Business schools redefine hacking to “stuff that a 7-year-old could do” (2005)

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/03/08/

by asciilifeform • 17 years ago

82 46 17 years ago

blogs.law.harvard.edu

Misleading headline, particularly the quotes. In this article no school said any such thing, only the author in creating an analogy.

Synopsis: Business schools outsource their student application web app, said web app has bug that allows students to change GET parameters and see their acceptance status early. Exploit is posted to BusinessWeek forums, and at least some of those students who tried the hack were denied admission to Harvard.

quizbiz2• 17 years ago

Harvard != MIT

scott_s2• 17 years ago

The students were denied admission to Harvard. MIT came up because the author supervised MIT students creating an application with similar requirements.

indiejade• 17 years ago

The MS&E program I applied to at Stanford University also routed me through ApplyYourself, which I thought seemed like a really deprecated site. But hey, if it's an MS&E program and a bigwig Uni name, who was I to question?

https://app.applyyourself.com/?id=SU-GRAD

All in all, it was an awful, horrible experience (the website application). What a disgrace to supposed prestigious Universities. Not to mention a waste of pompous application fees for many hopefuls.

omnipresent13• 17 years ago

Article definitely did not live up to its title. Author definitely got some eyeballs though....and eyeballs == money?

scott_s2• 17 years ago

The title was misleading, but what he talked about was interesting anyway. In this case, eyeballs don't equal money. This is a Harvard professor's blog with no ads.

Goladus• 17 years ago

I was not mislead by the headline. It is open to more than one interpretation of course, but it is accurate (and sort of humorous) as written.

The whole point of the article is a discussion about the line between "exploit" and "incredibly boneheaded app implementation" and where the responsibility should lie.

mquander3• 17 years ago

Top-tier schools already admit students based on a lot of fairly arbitrary criteria, so it doesn't seem like a very big deal to add "does not tinker with school-related web applications" onto the Harvard list.

gaius4• 17 years ago

That is particularly arbitrary considering how many HBS grads were discovered to have been involved in finance scams recently.

Cecil• 17 years ago

Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/2341213&tid=...

edw519• 17 years ago

"Instead of students studying Literature, Art, History, and Science they would be going through the motions of a scholar while occupying their minds with things that formerly had been learned at a desk as an apprentice in a dreary Victorian counting house."

Wow, that may be the best description of the concerns of the MBA I've ever read.

I have my MBA and, to this day, I still don't know how I feel about it. Sure, it covered a lot of valuable theory and it's opened doors, but then again I often wonder if the time would have been better spent in industry, honing my skills in the trenches.

The #1 quote I remember from one of my professors, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."

quizbiz2• 17 years ago

It seems business is very applicable in the real world, making relationships, making the most of them. Why do more academic courses like Economics or Political Science have such a better reputation?

emzo• 17 years ago

I have to agree. Even though I don't like to admit it, maybe my time in higher education would have been better spent studying a business related subject. If you're passionate enough about CS/hacking, there's so much info available online these days, you'll learn just as much by immersing yourself in the hacker communities in your own time as you would have studying for a degree.

timwiseman• 17 years ago

This is a good question. Personally, it seems to me that degrees in business are of a different kind than more academic courses, but not lesser.

This difference in kind may explain some of the attitudes that are out there though. MBA's are relatively new in terms of degrees and they are much more applied than most degrees. This is simply different from what other students are working on and people tend to be disdainful of what is different, especially if it is also new. This is just an off the cuff thought, but it seems to fit.

sbt• 17 years ago

Sure. I think it's accepted that you go to business school to network with students with rich parents. A friend of mine applying said that if she didn't get into any of the top 5 programs, it wasn't worth going.

jraines2• 17 years ago

Friend of mine went to one that's around #25. His offer coming out was $35K more than the job he left to attend the program full time. And he moved fields from one he didn't like (healthcare) to one he did (marketing). No rich parents involved. Sample size of 1 FTW!

carbon8• 17 years ago

That's only harvard, but harvard is still the center of a lot of business research. Of course, the vast majority of people getting MBAs from top-tier schools got in through hard work throughout their lives.

omnipresent13• 17 years ago

I wonder how ApplyYourself found out which students took a peek? Were they dumb enough not to implement access at the Gatekeeper level but smart enough to some how keep a track, if someone did?

mquander3• 17 years ago

It seems probable that they just looked at the BusinessWeek forums on which the exploit was posted, and denied the applicants who they saw discussing it.

omnipresent13• 17 years ago

If thats the case, its very unreliable. Denying admission based on a post on a forum...gotta love the digital age.

