Which is the policy I followed when I found that they had stored one of their LDAP admin passwords in a world readable file on the CS servers.
Were I personally impacted, I would just submit information to the media as an anonymous whistleblower to get it fixed.
I’d opt for silence in this case and hope that some future update patches the bug (accidentally or otherwise).
An investigation by the Missouri State Patrol and a MO county later determined that the executive branch screwed up and leaked the SSNs and that the reporter committed no crime.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-crime-educati...
Professors? The problem is tenure.
Those professors aren't great teachers, and I think we shouldn't blame them for it. Instead we should blame the system that forces them to do something they aren't good at.
Nobody actually got punished, that I recall, for bringing a wireless router, but that was the nominal policy for a number of years before someone successfully got it into the annual tuition rollup so it stopped being necessary.
To my recollection from when I left the school years after that, though, there still wasn't campus wifi reliably accessible in the dorms. (Of course, half of them also didn't have reliable air conditioning in muggy humid summers and would blow breakers if you tried putting window units in, so...priorities.)
But, yeah, lots of people skipping straight to comment too.
They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I really love UW and have had a wonderful time here. But this is so demoralizing.
Update #2:
I appreciate you guys for all of your advice.
This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
I'm not planning to pursue this project at this point. If they came up to me at first with the offer to work with them it might be different, but the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.
Also get a second or third opinion. I've sometimes gotten different answers from different lawyers about our prospects of success on things we've called about.
Whoops
It’s also the best way for any customer service rep to eject from an unpleasant exchange. 100% done with you; lawyers problem now.
I've witnessed a couple cases where things went from hiring a lawyer, to sending a letter, to a stalemate where legal bills started getting so expensive that the only winners were the lawyers. When you're dealing with a big bureaucracy you can't count on them giving up at the first sight of a letter from a lawyer.
The legal route also takes time and locks any further conversations into the speed of both sides' lawyers. Time matters in this case because this student needs to get registered for classes, so anything that could stall that process needs to be weighed carefully.
I wouldn't be surprised if this issue magically goes away as soon as the publicity comes around to local news media and/or some alumni with connections.
I would take a look at your Student Legal Aid office and get an appointment. Usually consultations are free.
Most issues can be settled out of court for much cheaper. A good lawyer can help you make that happen.
This is exactly the gotcha. You paid for a service. The outcome isn’t guaranteed.
Even if your app is successful, you still have to pay the programmers. Even if you sell the building, you still have to pay the construction crew. Even if you're packed during dinner service you still have to pay the chef.
None of these scenarios are painted as a pyrrhic victory because you had to pay the people who made it possible. All those people are generally paid hourly too. Is it because a good lawyer will bill you $400/hr? Is it because those generally have a lot more upside financially than simply winning a court case?
I think it's projecting anger from spec attorneys taking 40% of personal injury judgments, or class action attorneys making $50 million in fees when the people affected get checks for $8.72, but neither of those apply here particularly when you're paying an attorney $75 to send a demand letter template on their letterhead.
Oh come on, that's like saying when you involve engineers to build a bridge, the only people who wins are the engineers because you have to pay them.
It was under a thousand bucks so I could have just taken them to small claims court if they didn't fold. That may have worked in my favor.
The moment a journalist looks into they will spot what this actually is.
All we have is the word of some student who is trying to frame themselves positively.
Now it sounds like you’ve got some sociopaths on the line. I would gather information and fish them to get very specific about their request and threat, then kindly turn it around on them. Be prepared to go above their heads all the way to the board if necessary.
You may wish to consider deleting this comment. You can always repost it later after you lawyer up.
Depending on contracts, and local laws, that might be almost legal...
I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a free schedule to hold the class for you. In you're in a frat, great. If you're a bit of an introvert that lives off campus, you're shit out of luck.
I imagine UW is fully aware of this, I cant believe that it's still so much an issue that they felt the jeed to expell you for even having the gall to demo an idea. Absolutely appalling
Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there?
Remembering my time when my friends were in university, some while working, just about no one would have hundreds of dollars to spend on something like that.
If you use that to go long on the stock market, I get it since the S&P500 beats interest rates right now, though there’s a risk. Using it on personal expenses seems like the lowest EV choice!
If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.
I ended up needing to stay an extra semester for a single course my final semester, because I planned poorly and discovered too late that I couldn't get it in my would-have-been-penultimate semester.
Sure, but if you don't have "a couple of hundred dollars", you don't. It's a bit like saying "Why are people poor? Just put $1 million into a savings account, then you'll get enough to survive each month". Great for the ones who can, irrelevant for the ones who can't.
Don't forget you have to buy books, etc., and they cost "a couple of hundred dollars" too.
When I was an undergraduate I was definitely on a knife's edge, but I also often had cash in the bank because I got a big cash infusion annually. I just had to live off a very strict budget at that time to make sure the money would last.
I wouldn't have wanted to rely on this service when I was a student, especially at that cost, but in a pinch I could see situations where it would make sense.
Who? As in not "they" or "the university", but who within the university? Can you tell where the directive is coming from?
If this comes from, say, the Provost's Office then this probably can't be handled internally. (The position of Provost is the #2 position at a university, and the provost usually runs the show while the President or Chancellor goes schmoozing with donors.)
But if it's coming from the Registrar's Office, then the Registrar doesn't have that much power internally, and you might be able to fight this decision within the university. What they did is not only brazenly immoral, it is also a tremendous legal liability for UW, and it should and might be a firing offense for whoever is responsible. And quite frankly no matter what happens I would seriously consider hiring an attorney (you might find one who will work on contingency).
You might speak with any professors in the department you have a good relationship with; I would be very surprised if they were sympathetic to this decision.
You might also talk with the university ombudsman, Dean of Students, etc. -- although I would be a little bit cautious and polite here. Just calmly describe the situation and ask what you should do in this situation. Hopefully (but this is very far from certain), they will calmly offer to intervene on your behalf, and then they will go ballistic behind closed doors and absolutely rake the Registrar over the coals. In any case, be poker faced, don't fully trust them, and avoid committing to a particular course of action if you don't have to.
Finally, here's an amusing hack. Salaries at UW are public record. If you want to find out how important any individual person is in the hierarchy, look up how much money they make. It's a fairly accurate barometer.
https://fiscal.wa.gov/Staffing/Salaries
Universities are not monoliths, and the relationships between different power centers are usually mistrustful at best.
Best of luck to you.
I knew that salaries at public universities are public in many states, so thought to google it -- but the details can vary.
It wouldn't surprise me that an experienced security guard is making $170K; the state itself is expensive, and they have to retain staff. The staff is often ex-cop, and guards very frequently work overtime (paid time-and-a-half or more). The guard may be a people manager (I don't know which row you're referring to but it looks like the typical guard makes far less).
You could similarly ask why a town of 50,000 people needs a police department.
Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.
On the one hand, yes, this is absolutely batshit insane.
On the other hand, college sports are enormously popular; football games regularly play to sold out crowds of over 50,000, and during football season there will be games on TV all weekend (not just local ones). They bring in a lot of revenue and publicity for the university -- and the latter (debatably?) helps attract students to apply.
Regarding the latter, it’s weird and certainly was exploitative when college athletes weren’t allowed to monetize through sponsorships and frankly still is exploitative.
So US educational institutions don't really have any hangup against treating sports any differently than they might treat a CS class.
They are a subject you have to study and train at...and sometimes sit in a theatre and have a class time about (watching scout footage or deconstructing plays, etc).
