Stanford Rejects Business School Hackers 406
robbarrett writes "The Stanford Report offers the next chapter in a continuing story about business school applicants manipulating URLs on the ApplyYourself system to determine their personal admission status. Harvard immediately rejected the 'hacker' applicants, but Stanford gave 'offenders' the opportunity to defend their actions. However, none of the competitive applicants 'was able to explain his/her actions to our satisfaction,' according to Stanford's dean, so all were rejected. The story mentions the decisions reached by other schools involved in the mess."
If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2, Insightful)
But in this case you get what you deserve. Whats the difference of finding out now or later that you didnt get accepted to Stanford?
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2, Funny)
Knowing where, or where not to put your energy in perhaps ?
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But in this case you get what you deserve.
These kids didn't even know they were hacking. All they knew was that they received an url via MSN from their friends where they could look up their status...
Sure, they should've know it wasn't supposed to go this way, but should they really be punished like this ?
Personally, I don't think they should be the ones punished, but rather the person in charge of the security of the website...
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems pretty obvious these folks knew what they were doing. Its requires pouring through a sites source code to extract sensitive info and writing down ids to basically get into a system they obviously didnt have official access to.
As analogy lets assume during the day at a bank the vault is unlocked with access to those who are permitted but with no guard watching the entrace. OK, yes we should assume the bank is very stupid for not guarding it, but if someone walks in and takes off with a bunch of cash are they innocent?
Dont think so. Instead of stealing cash, these would-be students steal information. They got what they deserved.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:4, Informative)
Also your analogy is crap, because accessing an unsecured resource at a publicly-available URL is not the same as waltzing into an open bank vault and making off with the contents.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right though, accesing this url isn't the same as waltzing into the bank vault. That's why they weren't arrested, just merely unwanted.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2)
how about if they walked inside the unlocked vault and had a look around but took nothing ?
or are you going to prosecute them for stealing photons & electrons & wear and tear on the carpet!
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now get off of my property.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you think that they thought they were doing? They didn't get a message from Stanford saying "here's how you check your admission status"; they got a message from their friends saying "here's how you craft a URL that let's you sneak in to the web site and check your admission status before the official date."
Imagine if the email from their friends had said "Your admission status is kept in the filing cabinet in room 306 of the admissions office, and the guy who works in that office leaves the door unlocked when he eats lunch at noon every day."
Walking into an unlocked office and looking in the filing cabinet versus cobbling together a URL that obviously circumvents the system. Tell me the difference.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2)
The question I got on this goes beyond your lame example. Why was sensitive data in a web accessable area to begin with? Sure, the students shouldn't have done it but they aren't the real guilty party here are they? The real guilty party is the damned administrator. Did they punish the administrator as severely as the student by NOT PAYING HIS DUMB ASS?
B.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the correct analogy is
Imagine if the email from their friends had said "Your admission status is posted in the hall of the Natural Sciences building, indexed by SSN".
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2)
They were hacking as much as I'm hacking when I'm "guessing" an URL when the idiot webdesigner's used some IE-only javascript, making the whole site useless whenever I'm not using WinIE (which I never use)... or when I get an URL to a file not directly linked to anywhere on the web...
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2)
Maybe not, but the situation was at least dubious. If they don't have the wits to check that out, God help any company they ever wind up running.
The latter is certainly true; if the educational establishments in question are trying to make a point about how the real world works, then firing someone for gross incompetence is a pretty obvious point to make.
As for the first part, yes, it does seem harsh to turn them away. On the flip side, you're talking about a limited number of places on very prestigious courses. Other students, probably just as worthy in an ideal world and unlucky not to get offered a place before, will now get to study there and launch their careers instead.
It's sad for the unlucky ones that this happened, but the harsh reality is that smaller mistakes are enough to let your competitors wipe you out in real business. Perhaps they'll learn something valuable from business school after all.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's sad for the unlucky ones that this happened, but the harsh reality is that smaller mistakes are enough to let your competitors wipe you out in real business. Perhaps they'll learn something valuable from business school after all.
You're treating them a lot like numbers there... sure, there is plenty replacement for them in this case, but a certain number of the ``hacking'' students were accepted, for valid reasons... those reasons are now being completely ignored, solely because they did something which is not more offending than walking into your teacher's room and check out what score you have for your test in advance... sure, it isn't nice, and sure, in certain ways it can be seen as a privacy infrigment, but is it enough to completely ignore the reasons you initially accepted them ?
Sounds to me the school doesn't know how to handle this situation, and basically are doing this to scare off other potential hacking-attempts, while in fact they should be getting their security straight...
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, dear god yes it is. This is a serious ethical issue: these people felt there was nothing wrong with knowingly violating security measures.
And to what extend did they indeed know they were violating security measures ?
It could easily be mistaken for something very innocent, like guessing each other's hotmail passwords and such... i know a lot of kids who do that, is that unethical enough to deny them from a school application too ?
Think about it this way: if they'd been arrested for a drug bust, they'd have been excluded also, despite their previously valid acceptances. The difference is only the specific misdeed; there's no question that some misdeeds nullify the entire application.
Comparing an url modification with getting busted for drug posession really removed a lot of credibility from your post, I'm sorry...
