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March 09, 2005
Should You Be Denied Admission for Wanting to Know if You Were Admitted?
Harvard and MIT business schools are pulling their offers of admission from folks who followed a hacker's instructions and viewed their admission status early on the schools' websites. In this era of heightened sensitivity to business ethics - when the CEO of Boeing can be fired for having a consensual affair - the schools think it is right to crack down on hacks. Hacking, by the way, is an MIT tradition - granted, the term was originally used for random pranks (like stealing a car, dis-assembling it and re-assembling it on top of a building). Still, I don't think anyone was prosecuted for the aforementioned car jacking. Although, I don't think their paper trail was quite as obvious as the electronic one left by business school wannabes.
More info from Jay Lindsay, AP reporter: "Harvard, MIT Deny Admissions for Computer Peeking: Rejects Calls Schools' Reaction to Web Page 'Hack' Excessive" via AIM
Posted by cj at March 9, 2005 09:35 AM
Comments
From what I've heard, the "hack" was to legitimately log on as yourself, then to change the URL address in the browser from, say "http://www.harvard.edu/hyoun.html" to "http://www.harvard.edu/adminhyoun.html." If anything, it was shoddy security because students shouldn't have had access to their own admissions files at all.
Although I can understand the reluctance to not want people to cheat, this "hack" just seems too easy to resist. If someone had told me as a college student that by changing a few characters in my website browser, I could find my admissions status, I'd have a hell of a time resisting.
Admittingly,
Hyoun
Posted by: Hyoun at March 11, 2005 11:55 PM