, and of course, stealing Kerberos credentials... That's just what I have personally witnessed.
There was a way of submitting assignments 23h 59mn 59s late, and getting the time stamp within the allowed range, and that stayed around for months. There were people who would not think anything of using telnet from their dorm room, despite most of the equipment in said dorm being completely open for everyone with physical access. Hell, every single workstation in the public clusters had the same root password, and it was 'mrroot'. You could sit down after someone, and try your luck with whatever that was still on the hard drive. And of course, there were all these 'very busy' students who disabled their screensavers' passwords to save a few precious seconds... And there was a 'fancy' screensaver that was logging password, and that stayed around for months as well.
Man, it was the Wild West. So many things that today we take for granted, we were then just learning.
No good deed goes unpunished...
The only "technical prowess" described in the article, is stealing a password from someone.
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?
Maybe you're just an ugly unlikeable asshole that no one is willing to waste their time on.
I mean that's the impression I get, others may vary.
You're trusting her version of events without getting the scoop from the university, due to privacy concerns.
Since Tufts did not extend the right of legal discovery to Filler when she pleaded her case, tat's their own goddamned fault. There is no more "privacy" concern now that Filler has been expelled.
In my experience, school administrators don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. It's very, very likely the school is dead wrong about this student. Here's what happened to me in high school:
One day, a bunch of names were called to the office across the school's announcement system. Mine was among them. I found it odd that I was the only non-Chinese name to be called, but off I went to see what was the matter. I sat in a chair in the waiting area by the front of the office next to a bunch of Chinese students as I saw them being called into a spare office one by one.
When my turn came, I was greeted by this fatass sweatbag we all knew to be the idiot "admin" who was on a lowest-bidder contract to a bunch of other schools in the area to feed the wheel-hamsters that ran our Novell Netware based network. My fucking god does he look smug today, I thought.
Posturing himself like he's some kind of police interrogator, he asks me, "Doing a bit of hacking on the school network, are we?"
I say, "No, I haven't." Which was the truth. "What proof do you have to back up this accusation?"
With a grin, he pulls a piece of paper from a folder and emphatically slams it on the desk in front of me. "That's not what these LOG FILES are saying!"
I look at his "log files", which is really just a printed out screenshot of Windows Explorer navigated to my personal file directory on the network. Then I realize what the idiot feels so proud of himself for finding.
NetHack.exe
"That's not a hacking tool." I say with a chuckle.
"The program name says NET HACK. Clearly it's for HACKING the NETWORK," he sputters.
This is the part where I got a bit shouty. "That's a video game, you moron! It's been in development since 1983! How much is this school paying you to be this fucking retarded?!"
"Well, how am I supposed to know that's all it is? You expect me to double-click on THAT? I'm not a fool, I won't fall for your trap!" he blubbers.
"You run it in a sandbox, or on an offline computer, or you... I dunno... LOOK IT THE FUCK UP. In any case, I'm leaving this office, and if you pursue any further accusations against me, I'm prepared to use this very situation and experience to demonstrate your incompetence."
"Well... uh... you're not supposed to play video games in school."
"Fuck you, retard. You have nothing on me. Let me go, or I will have you fired."
He let me go. I never got into trouble, not for "hacking" and not for having a video game.
But that's just one example of how schools jump to conclusions based on the "expertise" of morons.
What are you talking about? I did all my clinical rotations online, and am now a heart surgeon! Youtube is amazing! I'm also an architect specializing in high-rises, bridge engineer, and highly qualified EOD technician. Never could have done any of that without wikipedia and Kahn Academy.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Fake login screens! That brings me back a couple of decades. I made one of those when I was in college before we switched to windows. It was risky, since it had to run from my account at first, and if someone tried to break out of it they'd be logged in. But once I had a couple accounts compromised, I just used those.
It emulated the login perfectly, and after the password was entered it emulated the "incorrect password" message perfectly, stored the password, and logged out of my account and returned to the real login screen. It was pretty genius, and worked flawlessly. I never did anything really malicious with it, but definitely could have. Especially if I could have gotten access to a system that staff used regularly.
I do wonder how many students really caused havoc on that system. It was really easy to do back in the day.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If she had an alibi for every event they claim she was part of, then that in itself is suspicious. Who would have an alibi for every random time that somebody tried to frame you for something?