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many students were even aware that it was a big secret whether they were admitted, and they werent allowed to actually know. Why was it even a big secret in the first place? Shouldn't they be telling the students as soon as its reasonably possible, and not dangle it over their heads making them waste time if they werent accepted.
So, Stanford wants to make claims that these students are morally corrupt by typing a couple letters into their browser, when the school itself is keeping secrets about the students futures hidden for no reason at all and punishing them for being curious. Who is morally corrupt in this scenario i ask...
"Morality" and the great academic monolith... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is morally corrupt in this scenario i ask...
Your modern-day University autocrat has about as much use for morality as a fish has for a bicycle.
This is all about the elites that govern these institutions - they were embarrassed* by the applicants, and now it's payback time.
----------
*Although, for the life of me, I don't see how this** sort of thing would embarrass a normal person, but that just goes to show you how introverted, self-obsessed, narcissistic, and arrogant these monomaniacal little twits really are.
----------
** i.e. typing a URL into a browser with the hope of finding out information ABOUT YOURSELF - information that, in theory, BELONGS TO YOU. Reminds me of hospital administrators who try to ban patients from reading THEIR OWN CHARTS, as if the medical records belonged to the hospital, rather than to THE PATIENTS THEMSELVES.
Just thinking about these kinds of people makes my skin crawl.
Re:"Morality" and the great academic monolith... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's the thing: not all information about you belongs to you. Think abouut it like this: suppose I know you, and I form an opinion about you. Does my opinion about you belong to you? Do you have some right to demand that I inform you of my opinion? Of course not. These decisions by admissions committees are the same thing: they are opinions about the applicant formed by a private group of individuals. While you certainly have the right to be informed of that opinion within the schedule of the application process, you have no right to demand access to the opinion prior to the contracted release date. What these people did was break into a system to extract private information about them that didn't belong to them.
The analogy to the medical records is specious at best, and arguably a straw-man (since the anlogy fails so much that it may be viewed as an intentional effort on your part to deflect proper attention).
Agreed. (Score:2)
the faggot format of your post
Yeah, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
That's why it was kind long winded. With footnotes, no less.
PS: Since when do ACs get mod points?
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Time and knowledge can always be used to advantage. Not only might a school end up bleeding out a little more just to keep enrollment up to par, but the students who peeked might be more able to scrounge up the leverage to get a bigger piece of the pie.
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2)
Re:If they had been Comp Sci students.... (Score:2)
I know Comp Sci isnt as popular as it used to be, but isnt that setting the standards a bit low...?
If you are not denied access when you're trying to access data then you can reasonably assume you're allowed to access that data. It's not like they were presented with a big 'permission denied' or 'access strictly prohibited' which they then tried to crack.
Comment removed (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
"None" is a special case of the singular. It should have a singular verb applied to it.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Informative)
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=none [reference.com]
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
None may very well be singular (and even that is disputed - see your own link), but it refers to a group - can you therefore not use it in conjunction with a plural verb? I'd put it in the class of words like 'they', which aren't singular or plural themselves but get their number from the concept they embody.
It may be the contraction of 'not one', where singular is definitely used, but none is a fully independent word nowadays and, in my opinion, should be viewed separately from its origins.
On the other hand, the 'was' is part of a quote, a situation where normal grammar rules can become warped.
Jw
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Well, that example still doesn't explain this.
I love English!
Re:Heh (Score:2)
In either case, I think you'll find that "none of the applicants was" and "none of the applicants were" are both acceptable, but the former is definitely correct, even if the latter is.
Re:Heh (Score:2)
If you look at the links provided by other posters, it's claimed that 'none' is an indefinite pronoun, both singular and plural. The exact number therefore relies on with which word it is used.
Now, look at the complete subject of the sentence you gave - "none of the applicants". None is used to define a subset of applicants (an empty set, but a set nontheless) and is therefore clearly plural in this case. This is a side effect of the construction "___ of the ___", which will always produce a plural subject.
As for other constructions; I'm no english teacher, but I cannot for the life of me remember another way to use none in the subject, excluding by itself where the "of the" is implied. If you look at the parent phrase "not one", it can be used in a singular subject of the form "Not one [singular noun]", but 'none' cannot be used in this way.
If the 'was' usage is acceptable, it is clearly only due to past usage and is an exception in the english language.
Of course, if you can find a usage of none as part of a singular subject (as indefinite pronoun, not as proper noun naming the word itself), I'll admit that this is all a load of hogwash.
Jw
Re:Heh (Score:2, Insightful)
You can if you want--it's an accepted usage as well. I normally wouldn't though. "None was" sounds perfectly fine to me. A lot of things that are correct may not sound right at first--"the data are" for example.
By the way, it's not disputed that "none" is singular. If you read the link carefully, you'll see that both the singular and the plural are accepted usages. My point was that the original poster was trying to nitpick a grammar point that was actually the correct (and, in fact, is generally considered the "more correct") usage.
