The Great Firewall of Yale

I thought my school was bad but reading this makes the administration at my school look like angels. When I launched a similar service at UNC Chapel Hill, the IT dept blocked requests from my server to theirs for scraping latest data.<p>They claimed I was creating excess load, which is silly because if they really did the math, given how many people were using my service I was probably saving them resources.

There is <i>no way</i> that a valid copyright claim can be made over the underlying data because it is <i>a statement of fact</i>. Such a work is not eligible for copyright protection.

One of the principal issues raised here - and not squarely addressed in the post or the article to which it links - is the extent to which average subjective ratings of courses and professors should be permitted to dominate the decision-making processes of students.<p>Note that Yale&#x27;s complaint included concerns over &quot;the prominence of class and professor ratings&quot;, and the student developers&#x27; response was to remove &quot;the option of sorting classes by ratings&quot;. Subjective five-point ratings can be useful in many contexts, but in the context of education they can also give rise to genuine pedagogical concerns about the way in which students choose their courses.<p>Looking at the screenshot in the post, it is not difficult to see that the pattern of enrolments might very quickly become skewed towards those classes with higher average evaluation ratings (whatever such ratings might mean). If that happens, it suggests that some students may be making decisions about the courses in which they enrol based principally on factors other than their interests, abilities and future career paths, or without critical thought. Whilst other factors are relevant, including those for which an average of subjective evaluation ratings might be a plausible heuristic, that does not mean those factors should be the primary or predominant factors.<p>Without seeking to defend or condone Yale&#x27;s response, there is more to the story than the tale of student censorship presented in the post.

If I&#x27;m paying $58,000 to attend an institution (rather, if my family is sacrificing $58,000 for me to attend an institution...or,worse yet, if I am taking out $58,000 worth of student loans per year), I should be able to use a course listing service so that I can tailor my academic experience however I chose. THAT is how we open this debate, not with comments about who the proper copyright holder is or whether or not this constitutes as deep packet inspection.

I don&#x27;t think blocking a specific set of IP addresses constitutes deep packet inspection. If they were reading the payload contents for strings matching the CourseTable site, that would qualify.<p>Still, this is a stupid move by Yale.

Harvard did this in 2003. It even went so far as to accuse me of using the word &quot;The&quot; improperly, in a copyright line where I properly attributed credit to &quot;The President and Fellows of Harvard College,&quot; when <a href="http://www.harvard.edu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.harvard.edu</a> at the time said the exact same thing (and apparently still does). I left Harvard early (with a degree), and then I wrote a book about it.<p><a href="http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aarongreenspan.com&#x2F;authoritas.html</a><p>Some things never change.

What&#x27;s the purpose of Yale censoring certain websites? I find it hilarious that people spend so much money to go to Yale, and some of that money goes to inspecting what they&#x27;re browsing.

Frankly, if colleges receive public funds, they shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to <i>claim</i> &quot;copyright&quot; on something like timetable information, in my opinion. Actual intellectual property, maybe, but this? Not a time table. That&#x27;s just silly.

I&#x27;m sure no Yale student has ever heard of tethering and that blocking the site on the Yale network will effectively prevent very smart students from reaching this website.<p>You would think that the Yale administrators would know better than this.

&quot;Universities are a bastion of free speech.&quot; LOL.

I expect the official explanation to be something like &quot;we cannot endorse an unofficial service that might give misleading information to our students.&quot;<p>Every censor does it from an honest desire to keep <i>this terribly misleading information</i> away from the unknowing masses.<p>I don&#x27;t think Yale is blocking the service in a conspiratorial effort to stymie students, but from a not well thought out desire to babysit.

tl;dr -- the crux of the issue (right or wrong) is making the evaluation information <i>too</i> public. From the news story:<p>&gt; <i>&quot;[Administrators&#x27; primary concern was] making YC [Yale College] course evaluation available to many who are not authorized to view this information,”</i><p>&gt; <i>&quot;[Administrators also asked] how they [the site operators] obtained the information, who gave them permission to use it and where the information is hosted.&quot;</i><p>Edit: Agreed, I don&#x27;t buy these are the <i>real</i> reasons.

It would have been really cool if the developers of this (really nice, AFAICT) site moved it to (or also made it available via) a Tor hidden service.<p>The students would regain access to their data (I realize that it has now been e-mailed to them) and it would be a great example of exactly how Tor can help &quot;bypass&quot; censorship.

If it were only deep packet inspection, the solution would be simply to prefix <a href="https://" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;</a> and be done with it. As other posters have remarked, I suspect the article means an IP based block.

I run a similar service for other schools (courseoff.com) and I have run into this before. I bet what happened was their site failed to cache the course data or seat information and was thus making lots of requests to the Yale servers. To Yale it might appear like a DoS from this site.<p>Obviously I don&#x27;t know for sure but I would venture to bet this block was more an automated response than malicious intent against the site.