Sports are probably just as rigorous as anything else academically once you get to something approaching a division 1 level of play. The reason we don't recognize it is because we suck and are mostly casual about it on a forum like this (filled with sports failures like myself or sports non-participants). The people actually in these programs with D1 scholarships and whatnot I guarantee take it as seriously as you or I would take calculus.
So the athletics department is not only self-sustaining and self-funding, but it funds academics as well.
It's basically as if Man U sent some of its profits to Manchester University.
It makes sense if you do the math.
Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.
A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for asking!
As manager pay is usually based on headcount instead of being aligned with good outcomes, they might just have threatened someone's mortgage payments. So, that manager might be willing to call in every favor and fight with everything they have got.
But yeah of course it's possible that they got into more trouble than they can handle.
Without a lawyer they have no reason to do anything. You paid a lot to graduate, it is nothing short of foolish to squander that investment by forgoing legal representation while they try to extort you.
Don’t have any more unrecorded conversations with them. They are playing hardball and you are pretending that everything is a-ok, when it clearly isn’t.
Adult businesspeople always have lawyers do the fighting for them; if you don’t it says more about you than the fight.
The last thing in the world you want at this point is to be getting into any big fights obviously, but wow did they just give you about 3 legs to stand on.
Can you clarify how you got the Swagger files? Were they publicly available?
Could you share the exact verbiage they used to seemingly extort labor and intellectual property from you?
Does the university have some previously existing (and communicated/documented) policy regarding swapping or trading seats?
All evidence so far indicates they will not make it right, but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer.
Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school. Talking to a lawyer is not an escalation; the school doesn't even need to know you consulted one. A lawyer will advise whether you should take legal action and any more amicable alternatives available before they do anything on your behalf.
To make it easier: it sounds like you're still registered. University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ). Set up a referral with one of them and talk to them. Even if they're employees of the university and don't want to work with you to sue the university itself they may be able to give you good advice about how to proceed.
> SLS cannot represent a student when the opposing party is another UW-Seattle, Tacoma, or Bothell student or UW entity.
How would the lawyer even know, without conversation, that there was a conflict?
They might but in many cases wouldn't even do that because they still wouldn't get paid for it. Doesn't matter, you don't need them for that.
Who mostly pays them sets the rules.
Anyone on here friends with a UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer who might be interested but doesn’t read HN?
It's very common in the UK. The most visible part of the unions is running social activities, often bars and events, but they can also provide legal advice to their members.
Graduate students sometimes are part of unions, but usually only if they're also employed by the university (somebody paying full tuition for an MBA probably isn't in a union, but a doctoral student teaching or doing research might be).
Undergrads doing part-time work at the university to pay bills (dining hall, bookstore, etc) could be, in theory, but probably aren't.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
Wow. Literally blackmailing a student to do illegal work (at least would be categorized like that in my country). A student that already paid money for class and potentially a degree the univ is trying to block, mind blowing. OP, 1000% lawyer up.
Someone at the uni has taken this personally, and has attacked you. At this point, if you don't defend yourself - that person has won.
Please seek legal advice.
Act accordingly.
Educate yourself on your options. This is why people are recommending a consultation with a lawyer.
Reach out to your friends and contacts in the University. Leverage existing ones to make new ones. Others may be in a stronger position to put pressure on the registrar's office.
Use the news and media to further ratchet up pressure.
Stay positive. Fon't stoop to their level, it won't help you.
And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly all companies stop caring about credentials. Just get your foot in the door somewhere and shine, that's what I did and it worked out for me 26 years later.
Hang in there.
Personally I would find a way to contact the president of the university (possibly through university PR, who also care about public image) and simply state,
"The registrar is asking me for quid pro quo, that I develop software for them in exchange to restore my ability to register for classes."
and include a screenshot of that communication.
Additionally, consider "agreeing" to their demands, if they will unblock you immediately. Register for classes, then reneg on your half of the "deal". Even if they then retaliate, that strengthens your position (a) that they are engaging in quid pro quo, and (b) that there's no valid reason that you should be barred from registering for courses, and also buys you some time.
I'll add another angle: financial.
You have invested years of time and presumably thousands of dollars into your schooling. Their threat that they will not allow you to graduate unless you give them unpaid labor without a clear boundary condition is a threat. While I haven't seen the correspondence, from what you said it appears they're doing the moral equivalent of one of those sitcom situations where someone is compelled to do what the other person wants under a threat, and even when they've done it, the threatening person keeps the threat.
A good lawyer (and not all lawyers are good) will help you understand your rights and your position.
As others have said, this is not an escalation of aggression, and not only don't you have to tell them whether you've seen a lawyer, unless the lawyer is speaking on your behalf- you don't have to tell them anything, and you shouldn't tell them, or tell us (in case they read this, which they likely will).
A lawyer in this case is more of a scholarly resource, telling you what your options are.
To add to that: it is understandable to expect and hope for the other party to behave rationally. But there is a power imbalance that the other party is exploiting and for all we know intends to continue.
deny, delay, defect.
and don't sign anything!!
That was my initial thought too. The upside is that that "someone" likely has a boss who called them out - so there may well be levels of the hierarchy that won't lose face by backing out of the exclusion decision. The challenge is to get their attention.
The registrar's office are the wrong people to appeal to. The deans office can fix this, but they may only move if it makes the University look bad. That's where the news and media can help, but this guy likely needs help to make that happen effectively.
This. Always protect yourself, even when operating in good faith. You may only interact with someone professionally, but you never know what kind of person you are really working with. Sometimes people may seem nice, but are pure evil.
In this particular case, it is likely the people in charge are completely unaware of the people doing the blackmailing. This may even be criminal, so it might be worth just talking to the police.
An attorney kept me from making some very expensive (honest) mistakes and payed for himself many times over. Don't gamble with your future.
When I went to the UW I used Arexx and my 2400 baud modem to turbo register for classes the moment the system went live.
Arexx was fun back in the day. A nice scripting language for the time.
Document everything. Make copies. Store them somewhere safe.
Read Washington State law on extortion in the first degree.[1] Follow the link to the definition of "threat", especially the section on "official action": "To take wrongful action as an official against anyone or anything, or wrongfully withhold official action, or cause such action or withholding". It's really bad for a state official to attempt extortion. It's a 10 years in prison felony offense.
Edit: Having a lawyer write and send a letter on your behalf tends to resolve a large number of annoying situations. A lawyer on the other side will have to read it. This immediately gets you past the first-line people to people who have to consider consequences.
All of a sudden bureaucrats will be getting visits from internal legal departments asking very pointed questions about questionable actions.
Yes, and even if it doesn't go to court, the university will know that it will cost them time and money.
It's entirely possible that university president or higher administration is unaware of the situation, and if they were, will intervene. The best way to do that is to have it brought to their attention via a legal letter, which then means they need to bring in their lawyers.
A good lawyer for the university won't want to fight because fighting is not in the best interest of the university. A good lawyer will say "We threatened the student with this? No good can come of that... let him register, let him graduate and make this all go away."
That doesn't mean the client (the university) will take it, but overall fighting isn't in their interest either.
This isn't advice it's just a story about what happened to me, to give you an idea of how things *could* go for you:
What I did to warrant initial sanctioning by my college was filing a witness statement describing a petty disorderly offense another student did. Apparently the college didn't like that I filed a statement with the police and it did not go through their internal system. The school placed a hold and I contacted my dean by email. I was told by the dean, in writing, that I was not being sanctioned but the hold would remain until I attended a hearing to describe the incident as prescribed in the handbook. When I went to this 'procedural hearing' with the other witness, they brought us in one at a time in front of representatives of the student body and the administration. At the end of my account they told me I would receive their decision and sanctions by mail. They issued formal academic sanctions and created a remediation plan not unlike what they are requesting of you.