Re:Heh (Score:2)
I just posted another comment to this thread about how I believe that 'none' cannot be used in a singular manner and thus the was usage is an irregularity in the language left over from 'not one'.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151031&cid=12
As for 'data are', isn't that a special case where the singular and plural are the same? "The data is" is correct when referring to a single data set, "The data are" correct when referring to multiple datas. I'd also note that "The data are" is rarely used, mostly replace by "The datasets are" or some similar word to indicate multiple blocks or sources.
Aah, the irregularities of the English language... Makes life interesting
Jw
Re:Heh (Score:2)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, common usage isn't everything, but it is what eventually defines a language.
Jw
Re:Heh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:2)
CUNTinuing (Score:2, Insightful)
ahh, in some ways i guess this is good...
Return of the H@x0r (Score:4, Funny)
RETURN OF THE H@X0R
Applicant-1337 has returned to
his home planet of ParentsBasement in
an attempt to rescue his
friend University Education from the
clutches of the vile gangster
The Big Guy.
Much does Hax0r know that the
HARVARD EMPIRE has controversially
begun construction on a new
armored hax0r-rejection policy even
more powerful than the first
dreaded competitive admission system.
When completed, this ultimate
weapon will spell certain doom
for the small band of hax0rs
struggling to restore freedom
to the interweb....
Hackers is a strong word for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hackers is a strong word for them (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's like calling the guy who lights candles to read by their light a "pyrotechnician with arsonistic tendencies". The word "hacker" implies skill with computers, and when used in place of the word "cracker", a certain amount of malicious intent. Since this incident implied neither, the word "hacker" is unapprooriate - and drawing any parallels with these people and arsonists is completely absurd.
Re:Hackers is a strong word for them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hackers is a strong word for them (Score:3, Insightful)
These students used non-cognitive systems (the URL parsing system) to illegally acquire information. Your [hypothetical] student used a cognitive system (the person) to illegally acquire information. The difference is that in the former, the student is the only moral agent acting, while in the latter there are two.
What this means is that the second one is notably less morally culpable. Solicitation of another to commit a morally wrong action cannot possibly be as wrong as the actual commission of that wrong, since to suggest otherwise would mean that one who encourages a wrong action is at least as culpable (which seems counterintuitive).
In other words, the presence of an intervening cause in the form of an intermediary moral agent must reduce the moral wrongness of whatever the student did.
If the emperor wears no clothes, who is (Score:4, Insightful)
If a human admissions officer put the info. on their door, and then hung a sheet of paper over it to 'secure it', would the students be 'hackers' if they lifted the paper up? Now in this case, perhaps the admissions folks really thought the paper was a form of security, it seems like an 'emperor wears no clothes' kind of thing: is the tailor at fault for telling the emperor he was wearing a suit? Is the emperor for not checking it out? In this case we are blaming the people who looked at the emperor and saw him naked!
Anything that is accessble by an unsecured url is publicly published (it's a 'uniform resource LOCATOR', after all). There was a cognitive choice made at some point to call this system 'secure', --or someone didn't read the manual--and that person is the one who published the information at a public URL.
The applicants just found the place it had been publically published before they were told to look there, which hardly seems a 'crime', really it seems more like initiative than anything else.
Re:If the emperor wears no clothes, who is (Score:3, Insightful)
My speculation is that the security-by-not-so-obscure-URL was actually a mistake, not by the universities, but by the "experts" they hired. If the university administrators thought they needed to hire experts, they can't be blamed for selecting this method of security, they can only be blamed for picking stupid experts, and they can't turn back time and undo someone's mistake. But, they can choose to turn this into an ethics test. I hope that they have also taken recourse against the worthless experts they hired. It wouldn't be fair to the rejected applicants if anyone was allowed to get away with this.
What? (Score:2)
TFM... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds more like an attempt by the PR departments to cover their collective legal asses after their PHBs jumped the gun and block rejected applicants on the grounds that they committed a crime that technically isn't. IMHO, their position on the matter is weak.
The students didn't steal passwords, spread a virus or trojan. All they did was akin to manually typing in an abiet complicated URL and accessed data on unprotected public servers.
I wouldn't want to employ those people (Score:2)
If you can't trust staff to not go rifling through the filing cabinets, you don't have much trust around the office...
Re:I wouldn't want to employ those people (Score:3, Insightful)
If I spray paint my salary on my front door, I can't complain when my neighbors know how much money I make. Even if I do something like "I make $100^2" instead of $10000.
Was it unethical? I'd have to say yes, but who hasn't hacked URL's if for no other reason than to navigate a poorly designed site.
I found an online vendor who put the price in the URL, I was able to put items in by shopping basket for any price I wanted. I didn't try to buy them like that, and I notified both the vendor and the maker of the web commerce package.
Ironically, the vendor did not seem concerned. They figured if someone tried that they would notice.
Re:I wouldn't want to employ those people (Score:2)
Re:I wouldn't want to employ those people (Score:2)
Get your merchandise AND a "refund" of the amount you never paid.
Re:I wouldn't want to employ those people (Score:2)
High volume sites were simply not able to check every transaction and with these types of coding failures... bad things can happen.
I was surprised by just how many vendors that did work on. In the end, all they could really do is go back over their transaction logs and look for grievious errors.
