Archive for March, 2005

Short, But Important To-Do List

  1. Pay cable bill
  2. Stop calling friend’s boyfriend by friend’s ex-boyfriend’s name.

   {Life, greatest hits}    #

ApplyYourself is the assclown here

A story getting major cycles on all many of the media outlets (not NYTimes yet) is the reported “hacking” of the Harvard Business School admission decisions webpage. Here’s a Reuter’s piece on it.

Here’s a summary:

  • A number of top-tier business schools (Harvard, Stanford, Duke, MIT’s Sloan) use a service called ApplyYourself to allow students to submit their application electronically and later check their application and admissions status.

  • One applicant found a way to access his admissions decision page (on applyyourself) earlier than the broadcasted decision date. This person, posting under the name “brookbond”, posted instructions on a BusinessWeek Forum about b-school to show how other people how to try it. Others read it and tried the method, to varying success at different schools.

  • BusinessWeek and ApplyYourself found out and yanked the thread and closed the hole, apparently.

This is where the annoying hysterics starts. From HBS dean Kim Clark:

I would like to have the last word on Harvard Business School’s policy regarding applicants who hacked into the ApplyYourself, Inc., Web site containing confidential admissions information… This behavior is unethical, at best — a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization. Any applicant found to have done so will not be admitted to this school.

The problem is that what these applicants did to get access to their own admission decision page can barely be characterized as “hacking”. I spent all afternoon trying to dig up a cache of those original instructions posted on the BW forum; the closest I could find was this blog post.

The “hack” seems to have been 1) logging into one’s own application, then 2) adding something to the URL (like “&mode=decision”). That’s it. It’s hardly the maliciousness blackhat activity some of these schools make it out to be.
It is, in my opinion, an overreaction.
The real people to rake over the coals is ApplyYourself and their system’s designs and flaws.

   {Life}    #