I retained a lawyer at this point and ended up filing a complaint in civil. There's nothing speedy here, judges stalled, the school stalled. Almost 2 years went by and we finally had the lawyers draft a settlement that made it possible to pursue college again. In the meanwhile they increased the sanctions on the remaining witness that didn't sue in order to retaliate. The student we filed the statement about, apparently the school couldn't touch since the police charged him. He got off paying a ticket and no other sanctions, last I heard he was in postgrad for mathematics and doing well for himself.
I was fortunate in that I went to college much later in life, after a career in the military, and as I'd had enough bullshit there, I made the conscious choice not to tolerate any out in the world.
Long story short, he and I butt heads. Then he wanted to take up to the Department head. For someone with a Ph.D., she definitely didn't think it through, just proving you can have a Ph.D., even in a STEM field, and not be too fucking bright... but... when it got to the Dean of Students, and the campus's VA liaison all sat down for a meeting with me, and I started pointing out that F.I.R.E. would have a field day with this, and would we really want a veteran-led incident on campus with a lab director that's flat out admitted in recorded interviews (I was attending college in a one-party recording state, so I had recordings of every one of these meetings) that he doesn't care about students' First Amendment rights??
That put everything into perspective really damn quick. I have never forgot that meeting because there, in that moment, we all looked at each other and everyone understood exactly what I was saying. The Dean of Students stood up and said, "Do you want to apologize to the department dean...?" and I just raised one eyebrow and he immediately shot back, "Right... we should probably all let this go." I nodded and said, "I think that'd be the best option for everyone involved, after you guys sit down with Lab Director and straighten him out."
I've done some things I'm not too particularly proud of in my life, but this was one time I really felt like I did the right thing.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Your comment reminds me of one of the misconceptions that friends have of me/military. I am not as it happens a particularly good shot/fighter/camper/adventurer. However the military has more then prepared me to wade through a bureaucratic swamp to tell a room full of people paid more then me that they're wrong and will fight to the proverbial death over it.
That being said, other then some culture shock, not expecting anything too dramatic, ought to be a good time really.
It’s not, and in some cases it can turn your problem into a more expensive and protracted different problem if you’re not careful.
I’d be especially cautious around a University that has already proven itself to have bureaucratic people who will turn small issues into threats of expulsion. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have legal counsel who is equally overstaffed and itching for something to do.
I am still dealing with a case with a 3 letter agency, going on 6 years now. "Bureaucratic violence" is a thing.
It does seem like you need someone on your side. A list of people to consider: your academic advisor, the professor in whose course you built the prototype application, your department chair, student ombudsman, dean of students. If the university is being as unreasonable as your posting makes it sound like, you will have no trouble getting one or more of these people on your side and they will be able to apply pressure to the registrars office on your behalf if needed to get your hold lifted.
The same goes for publicizing this further. The student newspaper is probably okay, but keep talking to other media in the room as a bargaining chip. Bad press may well force some administrator's hand.
To be sure, a chat with a lawyer may be helpful to get a sense of the universe of possible outcomes pursuing extramural action, but don't let anbyody send any lawyerly letters yet.
The ombudsman is definitely not a bad idea, but in most cases the mere hint of legal involvement would get this resolved without any legal involvement - just going on for a consultation doesn't mean one has to go to the next step, and in all probability you won't have to.
You need a trusted advisor on your side who can look at it with a calm mind and perspective on what is normal, acceptable, and legal. You're young and have been slapped around, seemingly inappropriately.
If you were in physical pain, you'd talk to a doctor to assess and get recommendations before treatment. Do the same here.
I sort of understand the part they wanted you to shutdown the website. Maybe its a copyright issue, even though the website only showed dummy courses.
I don't understand why they'd not let you sign up for classes to graduate, it seems like you were operating in good faith, and a University would lean towards the student. It doesn't seem like there was any indication of monetization here.
I'm definitely flabbergasted by their stance on asking you to build the same feature as an extortion mechanism.
I've lived in WA for ~9 years, and held UW in high regard as I often interact with graduates at my day job. But, this leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Hope the University admin that is involved in these series of decisions, receive health as more leadership gets involved with this going viral.
Things like tenant rights, criminal cases, immigration, consumer, employment, wills, health care directives, power of attorney, name change, etc.
You should make use of them. Especially if your educational career is being impacted “a hold” (whatever that means). If it was coursework project then your professor also should have some sway if he or she has tenure and any integrity
Good luck
From the linked page: "As I began college, I noticed that the poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would detect open slots in the full courses, and notify me via text message. While my friends were spending hours every day refreshing course schedules hoping to get into a full class, I was just waiting for a text message. And I always got into the classes, because a human refreshing a browser can't beat my software that was checking thousands of times per hour. Automation wins again."
I thought I had read somewhere that he turned it into a product while he was in college, but that wasn't mentioned there.
[0] https://www.hashicorp.com [1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/automation-obsessed
now i get a nice loud fire alarm beep to wake me up when someone drops a course i want ;^)
Rinse. Repeat for the entire 2 weeks of registration.
"I was wondering if you could go over the details of the resolution we discussed on DATE? I'm giving it consideration and just want to make sure I fully understand. On reflection I feel like it could be a great opportunity. Could I put it on my resume'?"
Sometimes they stitch themselves up and it's glorious when it happens.
Accept that you have lost, take the offer.
It's unlikely that you will have to do more than attend a few meetings and write some emails, possibly provide some code samples. The goal is likely not a complete working solution but to punish you for unwittingly countering someone's reason for needing a large team (and therefor you are threatening their pay).
Quite possible the desired solution here might be you agreeing to say that a proper solution can't work safely with the university systems for some made up reason.
What about their actions so far suggests that?
It's clear the ones running things do not care about their students. They care only about their bottom line and appearances. Don't let one or two nice administrators fool you. Get a lawyer.
Do not give any extra details about the project, do not comment on how it was made and what it used etc.
WTF!
That can’t be legal
It's so egregious. If you do a gofundme for legal support where would you post it? So we can follow you there.
Holy shit. Do you have this in writing? If you do, transfer the records to several places that YOU control... don't rely on University-controlled systems to keep this information safe.
If they relayed this to you verbally, and you are in a one-party-consent state, did you record the conversation?
If your report is reasonably accurate, they are absolutely NOT acting in good faith and absolutely WILL NOT act in good faith. If you have records of their statements, you should take those records to a lawyer and ask for advice.
It's hard to judge from the outside as you haven't shared the actual writing from UW.
I would probably cut this from the end of the LinkedIn post, this makes you look like you're possibly trying to blow this out of proportion for attention:
> I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to move on to projects that don't need to be cleared with the UW Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-time in June
Your LinkedIn profile states you graduated high school mid 2023 and started at UW mid-late 2023. How can you graduate in a few months already? That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead of the normal 4?
Their profile also mentions "Stanford Summer Session" in Jun 2022, which does give college credit, so Associates or not they were definitely more active in pursuing a degree than most high school students.
FWIW my wife was a fourth-year the start of her second year at uni because she'd tested out of a ton of basics or taken dual-credit courses in high school. I was a fourth-year the end of my second year.