Re:TFM... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, why would a student, who was told last year what the correct URL format is to ask for their application status, now be considered an unethical computer hacker because this URL format returned information before the administration wanted it to be released.
Perhaps we should stop considering URLs to be security devices, and compare them more to telephone numbers.
Unfair treatment (Score:5, Insightful)
Joss noted that while Stanford was dismayed by the
actions of the candidates who tried to gain
unauthorized access, it "did not rush to judgment
given the limited information available to us
initially. By carefully reviewing the file of each
applicant involved in these incidents, we upheld
the business school's values while treating each
applicant fairly...
That's quite a "holier than thou" sneer at Harvard and MIT.
What I am truly surprised is that none of the schools took actions against ApplyYourSelf as far as I know: rather, the focus has all been on whether the schools took action against the students. I think this plays heavily on the public's fear of "hacking". Just because the applicants peeked using a computer, it suddenly made it such a grave matter.
First, I think ApplyYourSelf should bear some responsibility for not properly securing their web-app in a way that such an action is possible. For many people (and I'd even venture to say that in public opinion), anything that is accessible by typing a URL into a browser window might as well be published. I don't really think the school has the right to penalize the applicants for accessing information that has been made available to them.
Secondly, this whole business has been blown out of proportion: the students were only able to look at their admission status, and that even hinges on the fact that the schools have already published those information to the website. It is not as if the students were actually "hacking" in the sense of escalating their privilege and modifying their admission status. I just don't think this incident is an acurate enough illustration of their moral fibers to warrant such decisions (though I generally have no sympathy for business school applicants).
Thirdly, I think the whole finding out the admission status thing is more akin to being impatient and calling up the admission office with the knowledge that the drunk receptionist would accidentally let the admission status slip out. So why the applicants were treated so harshly and why the ApplyYourself service was not is really troubling me.
W
Re:Unfair treatment (Score:2)
Re:Unfair treatment (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. And you'll gotta love Stanford for the playfulness.
Reminds me of a philosophy professor of mine who would put "extra credit" at the bottom of his tests like, "'If one swallow does not a summer make', how many do?"
Re:Unfair treatment (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Unfair treatment (Score:2)
Re:Unfair treatment (Score:2)
your analogy is a bit off. it'd be more like me testing my key in your car door to find that my key can unlock your door. although not the best thing to do, especially if getting caught in the act may make you look like a thief, you personally haven't committed any crime. maybe attempted to, but not yet.
the students didn't modify anything on the application result, meaning that they did not steal the car in this case. they just basically peeped inside the car and the parent basically said some of the blame should be put on the car maker for issuing a similar enough key so that you can open other people's door.
this is basically security by obscurity, which is basically not security at all. as the parent also mentioned, the application company (car company in your analogy) should've had more restrictive access.
Getting to the goodies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good grief. I'm guilty of doing this sort of thing all the time.
I'd never really read about what exactly the applicants did before. If the article is right, all they did was poke around the system with URL munged from information they already had. It's not like they exploited buffer overflows to gain control of the system or anything.
Like I said, I do this type of thing all the time. If I'm on a Web site with content I like and I see a series of URLs named something1.htm, something2.htm, something4.htm, etc., you'd better believe I'm going to type something3.htm in and see what happens. On my own dinky Web sites I have, if I don't want people browsing around the system, I take steps to prevent it, such as making sure the server doesn't allow one to list directories, always having an index.htm file in every directory in case I forget, naming files randomly instead of in series, etc.
And, on top of all of that, as the post above states, all these candidates did was find out information that was going to be disclosed to them soon anyway.
So I gotta ask, what the hell is the big deal here? Why is Stanford being such a hard ass about this? If anyone is to blame here for any significant wrongdoing, it has got to be the company that designed software that so easily gives up unauthorized information. I wonder what Stanford did to seek redress against them. (Probably nothing.)
Re:Getting to the goodies... (Score:4, Informative)
About five years ago the Federal Government here in Australia introduced a new goods and services tax. Businesses had to register to use the new system and the ATO (tax office) provided a nifty web interface for them to query their account.
One enterprising person changed the account number in the URL and accessed the details of other account holders.
IIRC he called up the ATO and told them he had found a security hole, and exactly how he found it.
Of course, he was charged with hacking the system.
So the Stanford experience is not exactly isolated. For me it is a bit like going to a public office, and trying an unmarked door. It is not your fault if the door is not locked and they can't really charge you with breaking and entering as long as you didn't use the opportunity to commit a crime.
Only one reply is possible. (Score:5, Interesting)
I pledge, the next time I hear of such a possible exploit, to rip as much information from the system as the website gives me permission to retrieve. Every bit of it -- I shall construct scripts, pore over forums, and create a list of possible students whose data I will then attempt to extract.
Additionally, with these links in hand, I shall paste them to random places on the internet, and specific places such as the most likely forums to find such students. I will also disguise their nature and essence, so that users will not know what they click on until it's too late.
So the next time Stanford comes calling, you go ahead and /blame me/. I could've been the one to do it, after all. You don't know I didn't. They don't know I didn't.
Or they could just accept that their own goddamn marketing department creates an illusion of prestige, and that people with a limited amount of time to waste on non-responsive colleges /sitting on/ important information like that are going to want to know who to stop wasting time on, and that if they don't like it they can /fix their fucking permissions/. Do they not know any decent webapp programmers? Who've they been graduating?