&quot;They had contacted us warning that we were using copyrighted data&quot; last I understood you can&#x27;t copyright data or facts [in the US]. You can own copyright to a particular published format though. One can&#x27;t copy and publish a phone book verbatim but you can certainly scrap a phone book for its data&#x2F;facts and publish them in a different format.

To focus only on the actual website issue:<p>Could it be in order to govern the information, rather than &quot;copyright&quot; per say?<p>My thinking is that, <i>from Yale&#x27;s perspective, having a 3rd party (and especially a student) be the go-to source for course info might be a bad shift in power</i>.<p>When it&#x27;s all in good kind, it may not look bad, and even if it is well intended, there are a few problems that could arise:<p>- Bugs in crawling code causing some course information to be false, omitted or stale.<p>- Changes in OCI causing said crawler to keep stale data and fail to update. - Students complaining to Yale with wrong information.<p>all the way to the more paranoid:<p>- 3rd party maliciously falsifying information.<p>- Generel confusion as to which information is reliable, driving students to have a more, rather than less, difficult time finding and verifying class scheduling.<p>I&#x27;m all for net neutrality and strongly against censorship in all forms, but &quot;playing devil&#x27;s advocate&quot; can&#x27;t there be a somewhat &quot;legitimate&quot; reason to shut the 3rd party page off for Yale students?

The experience seems like fair preparation for the reality into which their charges will graduate.

Yale Daily News reporting: <a href="http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/01/14/yale-shuts-down-yale-bluebook/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaledailynews.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;yale-shuts-down-yal...</a>

Something like this happened at the university in the city I live in. There was an apparently awful service for signing up for classes called BearTracks [1] and someone made a scraped version of it that was better called BearScat [2]. Eventually the university basically incorporated the better version into theirs (to, I understand, mixed results).<p>[1] <a href="https://www.beartracks.ualberta.ca/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beartracks.ualberta.ca&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="http://www.bearscat.ca/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bearscat.ca&#x2F;</a>

Mirror: <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/yalefirewall/index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3.amazonaws.com&#x2F;yalefirewall&#x2F;index.html</a>

This is an unacceptable, naked abuse of power. Any education institution blocking any site on political or anticompetitive grounds flushes away any vestiges of ideals of free speech and open learning. The administration should have known better or it may find itself replaced for acting incompetently.

Is the course listing software open-source? I&#x27;d like to do this for another school...

Wow. This really makes me appreciate what we had at my college. For nearly a decade now, the OFFICIAL portal for the university that lets students and teachers manage courses and assignments (submissions included), has been the one that was originally developed, and still managed by students. We have a webmasters club for that whose responsibility it is keep it up and running and add features to it as they see fit. The university has been nothing but supportive of this, including assigning it an yearly budget for hosting and other expenditures.

If you actually go to <a href="http://coursetable.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;coursetable.com</a> you will be asked to login through Yale Central Authentication Service, which sends you to: <a href="https://secure.its.yale.edu/cas/login?service=http%3A%2F%2Fcoursetable.com%2F%3Fforcelogin%3D1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;secure.its.yale.edu&#x2F;cas&#x2F;login?service=http%3A%2F%2Fc...</a><p>I hope I don&#x27;t give the administration any good ideas here, but I would seem that they have a much more efficient way to disable the site.

&gt; Universities are a bastion of free speech.<p>Incorrect - universities are now a business, nothing more. You can have your free speech so long as it makes the shareholders happy. Having students confused and lost (or being unable to chose the best education for themselves) is a fantastic way to have them repeat courses in the long run.<p>Tertiary education is no longer what it used to be. It is now exactly the same type of delusion that women face in terms of having to be slim; or consumers face in terms of having to have the latest iPhone or what have you.

I forwarded the link to a friend who works in the admissions office at Yale. Can&#x27;t promise anything but she said she&#x27;d be asking some questions.

I understand that Yale and Harvard have a rivalry and compete for students. Out of curiosity, how might Harvard have handled a similar situation?

Note that this site is also accessible at <a href="http://coursetable.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;coursetable.com</a>

If anyone is curious that&#x27;s a Palo Alto Networks NGFW block page. Yale is at least using some great hardware!

It looks like <a href="http://www.coursetable.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursetable.com</a> is filtered on WebSense.

Switch it to Cloudflare to obfuscate the source

Has there been an official response?

GFW don&#x27;t show any &quot;blocked&quot; message, it just &quot;reset&quot; the connection...

I&#x27;m surprised that we haven&#x27;t DDOS them yet, lol.

So MIT murders a student (Arron S.), Yale does some ridiculous censoring...<p>What&#x27;s next?

it&#x27;s so disgusting that this stuff even happen.

This is not news. Most campus have filtering software and the university administration will use it to block websites that make them look bad.

&quot;It threatens the very basis of academic freedom and net neutrality&quot;<p>So pretentious, did a teenager write this?