I AP'd my way out of 6 hours of English, 14 or so hours of Spanish, 8 hours of physics, 8 hours of calculus, and a hodgepodge of psych, sociology, etc., plus I'd taken some uni courses as a high school student as well.
I basically spent two years taking nothing but upper div math classes + a year living in Japan working on a second degree.
AP classes, my friend, save you so much time and money.
Why not both. I hire, and it crossed my mind to reach out to him when I read the ending. The project shows ambition and independent thought, two virtues in my book.
He's smart to leverage the attention. Might as well get some benefit out of the university's heavy-handed policing here.
There are a couple of other question marks:
- Says he'll graduate this year, but he's only started at UW 1.5y ago, his project team mates also started 1.5y ago, so the course does not seem to be super advanced
- Claims he did the project on his own in the LinkedIn post, when in fact it was coursework by a team of 6
- The docs promise stuff that are entirely unimplemented, I couldn't find anything related to talking to the UW API
Hence the idea of swapping must not have been the problem here, otherwise surely the instructor should be more in trouble than OP, and this other website shouldn't still be up.
This is extortion.
Saying you need todo it for free is bonkers. Students who work in the cafeteria get paid…
And the gap between “a greenfield project” versus rebuilding the app in their infrastructure is so huge… This type of app would take 6 months to build minimum. So insane.
If you only have a few months left, you will barely get out of the initial project scoping meetings talking to all of the various departments (legal, it, hr, etc etc)
Is the UW CS Bachelor just 2 years? Your LinkedIn profile states that you started there mid-2023, so you've been there for just 1.5y. What am I missing?
I fortunately did take advantage of this, and so did my wife. Thought we took advantage of it so we could do cheap study abroad and not have to take any courses toward our degree plan (indeed, I actually earned a second degree in a completely unrelated field while doing my study abroad)
But to be clear, this was because I took every advanced class offered at my high school and took other courses at the local community college instead of hanging out with my friends during lunch, etc. It was a constant gaming of the system to eventually get the results I wanted.
Yikes, they're going to walk all over you.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
This is so outrageous that I have trouble believing it. If it's true, you need to immediately take this to the media.
> I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that would culminate with my expulsion.
And now here, you say this:
> They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I don't think there's any reason to have faith that their leadership will make things right. It sounds like they've already moved the goalposts once, and there's no reason to trust that they wouldn't do it again later. They no longer deserve the presumption of good faith.
As an alternative to what the options here seem to be saying, I can't help but wonder if some other university might be more willing to work with you without having to go through all of the blackmail. If this is something that's actually valuable to UW, it probably would be valuable to others as well, and without the threat of expulsion, you might be able to get better terms from them; maybe someone here with a connection to a more open-minded university could help get the door open to making a more fair deal? If finishing your degree is important to you, and you still don't have any desire to make a business out of this, maybe some form of scholarship in return for making a system for them for something like this? Alternately, if you do end up wanting to own the IP and monetize it in some way, you could try to rework the idea to be a service you sell to universities rather than offer for free to students. Even if you don't want to sell it, you could always offer it to universities for free with some terms that require attribution to you (and maybe also stipulate that no one is allowed to share the code with UW, since you deserve some compensation from them even if you don't want it from anyone else).
An officious word for lawyer is counsel, because that’s what they’re for: they offer legal counsel. You don’t technically “talk” to a lawyer , instead you ask them questions. They answer. That’s why client-attorney privilege exists at all: so you can feel free to seek counsel, ie ask questions, without fear of those questions ever being held against you.
You’re right not to talk to a lawyer. Instead, you should ask them questions. Like “what’s the worst that can happen?” and “what are my options if it does?” and “ what documents / evidence would I need to defend myself?” and “what would you advise me not to do?”.
As a silly rule of thumb: every message to a lawyer should have at least one question mark in it. That is the role of legal counsel in our society. Use that privilege. Seek counsel.
Then, if you don’t want to do anything with their advice, that’s ok.
It cracks me up. As a lawyer, I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.
I sure hope most lawyers don't often misread other people's writing as bad as you did here.
In all fairness, You would probably be ok with criticizing software or a website that didn't work for you and offer improvements or features. There's certainly nothing wrong with that.
They are actively trying to fuck you over- stop hoping and having faith that it will somehow magically work out. Your degree is at stake. You need to escalate, and that starts with talking with a lawyer.
Right now, you are being the worst kind of naive.
They've already demonstrated that they won't, so faith is misplaced
You should at least talk to a guidance counselor if you are close to graduating. They have a lot of incentive to get you graduated, and would probably just register you for your courses manually (because...you weren't officially expelled so there has to be a way). Anyways, the counselor will have options for you, and won't be constrained by whoever is running the registration site (and aren't going to be their allies either). If that doesn't work, go to UW administration, they are going to be less interested in allying with the tech department the higher up you go (unless this came from them, and not the tech department?).
Alternatively, if you can put your work with the university on your CV, it isn't a clear loss for you. You should also consider getting a lawyer involved, but it might be better just to get what you can and graduate.
If this is a one-party state, record those calls!
Best thing to do is to lure them into overestepping themselves in writing, and the extortionate demand that you work for free is heading in that direction.
I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further.
don't be daft. they are already blackmailing you for free labour.
While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.
A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree, while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50 cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very well, we both came out to about 10-12 €/hour.
After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level. I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was up.
The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I somehow should've been aware of.
Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary nonwithstanding).
I politely declined because that's not how I think employment works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll just take it out of your next pay check", which they did (without me signing anything).
At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance" (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like this) and called them after we talked.
I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how it goes".
The end result was that the university in my next paycheck included the amount they had initially reduced my previous check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.
Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're doing is not OK.
Never do this.
You are on the right, they are on the wrong. This makes sound like you are doing something wrong.
Standing your ground on what you believe is right - technically, legally, ethically, ideology - would be what make you very successful in the long term.
Hopefully, the matter will be cleared up quickly and satisfactorily, for all parties.
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that [university] leadership will make it right in the end.
Ironically, the fact that you went public on what could be a delicate internal matter might've escalated things, more than consulting a lawyer would.
At a university, if there's at least one specific administrator or full professor who you both trust, and think has clout to resolve the matter satisfactorily, then trusting the university to make things right might be reasonable.
Or, if your university is a rare one that has unusually good conventions of honorable behavior, which you know are practiced by most (including administrators, faculty, staff, and students), and there are effective checks and balances for when that fails, then maybe you're also OK.
But, in most universities, when an official is talking about possibly ruining your career/life, then either you fudged up really-really badly (so, consult a lawyer), or you're in danger of learning just how bad a largely unaccountable institution of largely unaccountable individuals can get (so, consult a lawyer).
Also, if an official you're talking with ever asks if you've filed a lawsuit, and says they have to stop talking with you if you do, don't say that you want to work collegially with the university to resolve the situation internally. A shitty person hearing that will totally take advantage of naive you, to neutralize the risk from you. Run, don't walk, to consult a lawyer.
Once you have your degree, you can go from there, hire a lawyer, sue for uncompensated labor (something about minimum wage laws, I think, requires they pay you), and so on. Maybe even some emotional distress.
But hey, IANAL and ya gotta do what you think is right.
I would never ever trust those hypocritical bureaucrats in universities. They have power over your degree and your life, but you have nothing. They are businessmen and politicians (some of which actually had/will have a political life before/after the high education gig), not educators.
You high school teachers and university professors are real humans. Administrators are not.
Assuming you mean the project, not your degree, that sounds reasonable but from your description it also sounds like they aren't willing to let you do that. Hence the advice to at least talk to a lawyer.