They got what they deserve (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to work with somebody that cuts corners and refuses to play by the rules - what happens when it's a big contract and they decide to "see if we won?" or decide to see if "x is really going to buy Y?"
If I can't trust you to do what is right, I don't want to work with you.
Yes, waiting for B-school admission is a high stress period - but stressful situations is when people's character shows. I can understand HBS and Stanford's stance - they, and their alumni, don't want to be associated with the type of people that will create another Enron.
Overall, they were probably to dumb to get in - from what I saw, the "hack" was a no-brainier - append some code to the end of the URL to hit a page rather than some smart piece of coding; more importantly - didn't they think that there would be alums of schools on the boards that would see th "hack" and let their schools now? And that these alums would be know who to talk to so that the school could investigate and take whatever action is deemed appropriate? If one of the "hackers" had been smart, they'd email the Dean of Admissions and ask - "Someone posted this as a way to check admissions status - is it OK if I use it?"
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:5, Insightful)
Lack of good judgement maybe; but how is it unethical to try to get information concerning yourself ? Or are you trying to imply that Stanford is some sort of ethical authority ?
I'd imagine that they would become successfull and capable businessmen. After all, the ability to get good information is the cornerstone of making good decisions.
Are you sure you aren't confusing moral right with your own expectations of human behiviour ? Because, to the best of my knowledge, there's absolutely nothing unethical in reading information concerning myself, even if someone else is trying to keep it a secret.
Kindly explain what finding out whether you were admitted to a school has to do with forging accounts ?
Maybe they made the mistake of assuming that the school would take appropriate action, as opposed to the action it actually took ?
How would this have been smart ? These people had no obligations towards the Dean; why would they ask his permission to view information concerning them ?
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
They showed they lack good judgment and a sense of ethics.
Lack of good judgement maybe; but how is it unethical to try to get information concerning yourself ? Or are you trying to imply that Stanford is some sort of ethical authority ?
What matters is how they got the information - they could have calle dthe school and asked for, for example.
I don't want to work with somebody that cuts corners and refuses to play by the rules - what happens when it's a big contract and they decide to "see if we won?" or decide to see if "x is really going to buy Y?"
I'd imagine that they would become successfull and capable businessmen. After all, the ability to get good information is the cornerstone of making good decisions.
Again, there is a right way and a wrong way to get information - people don't expect nor allow others to walk into their office and read whatever they want, ven if teh door is unlocked.
If I can't trust you to do what is right, I don't want to work with you.
Are you sure you aren't confusing moral right with your own expectations of human behiviour ? Because, to the best of my knowledge, there's absolutely nothing unethical in reading information concerning myself, even if someone else is trying to keep it a secret.
Again, it depends on how you get the information - if someone tells me that you have a file on me in your house, I don't have the right to break in and read it.
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:3, Insightful)
They got the information from a public web server, by typing an URL into the URL bar of their browser. I fail to see any immorality in this.
Besides, if they had called the school, it's always possible that whoever answered the phone had not been told that the information was supposed to be secret (why was it secret, BTW ?) and would have answered their question. That was exactly what happened, in fact - only the uninformed party was a web server instead of a human being.
So you can't call and ask, either, without risking immorality ;(.
Maybe not, but the information was not in your office. It was in a public webserver. If you post your secret documents into the company webserver, don't be surprised if they get read.
Since no such thing or anything like it happened, what is your point ?
You keep on making the assumption that these people broke into a private machine. They did not. They read a publically available document in a publically available webserver. Absolutely no foul play was involved.
Stanford fucked up, and is now trying to cover it up by shifting the blame to innocent people. Then again, I suppose that is a good way of teaching todays business practices to them.
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
The kind of person who thinks out of the box and does rock the boat is the type of person you want running or working at your company (but usually only smaller companies hire them...). I know I wouldn't care one way or the other if I were hiring them at my company. I don't see anything unethical about it (I can't identify a victim), but following some directions is certainly not impressive enough to warrent hiring on the spot.
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
That's assuming that what they did was wrong. I fail to see how it was-the information was there, Stanford had it posted on public pages (granted, the URLs werent listed, but the fact that they were there at all without any encryption or password required shows that they were available to anyone).
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
That's like saying beacuse you're connected to the internet, and your security isn't 100%, it's OK to take a look at what's on your machine.
The schools told the applicants when they would be informed of their decision, and expected them to abide by the the timeline; applying for admission, IMHO, was agreeing to follow the school's timeline and so they should have realized what they did was unethical
What they did is morally no different than walking through an unlocked door to the admission office, walking unchallenged to a file cabinet and pulling and reading your app. Just because you can do it doesn't make it right.
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:3, Insightful)
No. It's like saying that because I'm connected to the Internet and running a publically available webserver, it's OK to take a look at what's available through that webserver. Replace the webserver with a P2P app, newsserver or whatever, and the point still stands.
If I publish data, and accidentally publish something I didn't want to be known, that's my fault, not the fault of whoever reads it.
