Where's the information on this? Was he querying the myUCF dozens of times every second? Is he accused of bring the networking infrastructure to its knees?
Or is this simply the faculty attempting to make a student conform? "Watch this presentation to see our side of the story." What story?
Edit: so we have to click more links on the linked page to get any more context. My apologies for being lazy.
"University officials, however, said Arnold's software was tying up the campus computer network, claiming it accessed UCF's scheduling website 220,000 times, as often as every 60 seconds."
I want to know if the reporter bungled the information or if these officials are this clueless. If this thing accessed the server "as often as every 60 seconds," where's the problem? Was the student really that clueless that he wrote his service to query constantly?
On the last page, an IT administrator testified that the application logged on every 15 minutes and checked the availability of every UCF course at each logon, which (according to the administrator) caused a total of around 14 minutes of query processing time.
That seems excessive, but if there are hundreds of courses and each course takes 15 seconds to check (presumably due to inefficient queries being run on legacy computer systems) then I could see real lag.
The hearing docs also say that the "YouCanFinish" service was a paid service and the on-campus IT agreement forbids building paid services on top of campus resources (in this case, the class registration service, not just the campus WiFi network). I can think of good arguments to object to a private service charging students for access to classes; it puts students who can't afford "YouCanFinish" at a disadvantage in class registration and (if competition emerges) there's a huge incentive to intentionally lag the registration servers so that students effectively have to use the private service to get classes.
Seems like the sort of service where the right path is to work with the school, not try to privately monetize class selection.
According to the student's slide deck, the service checked only courses users had signed up for, cached the information, and averaged 814 requests per day.
However, the University themselves "monetize" every little thing. Lab fees for English classes, library fees, $20 transcript fees to print a document on a $0.25 piece of paper. Fees for registration, fees for athletics (even if you don't participate,) fees for the Student Health Center (even if you have private insurance) fees for everything.
This kid making some coin isn't a problem for me. He built a service, he should get paid. He accessed public data (apparently) and didn't crack into anything.
The real question is why are universities so bad with their money -- they can pay head football coaches million dollar contracts, yet most universities are chronically unable to offer enough sections of popular classes. I get it, football brings in revenue, but so does licensing technology innovations and alumni that strike it rich.
Higher education is important, but the industry of higher ed is a giant scam.
One parties shit behavior does not justify anothers.
Education is meant to be about more than free-market principles of making as much money as you can and screw who you hurt on the way. A system where people who pay more get a better shot at classes is unfair.
Tho I agree the uni's response is an over-reaction and wrong. The real problem here is the situation the uni set up and not the student's actions. But for me, I couldn't 100% support this student unless it was free.
Or is this simply the faculty attempting to make a student conform? "Watch this presentation to see our side of the story." What story?
Edit: so we have to click more links on the linked page to get any more context. My apologies for being lazy.
"University officials, however, said Arnold's software was tying up the campus computer network, claiming it accessed UCF's scheduling website 220,000 times, as often as every 60 seconds."
I want to know if the reporter bungled the information or if these officials are this clueless. If this thing accessed the server "as often as every 60 seconds," where's the problem? Was the student really that clueless that he wrote his service to query constantly?