Sue the ever living hell out of them. They are forcing you to work for them unpaid. Call multiple labor boards and drag them into UW immediately.
In addition to raising hell on the public front. I would be consulting with attorneys to discuss what can be done in court to compel the UW to do the right thing.
Don’t be naive and think uni leadership will “make it right in the end”.
Please seek legal advice and do not take anything they say at face value. They're engaging in bad faith and preying on your fears and ignorance.
Just remember that your didn't do anything wrong, and I hope that you don't get discouraged from your future pursuits, I'm almost certain that there are employers out there who will love this and offer you a great start your career.
My wife works at a major public university and fights with antiquated software and business systems all day long. The amount of IT system bloat and 'village-idiot dumb' processes for managing course offerings, course catalogs, class schedules, etc. is pretty bad at a lot of universities.
The easiest path forward is to do what it takes to graduate, it sounds like you are one quarter away. Smile, play nice, help out where you can. Get everything in writing.
Definitely TALK to a lawyer and have that in your back pocket. It is likely there is some sort of legal aid through the law school and you can. However, only use this as a last resort. It would be no problem for a university to drag something like this out for months or years and you will be left without a degree.
Everyone in this thread is simply suggesting he talk to a lawyer. The lawyer can help guide him on the next action to take.
Not a lawyer, but this is outrageous and feels like a breach of the university-student contract. Point to the other students that must perform surprise labor for the university as a precondition for course registration. This is like paying your debt to the early 1900s company store. Absolutely lawyer up.
> “The Student Web Service gives your application access to information in the Student database such as course data, registration data, section data, person data, and term data (general academic data).”
It doesn't make any sense. Was there something left out of the story? Do they offer this web service as a honeypot to find and expel ambitious software developers?
A few of the smartest people I personally know left school at 15 - they reacted badly to school restrictions and just wanted to just do something (not study) and often left home early too.
Meanwhile, most university "enterprise" software is a festering pile of shit.
I'm very surprised by the extortion attempt, but sadly a massive overreaction doesn't much surprise me.
I came to understand that this is because the career positions have such great benefits, often the last bastion of pensions, that these people literally go there to die.
So they take no risks and don’t try anything. They hire a consultant and if it doesn’t work out the blame lies there.
They also get big budgets to implement the consultant solution, which is bloated and terrible, so the department head gets more money every year to support it
No bureaucrat is going to say "yes" because the consequences of something going wrong costs them their job while the benefits of things going right are zero.
(For example, a DDoS. The number of times I have accidentally fired a DDoS at an API endpoint is non-trivial. Or it could get so popular that it's a DDoS. etc.)
The kind of person who doesn't leave that role tends to be either someone who enjoys accumulating or wielding power, or would have trouble in roles outside of an institution like that.
Now imagine a person who has almost no power just made a public spectacle about something in your camp that you've been not doing for years even though it's been a well known problem because nobody could make you do anything about it.
You're probably going to go into overdrive and try to kill this story, even if it's not because you'll be directly punished in any way from it (because that's very uncommon in academia), but because this person DARED to challenge you.
...at least, that's my perception from years of time around toxic parts of academia (and some less toxic parts, but.)
I'm not saying the story is true, I don't have enough data to comment, but I have absolutely seen enough academics go off the handle from 0 to 11 to buy this as plausible.
I had a lecturer log in and leak the grades for my entire year, including my own, so his students could choose the best partners for final project.
Then Mark Zuckerberg built the Facebook by ignoring the data usage policy and scraping University data.
I think you're doing the right thing by publicizing this far and wide. Stay calm, cool, and stick to the facts as tightly as possible. When this gets picked up across social media and news media it will start to become a problem for other people on the administrative side of the university who are also territorial (about PR/image) and will take it as their job to fix it.
So be loud, but polite.
> So be loud, but polite.
Fully agree. In academia problems don't get fixed until it's more annoying to not fix it. The more attention this gets the more likely a petty bureaucrat above the one responsible for this will realize their day just significantly more annoying and will likely squash it quickly and quietly.
I said basically the same thing to him. It’s amazing how bad it can get when you threaten someone’s small stake when that’s all they have.
Reminds me of when I suggested to a college admin that she could automate some scheduling chore. She gave me death stares as if I wanted to take all the food off her plate.
Not so polite take: most of them could be replaced by a 20 line shell script.
Lord of the Shell Scripts doesn't ring as fun as having 20 employees, even if the shell scripts do more.
In my friends' case, he didn't really want a little fiefdom or even to be a manager.
The problem was that they made it clear that the only way to get promoted and move up the salary ladder was to become a manager of a team. So by converting his one-person role into a job that had to be done by several people, he could justify hiring a team underneath him and therefore getting a significant raise and better title.
It's weird to hear them describe how everyone seemingly knows the game is broken, but they're open about how it needs to be played.
And it should be no surprise that this is how it works. The operational side is hired by the academic side which is even more crazy. It's made up mostly of people who have never had a job outside of school (they went to university and then never left) so it's high school drama all of the time.
Having worked at a university your job isn't to get shit done. Your job is to make managers happy, usually by attending meetings, being knowledgeable, polite and always available. Your manager's job is to inflate headcount for the executives, so their empires grow and their ranking among other executives improves.
People at the higher levels literally use words like empire and fiefdom (of x) to refer to departments instead of the departments name.
The first few years I didn't understand this, so I would suggest automations and process improvements at meetings, my manager was always unhappy with me when I did this. I was literally told once that there was value in a human doing a task when I suggested we automate something that could be done with about 5 lines of code.
Eventually I understood and improved. I would automate some tasks silently and then use the freed-up time to prepare for meetings and generally being a better team member. After starting doing this I frequently got highlighted as one of the top 3 team members.
She loves it, obviously. Her boss loves her too, they chit chat all day when together, so she isn't getting laid off. But man, the inefficiency and waste is unreal.
It shouldn't be difficult to determine why education costs are so inflated, nor should it be difficult to see the obvious solution here.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
He was disciplined for blatantly trying to "hack" (in the YC sense, in UW's view) the registration process:
https://registrar.washington.edu/winter-2025-registration-ch...
"Know that trading, selling, or buying open spots is a breach of the Registration Tampering Abuse Policy. Consequences include referral to the Student Code of Conduct process, a Registrar’s Hold on your record, and potential diploma withholding for graduating students until the conduct process is complete."
https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...
"Registration Abuse The registration system is provided for the sole express purpose for students to register themselves into sections. Any use of the registration system other than for this purpose is considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling one’s seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking."
Disclaimer: I am making no claim about the ethical validity of this policy, and I don't know how well the policy is communicated to students. I am not commenting on the allegation that the University demanded free labor in exchange for not-expelling OP.
This bit is important.
At a glance, stubhub/ticketmaster/etc are pretty benign services that fulfil a pretty natural need for event tickets, but we've all seen the damage they can cause. There's a very real risk that OP's service could become a ticketmaster for UW classes, with all the perverse incentives that entails. Their reaction was probably excessive, but, from this perspective, understandable.
This is important, because it's the only explicit reference to "trading open spots" they've made.
The Registration Abuse policy covers access to the registration system for:
* buying or selling one’s seat in a class,
* holding seats for another student,
* or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking.
It's unclear if HuskySwap actually violated this policy, given that it never actually accessed the registration system and no students used it in conjunction with the registration system of the school.
