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Comment by BooneJS | Hacker News Reader

My kids are in the middle of their finals week. What a mess. Universities know nothing, Canvas claims to be in a "scheduled maintenance", and one Prof claims to "not have any copies of material offline" which seems pretty negligent. Sounds like one section of a popular class will be doing paper exams while other sections had Canvas-based "half points for 2nd attempt"-type exams earlier today. How soon before names & grades appear in data dumps?

This would be like TurboTax "scheduling maintenance" on April 14th in the US.

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The "Scheduled Maintenance" is just total B.S. and just honestly makes them look worse. Apparently according to their status pages this is what 99.996% uptime looks like. Pay attention lol.

It has been over 5 hours now and there has not been any communication about this being an attack, despite many of us seeing the ShinyHunters message on the login page.

There is a lot of people who likely are unaware the latest outage is because they were compromised again.

Them marking the incident as 'Under Maintenance' means the status page isn't reporting this as an outage and adding to downtime%.

Once we hit 8h 45m SLA has been broken. https://uptime.is/99.9 https://www.instructure.com/trust-center/availability

Compromised again? This is a separate in ident to the one seen yesterday?

Correct.

The incident yesterday was technically from April 28th, with most communications coming out on the 2nd and 3rd, with it being "Resolved" yesterday.

This incident is the second attack, because they failed to secure their infra again. Everything being reported is a bit delayed, which makes it seem like this is a single attack, not technically two instances.

Once again, an example of why corporations should not have free speech. Corporate statements that are transparent lies should be criminally actionable.

I was going to make a joke that they should have just taken a page from the military and said “Rapid Unscheduled Maintenance”, but I guess that’s actually the phrase for it.

> one Prof claims to "not have any copies of material offline" which seems pretty negligent

It's not unreasonable that non-technical people would expect paid cloud services to be good custodians of the data entrusted to them.

These services also do everything they can to encourage you to work within the online platform rather then working offline and then uploading.

For example, there's no easy way to author a quiz, set up the answers offline and then later upload it.

My daughter is in 3rd grade and has to do assignments online.

Last month it was a presentation. She had to make a poster that would be displayed on the big electronic "whiteboard" running Windows of some sort. The page layout software was so terrible that she repeatedly deleted the entire thing on accident moving text around.

This month, it was a short paper she had to write in Word, but through Teams. Literally, the Word icon is in the Teams sidebar, and she also had all kinds of trouble with it freezing or misbehaving.

In both cases, I advised her to write all the content in Notes in macOS and when she had it all ready to go we'd paste it into the crappy software so she didn't have to worry about losing any more work.

Long story short, she's non-technical and she's learned a very valuable lesson about these systems and how much trust to place in them.

Crazy that kids data are getting leaked before they even had a chance to properly understand the consequences and consent to it being used

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