Nerburg Posted January 19, 2014 Posted January 19, 2014 ...so another student made an un-blockable chrome extension to do the same thing. Reminds me of Stefan's talk of academia being opposed to the free-market, whether they give lip service or not. http://haufler.org/2014/01/19/i-hope-i-dont-get-kicked-out-of-yale-for-this/ In January 2012, two Yale students named Harry Yu and Peter Xu built a replacement to Yale's official course selection website. They it called YBB+ (Yale Bluebook Plus), a “plus” version of the Yale-owned site, called Yale Bluebook. YBB+ offered different functionality from the official site, allowing students to sort courses by average rating and workload. The official Yale Bluebook, rather, showed a visual graph of the distribution of student ratings as well as a list of written student reviews. YBB+ offered a more lightweight user interface and facilitated easier comparison of course statistics. Students loved it. A significant portion of the student body started using it. Fast-forward two years. Last Friday (1/10/14), Yale blocked YBB+'s IP address on the school network without warning. When contacted, Yale said that YBB+ infringed upon Yale's trademark. Harry and Peter quickly removed the Yale name from the site, rebranded it as CourseTable and relaunched. Yale blocked the website again, declaring the website to be malicious activity. Later that weekend, Yale's administration told the student developers that the school didn't approve of the use of its course evaluation data, saying that their website “let students see the averaged evaluations far too easily”. Harry and Peter were told to remove the feature from the CourseTable website or else they would be referred to the school's punishment committee.
LanceD Posted January 21, 2014 Posted January 21, 2014 I find these stories very funny. Immoral people take actions that preserve themselves and their ability to continue to act in immoral ways and everyone gets surprised and outraged.
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