tptacek• 17 years ago

Keeping track of what URLs people are hitting is trivial on any application server.

blasdel• 17 years ago

That presupposes not just that ApplyYourself is in any way competent (evidence points to dubious), but that they are at all communicative with the admissions grunts.

zain• 17 years ago

Note, this article is from March 2005.

keefe• 17 years ago

title = troll, rtfa

tezza• 17 years ago

Hacking :: stuff that a 7-year-old could do

Wow, Python makes it that easy! ( just a quick laugh )

dschobel• 17 years ago

Odd choice for the headline. I think the much more choice quote from Greenspun is this:

All the smart young Americans have gone to law, business, and medical school. Companies don’t like to hire old people (> 30 years) to write computer programs because it saddens them to see old folks doing something so degrading.

(he's attributing this mentality to the HBS lot)

I'm seeing this a lot now that I've gotten into development in the financial industry.

I think for some people developers will always be inseparably tied to the stereotypical unkempt and petulant tech-support guy who troubleshoots Windows boxes all day.

It's not a particularly well-respected profession unless you're doing the start-up thing in which case you're only respected because of the business aspect (and your potential to become a millionaire by 30), not the cool/hard things you may doing on the technology side.

notirk• 17 years ago

I'm guessing this bug was fixed, but I applied to b-school this summer (starting part-time in the fall) and ApplyYourself was used for a few of the schools I applied to (NYU Stern, Fordham, NYU-Poly). From a front end/end user interaction point of view, it did not strike me as a well made system. I'm more an IT guy and not a programmer but I know a shoddy website when I use one. I applied to multiple programs at one school and the information could not be shared, it actually lost one of my applications at one point.

pguerin• 17 years ago

hahaha this reminds me of a discussion I just had today with a student at the business school of my university. He was pissed off at the "IT people" because they know nothing about management and never finishes on time their projects. The way he talked to me was as if it was all our fault and that we were simply lazy. He was agressive to me even if he never worked with me and told me to check the "new york" methodology and the "ITIL" best practices for doing IT services. I haven't found them on google, does someone know anything about that?

It's great to live in a world where management loves and respect us! A world where they try to understand what is hard about software development instead of thinking about how much time it takes to "place a button there" :)

gaius4• 17 years ago

He's upset that they don't know about his specialist subject, yet is completely ignorant about theirs. And I bet he doesn't get why none of his employees respect him either.

whatusername2• 17 years ago

ITIL is pretty standard for managing IT Infrastructure. So standard in fact that http://www.google.com.au/search?q=itil maybe returns 1 result that isn't about ITIL in the top 50.

If you can't google for something as basic as that - then maybe the bus. guy was right about you being lazy.

qohen2• 17 years ago

FWIW, Google.com has the Wikipedia link up top: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastr...

Though it is interesting to see that ITIL originated in the UK, which might explain why not everyone has heard of it.

BTW, here's an article from '05 describing ITIL use in the US (and ITIL's history): http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/95672

gaius4• 17 years ago

ITIL is pretty standard for managing IT Infrastructure.

It's pretty standard for managing the government IT infrastructure. They're what, GBP 20Bn over budget on the NHS alone... And it seems every week there's a story in the papers about them losing a million people's personal data. ITIL is a red flag on anyone's CV IMHO.

nopal• 17 years ago

As progressively dumber programmers build progressively more complex systems we will see more of this kind of attempt to paper over coding mistakes with lawyers, sanctions, policies, and laws.

How very true.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

And this would have been the submission title, too, if it weren't for the nonsensical 80-character limit.

aptimpropriety• 17 years ago

One of the more interesting parts of the college application process (there weren't many) was comparing the websites of top-tier schools. Echoing what the writer said - it's amazing how poor the structure, workflow, security and general design the web systems of these schools with $X-billion endowment are.

MIT stood out as an exception; the rest I dealt with were par at best. Fast forward two years - I now attend an ivy league school with what I would consider a laughable website and data storage system.

"You must close your browser to log out of the system" - I don't even have to probe to know it's bad.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Huh, if they were disqualifying students for modifying URLs, I wonder how hard it'd be to scan the results for all students applying.

buugs• 17 years ago

I thought the fandango thing was pretty much fair game as that is one of the first thing people learn, or should learn, about web scripting is what can be controlled by the browser versus controlled by the server.

And in a perfect world the programmer would have made up the price lost not the theatre nor fandango.

Business schools redefine hacking to “stuff that a 7-year-old could do” (2005)

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