If someone hacked her laptop and was using it to hack the grades while she was sleeping or away, then it's pretty likely that she had an alibi for every occurrence - I can document every time I'm sleeping with my smart watch and my smart-thermostat motion sensors. Every time I leave the house, it's captured on the cloud cam in the garage, as well as the camera at the corner gas station that I have to pass to leave the neighborhood. My car is pretty new, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was tracking me through the navigation system or other car computer. When I go for a run or a bike ride, my smart watch tracks me. When I go to work, my employer has video and badge swipe evidence. When I travel, I have airline receipts, or if driving, toll and gas receipts. And of course, I have smart phone, so both the phone manufacturer and my cellular carrier knows my every move. Some of these can be faked, others are outside of my control.
In modern times, it's pretty hard to *not* have an alibi unless you're trying not to.
That isn't a function of NAT, it's a function of non-routable IP addresses. If you set up your NAT to route to your internal IP addresses, you can still get hacked.
NAT is no more secure than a firewall and a firewall is simpler and more straightforward.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There are two kinds of IQ tests: Raven's progressive matrices (in the laboratory) and the abuse of small words (in real life).
Massive fail.
Everyone here who has never seen anyone get the right answer on shoddy evidence, raise your hands. Those of you with your hands down, you may continue to consume News for Nerds.
The rest of you I'd like to see after class. Please bring a small, packed suitcase, and your favourite air-miles card, so I can credit you for all the catapult miles lovingly bestowed.
Sue Tufts for her lifetime expected income as a veterinarian and her student loans. Plus -unitary damages to discourage this reckless behavior. Her alibis and witnesses sound pretty convincing. Even if Tufts reverses itself, she is still tarnished for life. She also should in her court case demand Tufts reverse the expulsion, validate her earned credits and pay for her to complete her degree (of her choice) in a different university, of her choice. I’m not litigious but I am outraged.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
> NAT is no more secure than a firewall and a firewall is simpler and more straightforward.
In a technology sense, it can be. But the default behavior of NAT is so much safer than the default configurations of firewalls that it is, in effect, much more effective. The need to manually configure which port goes to which device, _before_ any traffic is carried, and the lack of an option to simply open up all traffic for all devices to the outside world automatically cuts the vulnerability exposure profoundly. I'm quite familiar with the argument, and have repeatedly found that the reasons for not using NAT are more subtly applied to using firewalls, and the networks that refuse to use NAT have consistently wound up far more exposed and vulnerable.
the default behavior of NAT is so much safer than the default configurations of firewalls that it is
Nah, that's silly. It's just a matter of how the consumer routers are setup by default. It's nothing innate about ipv6 or NAT.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> It's just a matter of how the consumer routers are setup by default
Since the most vulnerable ports are the same on all home devices, ports like 22, 80, 443, 8080, and 8443, the port needs to activated specifically for every device behind a NAT. The other ports cannot be exposed in normal NAT unless, again, they are selected and connected to a specific target. That is a built-in "turned off" state that is fundamental to NAT, and is not fundamental to firewalls. The default for firewalls, and for IPv6 routers due to their deliberate support of entirely routable devices, is "carry all traffic".
It is possible to configure firewalls to provide similar levels of protection. But if you survey any dozen corporate firewalls or private firewalls, I would bet that you would find that most of them have quite large default vulnerabilities. NAT does not replace firewalls or capable routers with their more powerful and complex features. But it provides a far better, far more secure default security stance than an unconfigured unmanaged, consumer firewall with its default exposuer of every single device on at least the common ports.
But if you survey any dozen corporate firewalls or private firewalls, I would bet that you would find that most of them have quite large default vulnerabilities.
Nah. I'd like to see a citation on this.
Since the most vulnerable ports are the same on all home devices, ports like 22, 80, 443, 8080, and 8443, the port needs to activated specifically for every device behind a NAT
That's just a design issue. Consumer routers could be built to behave the same way if you want to.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There were two rootkits found in the laptop, meaning anyone could have connected to her laptop and do the actual hacking.
Though still altering a grade should be easy to trace as it should leave a trail in the database logs that the actual grade was changed
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
After this level of press coverage? People are probably tracking her down now. The publicity might pay huge dividends for whatever law firm does the job. This on top of a contingency would be a huge payoff.
Indeed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They will also stop giving loans for worthless degrees, so double win.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What's surprising is there are still Canadians.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Apostrophes and commas are interchangable!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
She didn't offer a computer image of her MacBook before she wiped it, and that's where the only forensic evidence lived that would possibly exonerate her. Of course, that's gone now, and maybe she knew that. While there's parts of this article that ring a little strange on both sides, even one act of impropriety on her part (such as enlisting an accomplice) is condemning.