What isn't clear is how this site actually violated that policy, if there was no course slot trading actually occurring. You could describe it as an attempt, but in this situation, the student asked for permission from the school before doing something that would violate their policies.
To use an analogy, if I sneak notes into an exam, that is likely academic misconduct. However, creating a formula sheet and asking the professor if I can use it is not academic misconduct. I wouldn't consider that to be attempted cheating.
> The use of robots and other automated tools to submit registration requests is expressly forbidden.
Some sort of testing will likely have happened, in which case an automated tool has been used. Even if only by TFA himself.
Also note:
> Because use of scripts, robots, or other automated queries can adversely impact University network and computing resources and interferes with equal access to registration, such automated querying of registration-related resources is expressly forbidden. Violators may have their access to University network and computing resources terminated and may be subject to action by the University under applicable law, regulation, or policy, including but not limited to, discipline under any applicable University conduct code.
The whole purpose of the project is to violate this clause. I agree that if no testing had happened, no sanctions should apply because the clause above doesn't say anything about attempts of use being sanctioned.
1. They made substantial progress towards a working tool with available code, before requesting permission from the school. That request was to enable parts of the site, not requesting permission to develop/release it publicly.
2. It is pretty clear to students that you aren't allowed to mess with any of the registration systems/process (e.g. trading/holding classes). Your analogy has a very reasonable question (are notesheets allowed) vs a policy which is made very clear.
A different analogy is creating a hidden device to cheat on exams, then asking the professor for the exam room's wifi password as to enable it it in the future. While the situation is not as clear-cut as the analogy, I hope it helps show my perspective.
Until the author has used the tool on the UW server during registration, he is not violating their policies and procedures: He hasn't attempted to tamper with records. He admittedly hasn't used their registration system with this tool. Those are the two key phrases in their policy. The text goes on to specifically describe abuse as "use" of a script or robot. There isn't anything forbidding a student from authoring a script.
One problem here is that by releasing the source, it makes it easier for another student to exploit the system. In the case where another student uses this tool during registration, the other student is fully responsible.
Besides all that, it's a great project idea because everyone in his program would instantly relate to the problem.
It's easy to understand the University's overreaction---and it is an overreaction. The better solution from UW would have been to sternly inform the student(s), "The website can never go live. It dies as a proof of concept. Please use your own dummy data; no API access. A disclaimer must be added to any class demos (presentations, code, etc.) with the Tampering and Abuse policy, and that this only uses generated data. Our efforts to improve the registration system in the future will be X, Y, Z."
This student has done nothing wrong (yet) (based on what he revealed) and is getting punished for being near the border.
In my old days we did the same, only by finding someone who want to swap manually
So if you are planning to sell the slots and it does not work out, you just drop the course, no harm to you.
I won’t say no harm but you have to be pretty desperate to try to pull this off
Why can't UW increase the number of classes?
While well-intentioned, if this was commonly used it would mess registration up even more by making the "constrained" classes valuable and would be filled up quickly by people who wouldn't take them.
There may have been some browser automation scripts about… I wouldn’t know.
You do have to be signed typically to actually make changes of course, I imagine this tool would have to have your netid login… (yikes)
I sign up for a class. I am on the roster. How is it possible for me to put your name on the class roster, for credit, transcript, and diploma, without the university going out of their way to help?
These aren't anonymous concert tickets or XBoxes. They are personally identifiable registrations.
So while it sounds like his site would almost certainly wound up violating policy had it gone live _it never did so_. That's a pretty good reason for them to deny the API request (which seems like may have not been intended for the public anyway?) But it does not in any way seem to merit the threat of expulsion, or, even worse, the fact that (according to the student in an update), even though he immediately complied they still put a hold on his account anyways.
There is some nuance here for sure, but I do not see in any way that the universities response is proportional to what actually happened.
Also related: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295420/how-to-cope-...
Particularly in the age of AI, professors might have to go back to the practice of oral exams to have people demonstrate their understanding of an issue. The problem for universities is that means you have to have a lower student:teacher ratio.
If one of my open-source projects got hit with that sort of request, my response would be far less polite.
(Full disclosure: I have taught CS courses before.)
Note that I've become more cynical in these 10 years that passed. I was, let's say, more charitable with people in the past.
https://x.com/LewisCTech/status/1778912158404997494
Also briefly made me popular on Nigerian Twitter, which was fun :)
About a decade ago, some teammates and I built an internal request system for our Ops team to replace the MS Sharepoint crap we were using. We used Bottle, BootstrapJS and SQLite to get it up and going quickly, and under the radar. Our customer IT teams loved it, and managers from elsewhere in our department were even asking half-jokingly if we could support their teams, too.
Well, the IT team that was deploying ServiceNOW was none too happy that a "non-standard" application was running... our manager was a knight and kept them from making us tear it down. We pretended to play ball, we walked through SNOW process of getting a team-specific form to build out. And then we never used it; we kept directing our customers to the self-built tool.
The moral is, people like their fiefdoms. Bureaucrats often shun innovation because it has the chance to make them obsolete, or else they are simply the kind of people who don't like disruption.
You may also have invented a tool that would have obsoleted some multimillion dollar software acquisition or internal process, who knows.
Presumably by visiting `https://site.com/swagger-ui` or one of the other common doc endpoints. It's not that hard, and many places do not lock them down (even if they should).
FYI public university education is fully government-funded in Poland (i.e. it is free for students).
1 - https://usosweb.mimuw.edu.pl/kontroler.php?_action=news%2Fde...
I'm happy my uni in Poland didn't use it :P
So at least back when I went there, basically any CS student could have told you that this website was a horrible idea that is sure to get you in trouble.
I understand that the registration system is probably old and tied up in tons of just as old management software, but if the university really cared the solutions should be there.
Do you know that software can be used to build a wrapper layer around other software?
Or you know, they could have just improved their registration system so this wouldn't be an issue... But hey, I'm sure UW raises their tuition every year for good reasons and the money is well spent.
We even have an alumni-run site that scrapes the registration platform's API for the details of every course to provide a better UI interface.
It even has a tool to generate an AutoHotkey script so students can insta-register for all their classes seconds after registration opens up for them (it's usually a mad rush at midnight when course registration opens for freshman/sophomores as they all compete for the remaining course slots left after seniors and juniors have already registered).
Seems inane an institution would crack down on it.
We even have another alumni-run site that does nothing but FOIA the average GPA of all courses from every professor; While I can't imagine the university is thrilled about it, as it's completely legal they haven't tried to pressure the creators to shut it down afaik.
Mad rushes to register requiring people to use automations like that sounds like a bad system to me, and something the university should be trying to address. That said, rather than a crackdown on tools, it’d make more sense to implement a harder-to-game system like spreading registration across a long period and assigning students to have their access unlock at a random time during the period. My college had time-slot (in person!) appointments like that 20 years ago.
So you want to study, say, engineering.
First you have to apply and get admitted to the university, and many people aren't admitted. The acceptance rate I can find for UW is 54% in-state, 46% out of state.
Then the university tells you that if you want to study engineering, you have to study a lot of other non-engineering things it feels like you should study. All of which are pretty costly and time consuming.
You might have to take courses in things you already know, because there are few courses you can test out of and the universities limit how many credits it can bring over.
Then on top of this, the universities don't provide anywhere near enough adequate quality classes for students, which is the whole reason why there's this level of demand in the first place.
Not only do they not provide enough, they know they don't provide enough, so their response is since it's "really competitive" they need to be "really strict about making sure that no one had an edge over anyone else." It's not about making sure students needs are being met, even for classes that the university is forcing on them. It's about restricting students, so that they suffer a roughly equal amount from the university's failures.
