March 10, 2005
Harvard Rejects 199 Accused of Hacking
This article has inspired lively debate: Has Harvard over-reacted? Please comment.
Boston Globe March 8th
Harvard Business School will reject the 119 applicants who hacked into the school's admissions site last week, the school's dean, Kim B. Clark, said yesterday...A half dozen business schools were swamped by a wave of electronic intrusions Wednesday morning, after a computer hacker posted instructions on a BusinessWeek Online message board. Harvard is the second school to say definitively that it will deny the applications of proven hackers. ...
'Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world," Clark said in yesterday's Harvard statement. ''To achieve that, a person must have many skills and qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment, and a strong moral compass -- an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this website have failed to pass that test."
Comments
To me this comment by an admissions consultant is key: "Kreisberg said some applicants may had inadvertently tried to access the files, without realizing they were looking for confidential information, after they were e-mailed directions from other students who had copied them from the BusinessWeek message board."
This is something I hadn't considered, that perhaps many students hadn't seen the original post but had been forwarded instructions from their friends without the implications of the context of the original post. When information can be passed in such a fragmented manner, it does seem overly harsh to punish everyone involved assuming that they knew full well what they were doing. Also, it seems like breaking in to look at information is different than breaking in to change information...
Posted by: Jess ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 11, 2005 12:40 PM
Good point -a key isse is the (rapid and) fragmentary nature of disemination - unique to networked digital information.
Posted by: pweil at March 11, 2005 4:22 PM
hmmmh :P~
Posted by: summersgone at September 28, 2007 10:34 AM
