1 karma · joined February 27, 2024
Maybe university IT departments are staffed by people. Maybe even at the college board it's just some IT guys trying to keep a shitty platform working. Maybe they did the best they could working within their constraints and they expected the same from students who have a vested interest in getting their results submitted. Maybe this is just much ado about nothing.
Ok, first of, why should I (as an institution) care about the people unable to fulfil the conditions of my test? Maybe I only want people with a basic understanding of file formats because chances are they will have less issues with future applications?
> They did need to provide detailed instructions ahead of time, including possible issues with unsupported formats.
They send out a message a week before the tests. The website only accepted the allowed formats. You could complain about them using Twitter to send out that message but you are not.
> They didn't need to accept heif files. They did need to provide detailed instructions ahead of time, including possible issues with unsupported formats.
They did not accept .heic files (see the source from the upload js file). They did provide a list of supported files. Maybe the handholding should stop at some point?
else if (!isAllowedExtension)
error = { title: 'This file type is not acceptable.', details: 'Please check the requirements, save your file in one of the accepted
formats, and resubmit.' }
You seriously over-estimate the "tech-savviness" of the average student and that really is part of the issue I'm pointing out here.
You can shift responsibility for that knowledge wherever you want but I would say that at the age between 16 and 19 (which google tells me is the average age for AP classes) I would expect that knowledge from someone applying for AP credit. And if someone didn't know what the accepted file types (as stated in the FAQ) meant at that age I'd expect them to figure it out for themselves.
Just how when you take your drivers test you should actually be able to operate your vehicle and know the laws around operating a motor vehicle aside from the explicit knowledge required from you in the test. But I understand how this might be a foreign concept for someone from the US.
Understanding the conditions of your test is part of the test. And your doctor doesn't have to know. His toolchain forces him to use certain programs and settings. If anything is set up wrong, your MRI image is just a worthless CD-R.
>This highlights the level of knowledge the users of this application have in this area. The developers should have made it Painfully Clear that uploading directly from an iPhone isn't supported.
They did. The supported file formats were clearly stated. Your issue here is with apple.
>I agree they should learn this stuff, but don't think it should cost them their grade to do so.
It doesn't. They can retake the test without punishment.
>Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't increase public understanding of these "slightly-technical" topics but I think we're a long way off and we can't expect that understanding just yet.
I disagree. The sooner people learn that renaming a file does not constitute conversion the better. When I was a student 15 years ago it was painfully clear you could not upload the 50MB .tif file your scanner spat out (silly websites at the time would just not take 50MB uploads most of the time...). I think this "slightly-technical" knowledge is something akin to correct spelling and grammar. It's fine if you disagree but, in my opinion (even if that was not the intent of the college board), this is not a bad lesson to teach.
If you stay in the "regular" apple workflow everything is fine: iphone camera -> icloud/photos (airdrop/photos) -> safari. If you deviate at certain points though the workflow breaks down. Whose fault is that?
Knowing a file type is an "esoteric technical requirement" ?
Yes, this comment is for real. I'm the head of IT for a university and we do online applications. We actually accept everything within a given size requirement (which people are unable to respect). I have a bunch of scripts that run over all applications in the end to put them in the right formats, to do OCR for the photos of a printed PDF form that has been filled out by hand in pencil, I even run a script to scrape annotations in PDF portfolios to scrape video links and pass them to youtube-dl, to ensure everything submitted gets picked up and is provided for evaluation.
This is why I think it would be nice if there was at least some responsibility on the part of the student.
Yes, being able to understand the conditions should maybe be part of passing the test. Like I said, could the upload form have handled this better? Sure, although I have not read enough to understand if this was actually the upload form failing. The OP article claims "Spencer ... tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG" which is not how you convert files. Maybe students learning that early on is not a bad thing?
But if I got this right the upload page stated the accepted file formats, why should they accept anything else? Sure, there are workarounds to handle uploading .heic files and automatic conversion works in certain cases but why should they care? The onus is on the user to ensure his submission is correct.
EDIT: I just tried .heic files on my Surface and had to install an MS store app to actually be able to open .heic files in full resolution.
https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/p/heif-bilderweiterungen/9pm...
EDIT2: I guess for me it boils down to, why should we coddle the applicants? Being able to understand the conditions of a test is not an unreasonable hardship. From that I gathered the website stated the accepted file formats. The uploader source suggests it did refuse certain file formats. There are technical solutions for this/these problem(s) and of course it would be nice if every system would be perfect. But it would also be nice if people would just work within the given constraints of a system.
Getting the join by browser link apparently can be an issues but at least in the edu account I manage there is an admin setting to always provide the join with browser link.
We still do not have any evidence that the PRC has access to unencrypted Zoom server logs and frankly I assume we would have the same (or worse) issues I had with my tests from Iran that either SIP/WebRTC doesn't work or appears to be intercepted. So, at least for me and my users, Zoom is the most accessible and "least worst" solution.
To me, these look like things that could be used for local escalation or MITM attacks. This is not good but frankly, for most of Zooms use cases, it's not an issue. The only frightening thing is the turbojpeg.dll one. A POC that leads to an RCE or even a crash would be devastating for Zoom, especially considering the amount of edu setups that don't enforce passwords even now.
IDK, for me and the edu organization I'm responsible for Zoom has been a great offering (especially considering the pricing they were able to offer by default for edu and after very little negotiation) but we are actively looking at teams as a successor for the next semester. Zoom has had 3 killer features over teams (virtual background, easy dial-in, no effort guests) and all of them have gone away now with the recent teams changes. If teams finally gets customer skype calling figured out Zoom will most likely be done in the edu field because that's quite a big part of switching to teams for an all out integrated comms solution, especially since you can't use your office 365 account for consumer skype.