The attitude of the universities seems to be that since they're the only game in town, students have to suffer through all of this. Imagine a system where students could take classes from anywhere they want, and then could get a degree just by passing assessments at the university. I imagine the number of people paying huge amounts of money for inadequate classes would plummet.
Edit per reply: $1M/yr for the President is less than $50/student/year. Not funding more classes for students.
Study other things is good too. I went to a liberal arts school for this. I studied politics, chemistry, computer science, Chinese language, South African history, Russian literature. Of course me knowing how to count to ten in Mandarin or being able to talk about the influences of Dostoevsky never helped me get a job but being well-rounded is an objectively Good Thing. I don't think you should have 60 credits of gen eds but a semester or two worth of non-STEM classes over 2-3 years is not going to hurt anyone.
With pre-registration you can also get an idea of demand in advance, instead of having to post-hoc schedule additional classes (or concert tour dates, or airline flights, or PS5 units, or… etc.)
Non-transferability means the lottery is continuous. As soon as anyone relinquishes their class, the lottery will have to run again to reallocate. You could do this daily.
This is a technical solution that works but it overlooks the cultural side of a resource allocator wanting their resource to generate hype and demand, build up to the Big Event, and then sell out in “record time”. I can understand that a big part of University marketing is to try to seem as popular and oversubscribed as possible, even if I don’t agree with it.
Finally of course, the public RNG bit feels like the most interesting. A giant continuous dice tumbler in the middle of UW’s Red Square? The tumbler feels easy, but how would you make a physical ledger to record the dice rolls automatically?
My alma mater let people register in descending order of number of completed credits with a C or better (e.g. 2.0), and then GPA, in waves. Same with dorm sign ups which were required for everyone but seniors. It worked out great and professors always had enough slack to let special cases in if they felt compelled to.
Making it random seems like a bad idea to me. It's "fair" only insofar as randomness is fair. For high-demand classes isn't it more "fair" that people who will graduate sooner and/or have done better in their classes thus far should have the first opportunity to get those classes?
When someone drops a class, the opening becomes available immediately, so you coordinate a time well after the registration rush has died down for one person to click "drop" and the other to refresh the page and click "register". At least that's how it worked when I did it 20 years ago. It was relatively common in the Greek system not to "trade" a class for a class but rather a class for a few beers or the like: prior to registration, if you were an underclassman who really needed to get into a class next quarter that you knew filled up quickly, you'd find an upperclassman (who get access to the system earlier) who was eligible for the class you needed and wasn't full on credits to grab a slot, then a couple days before classes started, you'd have them drop and then grab it for yourself.
At that time (early 2000s), polling bots weren't common, but there were rumors, so people doing this got more careful and actually sat next to each other with their laptops to coordinate the drop and add instead of just picking a time or date.
The right side is the 5- or 6-person high level classes offered every other year or something. Usually, but not always, these are in demand because professors are not fungible at this level and they're probably taught by a popular or famous professor. I took one of these at my school taught by a former cabinet secretary, just four of us seniors and him talking about politics for 4 hours every week. You can't just offer more of these; if you're teaching one class every other Spring you're unlikely to seriously consider changing that to two Fall and two Spring classes every year.
I was just pointing out that there are two competing reasons why classes end up with long waitlists or people who graduate having never had the chance to take them so it's not a simple "Do _________" and it's fixed.
Allowing infinitely large waitlists for a given class - which even in the most convoluted legacy system imaginable is not that big of a challenge - and trading disappears overnight.
It's not a problem for the university directly, and fixing it would cost money, so there's no incentive to do it. Gotta make sure there's enough money to keep paying the president $76,000 every month, after all.
You will get plenty of job offers out of your post, and you don't need their useless degree anyway.
Universities are specialized in bullying from their admins (and often faculty) that have way too much time on their hands.
I'm not sure this kind of misbehaviour reflects well on our brand.
Do you have a contact at the university I can talk to?
I had completely forgotten that LinkedIn is fully owned by Microsoft.
This was back in late 1990s, a group I was part of was getting a web site made on the school pages and I wanted to contribute. I ran my mouth about my dislike of the current site (I was a dumbass) and for some reason hosted the site on my local computer in my room which was accessible everywhere on the network. I wasn’t going to run it permanently, I just wanted to showcase it. That got me in some trouble, what I said got back too, I got my room connection disconnected because we weren’t supposed to run servers.
I apologized, obviously disabled the server, and eventually got reconnected.
- Write stuff down! A paper trail is helpful both to prevent hearsay and keep your own timeline of events in check. Recency bias and the like are too common in stressful situations.
- Remember that you are one (1) human who needs food, sleep, and water.
- Reach out to the Ombud (at the HUB), professors, and other administrators you may know. Even within one department there can be mixups -- nevermind when university-wide policies (such as registration) come into play. Having someone who can help point you in the right direction will be invaluable.
- On that note, the HUB has free legal services; for better or worse, you aren't the first student to be in this position.
- I understand in another comment you said you're confident in UW Leadership's ability, but crucially, there is no such thing as a singular leadership. At a university that large, *even when everyone is working to help*, things can turn out bad. (It's like how a CEO can get fired and nothing changes at a company; the system has its own momentum.) It's hard to say what level of intervention needs to happen to resolve this -- School of CSE? Undergrad CS department? Registrar? UW President's Office? -- and each level will likely not know what the level above/around them can do.
- (And if you do need to escalate, it might be worth reaching out to the Registrar's office directly, over email. I say this because they work at a university-wide level, separate from any school or department, and may have a more-final say on what any individual branch can do/not do w.r.t. your enrollment.)
- Remember that you are (likely still) one (1) human who needs food, sleep, and water. Those damn robots won't take over yet.
- Be careful what you post publicly! There is a reason the best PR teams stay silent. Less is more. Form a close group of people you trust to share information freely, and be very clear (to yourself) what your intention is with every public post. Is it to get validation/advice? Is it to put pressure on the university? The court of public opinion is a double edged sword! Not every interpretation needs to or will be true. (And employers, like the public, might interpret this situation positively or negatively. It's hard to say which way it will go!)
Is the request system just a honeypot?
Both times we came under scrutiny for the possibility that we might be handling student data in ways that the university couldn't control, and mostly, that we might be taking passwords on behalf of users.
The first was just a mockup, and while the second initially had full university auth against their open LDAP server, we quickly removed that in favour of our own auth, because it was very apparent that the password input being on our domain was a dealbreaker for the university.
By doing this, and by communicating carefully about what we were doing and what we were not doing, where the boundaries were, and how we handled data, we managed to win them around to some productive discussions. Most of the people we spoke to on university staff who were involved in this were not at the technical level to be able to understand, for example, having an unsecured LDAP server that we could auth against, and were only interested in the policy of whether we were allowed to do it.
It's a common failure mode of software engineers to assume that because something is not technically disallowed, even though it could be, that it must therefore be allowed. This is not true.
What's not clear with this project is whether the university have a fundamental disagreement with the idea of a student project providing services, or if someone has panicked that a non-approved system might be receiving passwords from students. The former is obviously ridiculous, universities should be open to this sort of innovation, especially from their students. But the latter is understandable and a fairly reasonable response, but one that does need careful handling by the student to navigate well.