You know, just because someone expects someone else to abide by their decision, doesn't in any way oblige that other one to actually do so.
This does seem to come down to opinions, doesn't it ?
You keep on claiming that the information was in a private place, equivalent to home or office, and others keep on claiming that a publically availabe document in a publically available web server is not private by any definition.
You also keep on claiming that the students had an obligation to follow the schools timeline, and I keep on claiming that no such obligation exists.
One can reasonably expect that a filing cabinet in an office is not meant for public use (altought, if I can just walk to it and read the contents unchallenged, there is propably grounds for a lawsuit about breaking privacy laws - is that the real reason for the schools behaviour ? Try to label innocent people criminals to destroy their credibility, if they ever decide to go that route ?). However, one can just as reasonably expect that a publically available document in a publically available web server is meant to be public. If one can't, using the Internet is going to become mighty inconvenient, since one must always ask for permission before using any resource.
But if you go out of your way (run a webserver and post the document there) to make it possible for me, it is reasonable to expect that you meant it for my use.
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
Sorry, no, you have the wrong idea here. This would be akin to checking to see if the deposit from a contract had come through yet so that it could be used to do more work. This isn't like they were trying to obtain information they weren't entitled to know. It was them just seeing if they had been accepted or not. Most probably didn't realize they were doing anything wrong. Also knowing if this was wrong or not takes someone much more technically oriented than most business school applicants are going to be. They weren't trying to get into the CS or EE program after all. I don't expect managers to have a freaking clue about security unless they're over IT. Even then I don't really expect it, technical knowledge and management seem to be mutually exclusive things.
Checking a deposit means you look at your account, which you control, what they did would be more akin to walking into the other companies office and pulling the contract, or finding a way into their computer system to see if a payment had been authorized but not yet made.
My point is how they got the information was wrong - the schools said they'd let them know by a certain date, and they found a back door way to get the information.
If they didn't know what they were doing was unethical, then they have a more fundemental problem of not being smart enough to know when they may be crossing the line.
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:2)
Re:They got what they deserve (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no, they showed curiosity and a certain resourcefulness in finding data. Traits I can certainly appreciate in colleagues.
Now, HBS and Stanford on the other hand showed a lack of good judgement and a sense of ethics. Their only concern appears to be to save face because they invested in a crap product that apparently doesnt even have proper access control. To blame some applicants to cover up their own incompetence is pretty low.
"they'd email the Dean of Admissions and ask"
Where do I send my mail asking if it is ok to access www.harvard.edu? Some guy said you could access their webpage if you typed that into your web browser, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to?
If you can access it you can assume you're allowed to access it. It is not customary to be required to ask permission for looking at things in plain view.
Business Ethics 0.99? (Score:2)
Re:Business Ethics 0.99? (Score:2)
Re:Business Ethics 0.99? (Score:3, Funny)
culture of zero tolerance (Score:5, Insightful)
the proble is not the kids. i's this culture of zero tolerance which the otherwise liberal educational community has latched onto with a fervor one would normally expect from religous fanatics.
back when i was attending college the attitudes were different. administration had a 'boys will be boys' attitude and was more concerned with helping us understand why certain activites were not acceptable, rather than striking us down like Zeus on the maountain.
Based on the information I've encountered regarding this mess, there seems to be an extreme level of self righteous bigotry on the part of the 'adults'.
Or perhaps they are just too lazy to do their job of education.
URL "hacking" court case (Score:2, Interesting)
Come on, this is stanfords own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Of cause no institution should be forced to accept students it doesn't want to, but morally speaking, these students have done nothing wrong. There are many immoral things one can do on a computer: sabotaging other people's systems, destroying other people's data among others. But finding out personal information by asking a gullible computer the right question is perfectly understandable. If Stanford want this data safe, they should fix their computers so it protects the data. Computers are remote controlled and pretty much do what their asked to do. One wouldn't leave a priceless Monet strapped to a remote control truck that every kid with a toy car can control, so why do people complain about their loose lipped computer squealing numbers to some kid who knows how to use a URL bar? The sooner people see computers for what they are: devices that are told what to do by more people than they should and forget about the whole trespass on private land metaphors, the sooner people might take some responsibility about dumb machines being given too much information. They probably will end up a lot safer in the long term. It really makes me mad when people blame others for exploiting their own gullibility.
Re:Come on, this is stanfords own fault (Score:2)
I've been somewhat sympathetic to the students, who didn't do anything that was that blatantly inappropriate. But seeing the reasoning people deploy in their defense is making it clear why the universities decided that they offenders were facing a test and failed it.
For example, let's say (and this happens constantly) a vendor mistakenly faxes sensitive information to us instead of to the correct client, one of our competitors. According to your logic, this is even more legitimately obtained information than the acceptance information, right? We didn't do anything -- it just appeared in the machine. We don't want people with that attitude working here because 1) they put the company at legal risk and 2) if they can rationalize crewing other people, they'll rationalize screwing us.
Re:Come on, this is stanfords own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate this idea of "It wasn't protected enough, so it's okay". Yes, the website screwed up, but that doesn't mean it's right for the students to have accessed a page they were not meant to.