But, this is just wrong. In Germany we did speak out when they came for the communists, the socialists, the unions and the jews. Niemöllers argument was relevant in 1937 when he was arrested and I appreciate that you picked up on it but frankly it's different here in Germany. We do still speak out against discrimination against all of them. Maybe E2E encryption in a chat application is just not as pressing as the things Niemöller talked about at the time.
Me administering a Zoom account for my fellow employees and my students does not erode anybodies right. For me it is a choice between a GDPR compliant vendor and a vendor that does not care about the GDPR. Personally I have had good experiences with the GDPR (Facebook finally having to delete my account even though I would not verify it with a personal ID and cell phone number after I went through the irish data protection authority) and Zoom claims to be GDPR compliant.
So, frankly I'm not sure what you are talking about. It seems like you are going for a slippery slope argument I don't agree with.
Good job discrediting my post though. It's not like Cisco basically told everybody in a KB that if you want to use the same features Zoom provides (or a Linux client, or desktop sharing or breakout rooms or audio transcription or waiting rooms or...) you would have to give up every encryption feature Webex provides. But I assume you are a seasoned Webex admin and can provide us some insight into why you are using webex in contrast any other solution. Or you are trolling, whatever.
Your point does not stand on its own.
And assuming I'll consider switching to webex the response to encryption in webex is this: https://www.webex.com/content/dam/Webex/eopi/Americas/USA/en...
Which 404's and basically represents my experience with Cisco: "We don't give a shit about you, you already payed us.". Frankly Webex could host the next coming of Jesus and I would not give them any more money.
A good part of that is corporations not giving back to OSS but I also think that a large part of OSS developers are missing the point (I keep remembering the story of that one these OSS guy trying to get his printer working but I can't remember his name to find the link).
The only concerning thing for me is, why would they lie about using AES-256 when none of my users (and I assume most of their users) would care in any way about AES-256 vs. AES-128 in ECB mode. Why would they lie?
Even after this, having my users conducting university lessons over something that might be decrypted in China is honestly not that big of an issue. I would of course prefer it if these meetings would be private from the PRCs scrutiny but at least in my situation (and I think most educational contexts) this is not really that important.
Mumble: Mumble is amazing. I used it extensively playing EVE Online and what can be done with mumble with regards to external authentication and integration is really great. As an enterprise solution, if I have to weigh my time versus expenditure, it's not worth it though, I'll go with MS Teams or Slack.
Asterisk/SIP: I actually ran an asterisk PBX with a self made IVR solution for a project at my previous employer and handled a lot of calls with it and saved a load of money compared to what the callcenter would have charged. Asterisk is great but we are back to the time/expenditure calculation again. I can buy a PBX solution and pay someone to maintain it for far less then me setting up Asterisk. I'd rather just buy a PBX and a support contract. For IVR the calculation gets more complicated.
Jitsi: Jitsi meet is really great. It's right in that sweetspot where Skype begins to fail for decent conferences (>4 people) and where I'm invested that much that I want someone to blame and a service contract if my meetings get large enough. If you exceed that threshold (in my testing it has been somewhere between 15 and 30 participants) you want to pay someone for this service or run your own server/videobridge (still curious why BigBlueButton isn't mentioned here anywhere in all these Zoom topics). As an educational institution with my amount of users, hosting a videobridge or bbb the hosting budget alone would have exceeded our Zoom licensing cost not to mention my time. At least in Germany there is also the issue with not having a contract with the provider and problems this creates with regard to the GDPR.
Jami: I don't actually know this one.
OBS: Nothing can touch OBS. It's an incredibly flexible tool and while it could use some usability improvements it just really is that great. With it's usability downfalls it's also not something you can suggest to a casual user, which is kinda sad. Someone please figure out whatever Zoom is doing with the virtual camera background. Setting a simple picture as background without a green screen frankly is one of their killer features. No one talks bout it but so many people are using this that it has got to be one of their killer features.
XMPP: Is a weird mention for me, since it's not an application but a protocol. Jabber sucks, most XMPP clients suck for normal users. I'm not aware of any decent enterprise solutions.
IRC: Well, IRC is fucking great. I spend so much time on IRC in my youth and I'm fairly certain my earliest linux contact was an IRC bouncer on a friends machine. In the end it's kind of a weird mention as well though, since it's a protocol and not an application. It is also a protocol that is kinda caught between the "I want link preview, VoIP, file sharing, whatever" crowd and the "why is that noobs client spamming my channel with un-interpretable messages" crowd. IRC with a spec upgrade, even if it would induce a permanent netsplit would be great.
I'm not gonna talk about the rest. Nextcloud is great, and with Univentions app server (https://www.univention.de/) is a usable solution that just suffers at scale. Of course I could set up a univention server and nextcloud and imap email and ldap and lots of other things mentioned above but it would cost me a significant amount of money and time and I can have Office 365 basically for free. So, considering I'm spending tax payers money, and I'm in the EU and MS claims to be GDPR compliant... what is my incentive to do any of this?
If I'd have one complaint about Zoom, I'd would be that we had one student unable to join from Iran (which is either because of his ISP blocking certain connections or Zoom actively blocking users from Iran). Zoom excludes users from Iran in their ToU but we assumed that would just be for paying users and have a currently open ticket to figure out what could be the issue.
So, this is my take. Basically if you have the time and money and want to tinker most of these OSS solutions are great and worth it. If you are operating within budget or time constraints there a valid reasons to choose a commercial provider.