Hacker News Reader

Comment by shtylman | Hacker News Reader

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.

Obviously I don't know for sure but I would venture to bet this block was more an automated response than malicious intent against the site.

View on HN

The article indicates otherwise.

The issue isn't that Yale cut off the sites access to the school's servers. The issue is that Yale cut off their students access to the site. Furthermore Yale and the site were apparently in dialog before the block, and Yale raised copyright concerns (probably bullshit, unless they were copying course descriptions or something like that (I suspect course descriptions were involved initially): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#Unit...).

It's not DoS, you don't present a splash page for offenders in that regard. I know the platform (PAN-OS) very well and that page is a URL filtering profile splash. It's actually a custom URL category (shown at bottom) that they can update via white and black lists.

> Over 2,000 students out of a campus of 5,000 were using it as of today noon, when the Yale administration began censoring it using traffic inspection. They had contacted us warning that we were using copyrighted data.

It doesn't seem automated, and if there was a DoS wouldn't they just go out and say so?

The data was scraped quite some time ago. There is no issue with a DoS on the Yale servers.

This is very unfortunate that they are doing this if the data was scraped and not hitting their servers. Is it that some part of the data they think is copyrighted (like grades) versus just courses?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com