TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Divide Grows on Treatment of Students in Online Breach

Divide Grows on Treatment of Students in Online Breach

Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Mon, 28 Mar 2005 20:27:21 -0500

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff

A small backlash has formed against the business schools of Harvard
and some of the nation's other most prestigious universities for
denying admission to more than 200 applicants who used a loophole
devised by a computer hacker to peek at their admission files.

Last week, Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, dissenting from
Harvard's stern reaction to the digital trespassing, said it had
accepted at least a few of the electronic intruders.

For administrators at Harvard, MIT, Duke, and Carnegie Mellon, the
attempts to view confidential data this month were the electronic
equivalent of breaking and entering, wholly unworthy of the future
captains of American commerce. But others see the online breaches as a
victimless crime by overeager young people accustomed to copying and
pasting links onto websites. The contrasting reactions may expose not
only a generational divide in Internet etiquette but also increasingly
divergent mores in the physical and virtual worlds at a time when free
downloading of music and open-source software is commonplace.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/28/divide_grows_on_treatment_of_students_in_online_breach/

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