Having said that, Stanford really need to make sure the people managing the website realise what went wrong, and why, and never make the same mistake again. There are too many coders out there who don't get simple ideas like verifying user input (let alone the input of hidden fields), and that needs to change.
Stanford's liability? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems that Stanford made this information (acceptance status) available by entering a (guessable) address.
Until this information was issued formally to the student, Stanford apparently considered this information confidential.
By not utilizing an effective password / security system, Stanford then effectively made this information publicly available.
One could argue that any student would have a right / entitlement to know what information on himself / herself was being made publicly available - especially if the information were supposed to have been confidential.
It is arguable that Stanford effectively violated the privacy of the students, but is prepared to punish the (prospective) students for obtaining the information it made publiclay available.
Sort out the mediocre ones (Score:2)
Their choice? (Score:2)
Look (Score:2, Insightful)
What these (prospective) students did was wrong. Period. They willingly and knowingly gained unauthorized access to information that was not theirs to access. I generally hate analogies but here goes: if these students found a key to their professor's room and snuck in to check on their exam results, do you think there'd be a furor as to whether they are guilty of cheatin or not?
Now, whether that access gives them an unfair edge like cheating in exams does is irrelevant. Also, whether these students knew they were "hacking" or not is irrelevant. I am positive every single one of them knew of how the status of their application was to be informed to them, and I'm positive that didn't include manipulating the URL or getting instant messages from friends about how to do it. Just the act of getting access to these records is the offense.
The conclusion is that these students deserved the punishment they got. I am also very happy to learn that there are other schools than my alma mater which take honor of their students (and faculty) seriously.
I'm afraid the reaction to this story on
Re:Look (Score:2)
If you get drunk, and brag about killing your spouse, is it immoral for a bystander to pass that information on to the police?
Re:Look (Score:2)
Probably not. If they had snuck into a locked room to look at the answer key before the test, there probably would be. From what I understand, their knowledge of their admission status had no impact on that status until the colleges decided to bar all of the students involved from admission. It's kind of ironic, really.
Re:Look (Score:3, Insightful)
What is "cheating?" You equate "unauthorized access" (which is quite funny because to get to their page, they had to enter their username and password, no other username/password from a student or anonymous access was allowed, so they were explicitly "authorized" to see that page) with "cheating." Cheating is manipulating your grade or outcome. If you steal the test before given to gain knowledge of the questions, that is cheating. If you take in notes to aid you while taking the test, that is cheating. If you alter your grade after the test, that is cheating.
What isn't cheating is seeing your test on the professor's desk, then taking a peek at your test to see what you got before it is handed back.
They willingly and knowingly gained unauthorized access to information that was not theirs to access.
It was information that only they (and presumably administrators) could access. They had to be authenticated. The information was information put up on the web site explicitly for them to view. So, I'm curious how it was "unauthorized access" and not information they were supposed to know?
The best analogy I can come up with out of all this is if a professor left the results of a test out where everyone looking through his window could see them. The first person walking past noticed that he could see his grade, so he let others know that there grades were done and available and you didn't have to wait until they were posted to see them.
Is it cheating to see your grade on the desk before it is posted? Is it wrong to know something they presented in the final form for your consumption, just that they were careless and left it where everyone could check their own grade early?
I'm afraid the reaction to this story on
So I guess it was "cheating" when I asked my boss what was going to be in my performance review before HR officially gave it to me. I guess it was "cheating" when I extrapolated this weeks movie times to next week to plan activities. After all, learning something that people want you to know is obviously "cheating" if you don't learn of it in some specific arbitrary manner. The real tradegy is the outporing of moral absolutism. Well, that and the gross misuse of the word "cheating." But that is standard on Slashdot, to misuse a word in order to conjure up more negative images than what really happened. It seems that the schools are over reacting to cover up the fact that they used a service that failed to deliver what they promised. The service used posted the informatino before it was intended to be viewed. If that is what the schools are upset about, then they need to drop their service, not punish the people that accessed the published information they were supposed to see.
Just to make it clear:
They were given access to a site.
They authenticate to the site.
They access information that was posted with the intention of them seeing it.
They are banned because of the timing of seeing the information that was posted for them to see.
learned something? I hope so (Score:2)
I hope the educational institution might have learned something too. Like have a secure system.
Sure temptation is there and control should have been exercised. However it is really stupid just to brush everyone or any of them aside. It's just like the rules now days where the punishment is the punishment because you don't have to think.
No one gains a thing out of it. Well except Berkely. They gain some more people cheering for them when they play Stanford.
bad precedent (Score:2)
If viewing those kinds of pages violates anybody's rules, then that's a bad precedent. The intent of the applicants may have been bad, but punishing them for this sort of innocuous URL manipulation sets a bad precedent for the entire WWW.
The people who should get "rejected" are the people who created the web site: obviously, ApplyYourself.com is incapable of creating a minimally secure web site. Is a site with such poor security acceptable to Stanford, Harvard, and other universities to handle sensitive personal data? What does that say about the integrity and ethics of those universities?
(We are actually looking for an outsourced service like ApplyYourself--does anybody know of more reputable alternatives?)