UW has missed a great opportunity to show its current and future students and faculty that innovation is valued there. Their management decision will shutdown the minds of so many brilliant hackers, as we have already witnessed with the OP's decision to back down. I really hope the school can re-evaluate their decision and more importantly, the faculty should support the students, as they are together pursuing the goal of learning by doing. That's what higher education should offer, not conditioning people into rule makers and rule followers.
It is not hard to find the policy in question. I quote from the UW Registrar's website, their policy on tampering and abuse of the registration system, as cited in the subject of the email the student received:
> The registration system is provided for the sole express purpose for students to register themselves into sections. Any use of the registration system other than for this purpose is considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling one’s seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention of taking. [0]
The student's project, though well-intentioned, is in clear violation of this policy. And it ought to be forbidden. There are plenty of ways this kind of a system could go wrong, including creating incentives to overregister or develop a registration black market, not to mention the technical liabilities of letting a bot talk to the database at bot-speed.
Now, as for follow-up conversations the student and the university have had, we have not seen these emails. We have only heard the student's own summary, which, given the high stakes and personally significant impact, may very well have been editorialized so that the university looks unreasonable and the student reasonable.
I, for one, cannot pass such quick and single-minded judgment as everyone else without seeing these emails.
[0] https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...
Note also that the student uses the LinkedIn post to advertise themselves to potential employers. This reduces credibility in my mind as it provides a reason why TFA might benefit from exaggeration/misrepresentation.
Am I being overly skeptical here?
To be fair he follows up the first post saying that the university is holding his future registration hostage unless he builds them a similar website:https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap...
What might have happened is that UW offered that he could keep the website up if he changed the project in such a way a way that the university is happy with it.
We don't know how much escalation has happened already, maybe he gave grounds for UW to not give him the account back because he has indicated he wouldn't back down and try to find a way to get his project to work nonetheless.
In fact if you go on GitHub, their project presentation lists a 6 people team: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/117dGuEK98-TwAPGUBijf.... He was on the backend team, but still mentions angular in the LinkedIn post.
Did the others not do anything? Or why is he not giving them credit in the LinkedIn post?
By that metric, he did half the work. But it still means he completely disregards the other half.
vs
46 commits, +478, -94 LOC
I think it's safe to say it was mostly him.
Out of the 273k LOC added, all but 20k, that is 253k are just from the boilerplate auto-generated copy/paste initialization code: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/commit/e9f0df0d5a221b3c7...
Sure he probably did most of the coding, but it's still weird to talk all about I and not mention the other 5 in a single word when they _did_ contribute. Maybe they did testing or other things that are not reflected in LOC, e.g. presentations etc.
Is some OAuth2 authentication flow involved so that the university has registered the application and assigned a client id and return URI?
I think the university might have valid security concerns if the application somehow accesses student accounts without valid OAuth2 authorization flow (or equivalent).
Entering login credentials for university on a third-party site is probably forbidden by terms of service for the university site.
That's hardly readable, how could they act like that? I am sad to say it but you need the help of a lawyer and the most backup you'll get the better. The way they presented the case will never get solved in a happy manner. Do not let them get the code and the IP. Keep on!
I am not from the USA and I don’t understand the context. What does “trade spots” mean? Does it mean that if I have registered to course A but not course B and my friend have registered to course B but not course A, we can swap our registered courses in the official registration system?
So, why do they allow people to do it, but expell them for... publicly discussing it? When the university could just, you know, not offer the service!
There were tests you had to take in a special classroom full of Sun thin clients. You had to register yourself for some time slot(s) to go there. Sometimes you had to go there in like 2 days to meet a deadline but there were no slots available. So, someone made an app that would continuously scrape that page and notify you when a slot for your chosen time is available. Saved my ass a couple times.
In my case, they accused me of copyright infringement and trying to destroy the co-op program. I made the case that while I was reproducing some data from the university's website, none of it had creative value and therefore wasn't protected by copyright. (I drew a parallel to an actual court case about reproducing phone book listings.)
I also reached out to some faculty that I was close to for some character references to show that I didn't have malicious intent.
Ultimately, I wasn't expelled or anything too bad. I was required to take a business ethics course, which I actually ended up enjoying.
Good luck!
The registration system is probably mostly still the original 90s code though, it’s very basic, totally custom.
UW CSE actually had its own tech support team, completely separate from UW IT, who also write internal software/manage the computing systems just for CSE. At least, that used to be the case.
I'm really baffled here because the code Kaim published is itself MIT licensed. The university could use it however they see fit after his version, and perhaps make a modified version which they then incorporate in to their system as the 'official' version.
Perhaps this code being public may expose potential flaws (logical, security, etc) which they don't want to have to deal with. Or might even be known flaws they don't want to expose.
As well as the question of interfering with registration, he has also gone about this in a way that causes reputational damage (& UW have probably caused their own, but that's not necessarily relevant here), which I cant imagine they'll take that kindly either.
But I work in a public university in the EU, so my understanding of how these institutions probably operate is likely a little skewed.
I agree with you that it seems that there might be something missing from the story.
The standard response and advice of talking to a lawyer I think is still good and stands regardless of how full or truthful the OPs account of the situation is.
I don't personally think that most university staff in the US are out to get people in this way either, so either there is something about the story we are missing, or this is a really big deal and this particular university is out of control.
My experience in university in the US was never this dramatic and I didn't see actions like this taken (but I also never constructed a project of this nature that is directly related to the university beurocracy).
In other words, this is kind of weird in a US context too and I feel the same weirdness about it that you are probably feeling viewing from the EU.
FERPA was probably a big factor in UW’s initial response to ask that the site be taken down. Institutions are all about CYA now.
The bit about blackmail seems a bit far fetched. I’d like to see the correspondence between UW and this individual. The entire story is certainly plausible but as other have pointed out, there are a number of inconsistencies.
1. Mea Culpa
Talk to all of the faculty (dean of students, etc) and do your best to get people on your side. You need the petty person on the other end to reverse their decision, and having a lot of administration on your side, and more importantly, expressing (fake) remorse is makes it easy for these jobsworth asshole(s) to fulfill their God complex. I'm actually convinced that this would have the highest probability of success. These Dolores Umbridge types adore getting to be the ones issuing mercy to the sinners.
Additionally, informing staff of the expulsion will help bring awareness of this abuse, and spread the word and prevent this from happening to other students.
While you perform your mea culpa groveling, record everything, which can be used as ammo later.
2. Agree to the (illegal) terms
Blackmailing you into slave labor is obviously illegal, but no terms have been laid out, so I don't see any harm in agreeing to them. Best case, they reverse the decision with the expectation that you'll do something (which you can then phone in or do a token exercise of), and worst case they outline terms which are the perfect ammo for negative publicity or a lawsuit.
3. Transfer schools/credits
I don't actually know what is involved in transferring schools or how expulsion factors in, but the reality is that you are effectively already expelled. Try and figure out the feasibility of saving what is salvageable at a school that is less insufferable.
4. Negative publicity
This story is easy to believe, sell, and consume- i.e. perfect ragebait. Start emailing every news outlet you can think of. Post on all social media. If it gets high enough, and probably not even that high, the weight of the negative publicity can easily outweigh the jobsworth PoS's narcissism that started this, forcing a reversal.
5. Seek employment
If you have any employment cards in your deck, I'd strongly consider playing them. If everything else fails, then at least you're financially secure.
6. Lawyer
The combined weight of all of the above will assist a lawsuit, even prior to taking any legal steps. Note that all outcomes of a lawsuit that aren't "total win" are effectively a loss (of time, money, energy, and mental health), so I'd hesitate to take this course at all.