{"id":186443,"date":"2014-01-20T20:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T01:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/01\/20\/wanker-of-the-day-yale-university\/"},"modified":"2014-01-20T20:37:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T01:37:00","slug":"wanker-of-the-day-yale-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/01\/20\/wanker-of-the-day-yale-university\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanker of the Day: Yale University"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>    <\/a>
Before Plugin                                    After Plugin   <\/i><\/div>\n

Yale has a course selection website, and a two students, Harry Yu and Peter Xu, came up with a personal website that aggregated the ratings so that students could look at ratings and workload when selecting a course.<\/p>\n

Yale blocked the site, and threatened disciplinary action against them so another student, Sean Haufler,  wrote a Google Chrome shortcut that does this on the fly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Basically, Yale does not want students to access this data in a coherent way, because, tenured professors who cannot or will not teach do not want students avoiding their courses:<\/p>\n

In January 2012, two Yale students named Harry Yu and Peter Xu built a replacement to Yale\u2019s official course selection website. They it called YBB+ (Yale Bluebook Plus), a \u201cplus\u201d version of the Yale-owned site, called Yale Bluebook. YBB+ offered different functionality from the official site, allowing students to sort courses by average rating and workload. The official Yale Bluebook, rather, showed a visual graph of the distribution of student ratings as well as a list of written student reviews. YBB+ offered a more lightweight user interface and facilitated easier comparison of course statistics. Students loved it. A significant portion of the student body started using it.<\/span>

<\/span>Fast-forward two years. Last Friday (1\/10\/14), Yale blocked YBB+\u2019s IP address on the school network without warning. When contacted, Yale said that YBB+ infringed upon Yale\u2019s trademark. Harry and Peter quickly removed the Yale name from the site, rebranded it as CourseTable and relaunched. Yale blocked the website again, declaring the website to be malicious activity.<\/span>

<\/span>Later that weekend, Yale\u2019s administration told the student developers that the school didn\u2019t approve of the use of its course evaluation data, saying that their website \u201clet students see the averaged evaluations far too easily\u201d. Harry and Peter were told to remove the feature from the CourseTable website or else they would be referred to the school\u2019s punishment committee.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then it hit the internet:<\/p>\n

Finally, Mary Miller, the Dean of Yale College, wrote an open letter to Yale on Friday night. In this letter, she defended Yale\u2019s decision to censor Harry and Peter\u2019s website and course rating functionality, stating: <\/span>

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[Yale\u2019s course] evaluations\u2026 became available to students only in recent years and with the understanding that the information they made available to students would appear only as it currently appears on Yale\u2019s sites \u2014 in its entirety.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


<\/span>Worded less diplomatically, it appears the Dean of Yale College is expressing to students that, \u201cYou can use our course evaluation data, but only if you view the data as we tell you to view it<\/b>\u201d.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis original<\/i>)<\/p>\n

And there were the inevitable claims of copyright and trademark infringement, and Mr. Haufler came up with his solution:<\/p>\n

The story does not end here, however, since there\u2019s a way to distinguish the freedom of speech issue from the copyright claims. What if someone made a piece of software that displays Yale\u2019s course evaluation data in a way that Yale disapproves of, while also (1) not infringing on Yale\u2019s copyrights or trademarks, (2) not storing any sensitive data, (3) not scraping or collecting Yale\u2019s data, and (4) not causing damages to Yale\u2019s network or servers? If Yale censors this piece of software or punishes the software developer, it would clearly characterize Yale as an institution where having authority over students trumps freedom of speech.<\/span>

<\/span>Guess what? I made it last night.<\/span>

<\/span>I built a Chrome Extension called Banned Bluebook. It modifies the Chrome browser to add CourseTable\u2019s functionality to Yale\u2019s official course selection website, showing the course\u2019s average rating and workload next to each search result. It also allows students to sort these courses by rating and workload. This is the original site, and this is the site with Banned Bluebook enabled (this demo uses randomly generated rating values).<\/span>

<\/span>Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don\u2019t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale\u2019s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It\u2019s 100% kosher.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>If Yale denies this right, I\u2019ll see you at the punishment committee.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s hoping that Yale backs down.  If not, I hope that you talk to the ACLU.<\/p>\n

In my day, of course, we had to talk to each other, I recall a materials course, taught by a Professor Clapp, was called “Catching the Clapp,” but I only discovered that after<\/b> I was half way through the class.<\/p>\n

I appreciate the value of tenure, but this should not be a justification for erecting the, “The Great Firewall of Yale<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

It’s not like their jobs are at stake over this, just their egos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Before Plugin                                    After Plugin   Yale has a course selection website, and a two students, Harry Yu and Peter Xu, came up with a personal website that aggregated the ratings so that students could look at ratings and workload when selecting a course. Yale blocked the site, and threatened disciplinary action …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1134,968,1051,997,1109,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-education","category-hypocrisy","category-internet","category-ip","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}