Don’t wuss out and cry about some students in Princeton hacking your web site. Start a good elite hacking war that can dazzle seniors in the know deciding which school to go to. Just set a couple of ground rules, and go for it. The competition for students is fierce. All you did is advertise that Princeton doles out computer wizards better than you can. Way to go.
A Yale-Princeton hacking war, how amusing.
I guess it will help take their minds off not being able to get into a real school 
Hacking?
By supplying the required information, I fail to see how this a hack.
Granted they may have breached privacy rules, but hacking, I don’t think so.
I’m not sure if it would be considered a hack, but it is a serious breach of security and confidentiality. If the person who did it had access to the information that could get them into the system at Yale, they have access to get them into medical records, credit records, basically anything they want to. One thing Yale is strict on is confidentiality of students and staff memebers, due to the fact that many rich or famous people have gone there. The fact that this could happen raises serious issues on the security of the system for any school that is using that system.
Any lawyers care to comment? I’m pretty sure (INAL) that using the student’s SSN for a purpose other than that stated on the application is a violation of federal law.
Any lawyers care to comment? I’m pretty sure (INAL) that using the student’s SSN for a purpose other than that stated on the application is a violation of federal law.
Yes, the media should NEVER have used the word “hack” and according to reports I have seen, it wasn’t students doing it.
This is an outrageous story and a real black mark on Princeton. We’re stunned in my office. My boss had not seen the story yet so we got the pleasure of telling her. Her mouth was literally hanging open.
Cranky,
'Twasn’t the media, but the OP here, AFACT that said it was students doing it.
And let’s not get into the whole definition thing about hacking. Most folks (you know, like the intended audience of the people writing the news reports) see any unauthorized access to information on a computer as hacking. Always handy to write in the language of the person reading your work.
http://www.browndailyherald.com/stories.cfm?ID=4743:
Brown accepted 2,637 of its 11,350 applicants, or 15.9 percent
Harvard received 19,009 applications and admitted 2,042 students.
Princeton admitted 1,675 of its 14,287 applicants.
Yale admitted 2,000 of 14,809 applicants.
Columbia offered spots to 2,367 of its 16,557
Cornell reduced its acceptance rate from 30.5 percent to 25.6 percent, admitting 5,512 of its 21,518 applicants.
Dartmouth accepted 22.8 percent of its applicants. received 19,009 applications and admitted 2,042 students.
It doesn’t seem like they are hurting for applicants. Unless you mean there is a small elite group of students these schools fight over?
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=19455
“Yale officials learned of the security breach after Princeton admissions officials mentioned it informally during an Ivy League deans’ conference in June.”
If you are going to pull illegal crap like this, would you mind not mentioning it to the people whose system you have violated??:rolleyes:
gigi, did YOU leave the University of Pennsylvania off the list, or did the Brown Daily Herald?
[sub]Poor Penn bastards…[/sub]
No numbers given for Penn, just that their acceptance rate was lower. “The ugly duckling of the Ivy League”, according to one of my college search guides.
Actually, they do. Or, more precisely, they trade them the way sports teams trade prospects. Each school looks over applicants and their financial needs and records and decides who would be the best mix for their school. Since many applicants will be applying to more than one of the same schools, the schools get together during the selection process and decide which students they want and which they are willing to “exchange” for other students. They then prepare scholarship and aid packages tailored to “encourage” the students to select the school that claimed them in the trade.
Note that the reason Princeton was able to look at the files was that they had all the relevant information (name, SSN, birth date) to access the Yale system for the same students who had also applied to Princeton.
I suspect that rather than a serious attempt to damage Yale’s “position” or interfere with the students, this was a somewhat innocent (from the Latin “not harmful”) if UTTERLY BONEHEADED desire to just “poke around” on the system and see what was there. Pretty stupid thing to lose one’s job over, but some people have more curiosity than sense.
Wow, I’d need to see a cite for this. I know that they had a loose coalition which reviewed aid packages to amke sure they were equal, to (supposedly) make sure that students could make decisions solely on the fit of the school to their needs, interests, and so on. However, the justice department wasn’t keen on this and they all stopped voluntarily in the early 1990s, except MIT chose to fight it in court.
You could be right that they have stopped. I would question that it happened in the early 1990s as I first saw reports (plural) on it around 2000. Since I won’t be attending any of these schools and I am only going to have my son apply to Harvard and not any other Ivy League outfit, I haven’t kept up on it.
This article from The Wall Street Journal implies that the cessation of such trading is only going to begin this year.