NYU Website Hacked | Hacker News Reader

NYU Website Hacked

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23 pointsmikevm28 comments

I own the nyu.scool domain. I contacted them years ago to tell them this is a security risk and they should take it and they didn’t bother to respond.

MIT.school is the same story except they sent lawyers after me and sued me.

These orgs do not have competent security teams.

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43446571

This data should be available with a FOIA, or even better it should be proactively published by colleges online. It should not take hacking to bring this information to light.

The interesting question is, now that this information has been publicized, will the DoJ pursue a civil rights case for what appears to be a fairly blatant case of racial discrimination against white and Asian students?

Excluding foreign students & "other", NYU is already 70% total non-Hispanic White (30%) & Asian (40%), rather higher % than within the overall US population 46% total non-Hispanic White (40%)/ Asian (6%).

And a huge % of the foreign students are Asian as well.

College admissions are not a single-metric first-past-the-post process like time to run a marathon or votes won in an election.

Hard to argue whatever balance of quantitative/qualitative inputs they are using actually harms Asian admissions.

I can accept the argument that they are trying to be inclusive towards disadvantaged students, and it just happens that racial make up of poor but qualified students lean towards black or hispanic.

Is that the reality? or is it middle class and less advantaged white/asian kids giving way to middle class black/hispanic ones? Or worse, is it simply raising the bar for asians because there are too many of them in higher education like they did to jews?

NYU is a terrible example to pick this fight over, given the stats I posted though.

1) The school is already 40% Asian and only 7% Black. How much higher further should we expect those numbers to move from their demographics (6% Asian / 13% Black). If it was 46% Asian and 1% Black how different would those GPA stats even be? Not much! How about 46.5% Asian and 0.5% Black? When would you be pleased?

2) Its a huge liberal arts, emphasis on the ARTS school. Nearly 20% of the school pursues ART degrees. GPA is not even the correct measure for admissions for that type of degree. Generally it's a portfolio of work. Go do this GPA-only analysis on a college's STEM program admissions or at a pure Engineering school.

Anyway, NYU has always been in my mind a "pretty good college for kids with enough money who want to have fun living in Downtown Manhattan for 4 years on their parents dime". Its selectivity is outsized to its academic quality.

I'm sure the DoJ will love to hear how they came up with a "holistic" qualitative admissions process that just happens to discriminate based on race, just like they were doing prior to the Supreme Court's ruling.

For context, it looks like the same person (people?) hacked the University of Minnesota in 2023.

(Sorry for bad source.) https://datafort.com/university-of-minnesota-hit-with-lawsui...

Ethical hacker:

- Identifies universities illegally racially discriminating

- Provides all the data needed to prove it

- Removes all the PII

NYU has no moral ground to stand on. They got owned by the nicest possible hacker.

They failed to fully remove the PII.

Do you see a reason to trust the data is real?

Any independent confirmation the linked data is genuine or are we just expected to trust it?

I'm also not clear why GPA/SAT/ACT are the singular measure of fairness of admissions at, of all schools.. NYU, which is emphatically NOT a STEM school.

17% of kids graduate with Visual & Performing Arts degrees at NYU. What relevance do test scores have for their admissions vs a portfolio of their work/performances?

Math, Engineering and CS are under 20% of enrollees.

NYU applicant students on reddit are saying they searched and found their data, apparently despite the hacker's claim, not all identifying information has been deleted.

So in addition to a admissions scandal, this is also a rather critical info breach.

So in addition to being a racist, the hacker is also a moron?

Many such cases.

I don't think they are a moron, I feel it's a deliberate 'oopsie tee hee' type of thing, where they cleaned enough to pretend they did some due diligence, but still left enough to allow people to verify its authenticity.

A less severe moronic decision was pulling in thousands of lines of Tailwind for the world's simplest webpage.

racist for exposing the truth? OH NOESSSS

It could have made up entries added to authentic ones, but if you know someone who has applied to NYU in the past few decades you can easily verify its authenticity by asking if their data is accurate. (Names were supposed to be redacted by the hacker but they missed a column in one of the CSVs)

That or edited entries. I don't have a clear idea how many you'd need to verify to even start putting trust in the data as a whole. How many people are listed? Libreoffice can only load the first 1,048,576 rows here.

Can someone explain it to me what the hackers actually meant and what the school is supposed to do? Mistreat these Asian kids with stern parents who force them to study until late night - because what? I believe it's barking up the wrong tree.

The hackers insinuate that the school is discriminating against white and asian applicants, in favor of black applicants.

If you look at % breakdowns of elite universities now (though I sort of hesitate to include NYU in that bucket..), one of the biggest / fastest growing groups would be how many foreign nationals they admit now vs 10/20/30 years ago.

For a lot of these schools, foreign admissions are a big economic contributor because foreign nationals pay full freight (plus sometimes additional costs/fees). From wikipedia in 2022 the largest racial group at NYU was actually foreign nationals at 24%, with current estimates as high as 28%.

After that the remaining 76%, the biggest groups are - 23% White & 19% Asian anyway. If you decompose the foreign national numbers down, they are majority European & Asian country of origin. From some light googling, it would seem 15% of NYU students are Chinese & Indian nationals, above and beyond the 19% Asian American. So overall its hard to see admissions as being terribly discriminatory in this particular regard at NYU..

It's telling that, again and again, people can't simply point out issues with affirmative action without resorting to racial slurs.

Impossible to have adult conversations with these types of provocateurs.

People point out issues with affirmative action literally all the time without racial slurs, it's how the majority of discussions on the topic go. What does it mean for you to see a rare instance of extremist hackers defacing a website, and go "it's telling", you are hinting that some of your confirmation bias got fueled while avoiding being more than vague about your actual thoughts.

Where is the adult conversation you claimed to want? We can talk about the reality that racial discrimination fuels racial tensions in general. That we have now reached a point in society where there are numerous mismatches in discrimination, in some places you are likely to be discriminated against if you're black, in some places you are likely to be discriminated against if you are white. The goal of ending racial discrimination was to end discrimination not just shift around the targets. It's unfortunate how people don't seem to realize that.

College admissions have been a disaster for some time, whether it be discrimination, legacy, prep school pipeline corruption or affirmative action leading to "positive discrimination". Asians are obviously being adversely impacted today.

The real problem is classism and economic diversity more than racial diversity now. Schools like Harvard are moderately diverse on race, but economically not at all.. something like 90% of kids come from families that are upper income.

If you are trying to raise all boats, then economic class is a better method since given the relative amount of people .. there are actually more poor white people than any other race, even if white people experience poverty at a relatively lower % rate.

This also avoids all the racial resentment / reverse racism issues.

So there's your adult conversation, but I don't think OP posting a link to a racist defacement of a website was looking for that.

I agree with your points, especially about economic class. I've been thinking since the original occupy wall street protests that there's been a shift towards pitting people against each other on the basis of other identity rather than class. Maybe it's been an intentional push to create infighting and divert people away from eating the rich or whatever.

I usually don't pay too much mind to trying to guess what the OP might want, rather the topic has been raised here so it's a good conversation to have.

> Where is the adult conversation you claimed to want?

There is a place for a conversation on the merits of affirmative action, but this isn't that place.

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