Re:bad precedent (Score:3, Insightful)
Advice to Stanford alums (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's ask the man on the street (Score:3, Funny)
--American Business
poor security doesn't justify (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor security doesn't justify the means. From a referenced slashdot article:
This, in my opinion, is really the heart of the issue. I jumped into this discussion a little late, so I haven't had time to read all 150 posts, but what I've read so far I find a little disturbing. There seems to be a common theme that The school had bad security and the hackers were merely (in the words of one comment) asking the right question. I disagree.
I don't think poorly obfuscated information intended to be kept confidential justifies hackers taking or accessing it, much less publicizing for others how to do the same. It seems unethical to me. And, I know I'm risking big time going down the chute of flamebait and troll modding hell for saying so, but I just think the pervasive "justification" of this hacking many of "us" perpetuates the stereotype of "in your face" behavior just because we know the technology and you (rhetorical) don't.
The school blew it only in the sense they didn't have much of a mechanism to prevent access, but would we still be saying it was okay if the school had some huge encryption in place to hide data and someone had hacked that? It really isn't that much different. The fact that the school "hid" the information sets the bar high enough to define the standard as to what the hackers did as inappropriate hacking. Just my $.02
I didn't peak (Score:3, Interesting)
Due to the staggered and overlapping notification dates, it would have been extremely helpful to know results in advance. Imagine the scenario of being accepted to one school with your deposit deadline due before being notified if you got into your preferred, but more difficult to get into school. Do you pass on sure thing behind door #1 or skip it for a chance at door #2? When you're facing relocation and close to $100,000 of expenses (with no income) over the next two years you want to make as informed a choice as possible. So I understand the desire to get the extra information.
HOWEVER, these are business schools. They all have a huge emphasis on ethics and take it very seriously (especially over the past several years due to high profile scandals). As soon as I saw the news I knew it would end badly for peakers. No matter if you believe it was acceptable or not to peak - as a business school candidate you should have realized peaking could get you into trouble.
I found it amusing that the b-school(s) gave the accused an opportunity to defend their actions. It almost implies the ethics violation would have been tolerated had the candidate been persuasive enough to talk their way out of it.
You are (almost) all wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
1) No hacking or cracking was involved - the information was available to anybody who had a login/password by adding freely available information (again, if one has a login/password) to the url.
2) No one is claiming that someone viewed admission status for anyone but themselves (except for the sister but that's another story).
3) No information on the server was changed by the students, simply viewed (ie, admission status was not changed not could it be via this process).
4) Some posters are claiming that the students were told they shouldn't do this, but I have yet to read anything supporting this.
5) In some cases, this act was the sole basis for a denial from the school.
Simply put, the schools will and should get sued by the students who had their admissions taken away. No law was broken, and no attempt at cheating was made.
If you put information on the web, it will be viewed. Period. You can bitch and moan all you want about it, but if the information is not protected, it's your own damn fault. Blaming the students is a sad attempt at diverting the focus from the real issue - security by obscurity does not work.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask yourself, did the students do the Right Thing (tm)? Whether or not the admin, the company or whoever did a bad job of securing the information is a separate matter, which should be dealt with separately. The fact is that the students did the Wrong Thing ®, and the university don't want people like that. They don't want people who don't seem to have any moral spine, even though they might be good and intelligent students otherwise.
A lot of people here seem to have this idea: "If it isn't encrypted, I'm allowed to read it. If it isn't secured, locked down, and guarded by the army, I'm allowed to break in." Or that it's the admin's fault for "letting me break in".
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The admin may be at fault for not doing his job fully, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the hacker has hacked. There are two faults involved, not one.
Conclusion: if you hack into a system, you have hacked into a system. Don't make irrelevant excuses.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
Hence, even if you fail to adequately advertise that the information is available till a later date, the information is published and available to anyone who does enough diligence in the researching of it.
By the same reasoning as Stanford would like you to believe, you cannot "find" a book and start reading it, you must first be given the book by it's publisher. Basically Stanford is indicating that if there's not a URL on thier web page pointing to another web page their server is offering, then the server isn't really offering the unreferenced web page. It's a non-sequiter, and Stanford will likely get sued over it, which is why it is so important to demonize the students and mold public opinion before they have a few hundered lawsuits on thier hand.
And if you don't think it won't go to court, consider this. Stanford ACCEPTED these students, which is part of a contract that indicates should the students decide to pay Stanford and perform well in classes, Stanford will provide them with an education at their facilities. Now Stanford is claiming that viewing certain web pages they publish violates this contract. And instead of a person making this blunder on Stanford's part privately (where it is unlikely to cause big problems) he made the statement in the media.
Stanford is in for some hard education, but I hope that there's not too much Alma Mater out there in the legal field to prevent it from being properly spanked on this one.
You read this article, did you "Do the right thing?" How do you know that it isn't meant to be public knowledge? Read your argument more carefully, if you concede that "I'm allowed to read it.", then you're allowed. Period. End of story. It's not breaking in if your allowed. If someone made the mistaked of allowing it, they can't call you a criminal afterwards for doing what you were allowed to do.
Re:White/Grey/Black Hats..... (Score:2)
Re:White/Grey/Black Hats..... (Score:2)
Now come on, they're not bright minds, they're business students.