Rewarding crime and punishing honesty is COOL now. Cities and states refuse to jail thieves, so stores turn into prisons for honest people.
Companies reward hackers and punish honest users. Canvas was expertly hacked by an organized gang who worked through Canvas’s private Github area to locate user data, then captured millions of users and received millions of dollars in return for a meaningless promise not to release the data.
Now Canvas is locking the barn door after the thieves took out the horse through a tunnel they dug, not through the barn door.
I’ve been paying Canvas $3600 a year for a testbed, through an indirect arrangement with my publisher. The publisher owns the account and bills me annually. (3600 is two months of income, not inconsequential.)
Now Canvas has locked me out because I don’t own a smartphone. They won’t do the other MFA tricks like sending audio codes to a regular phone. Only a smartphone will do. The only alternative they can imagine is for the publisher to verify me every time I want to use the system.
THIS IS UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE.
I need to test lessons at random times of day and night, often 20 or 30 in one day. If the publisher has to let me in each time, both of us will waste an INTOLERABLE amount of labor and delay.
If Canvas had any brains, they’d recognize that a PAYING CUSTOMER without a cellphone is at the opposite end of the scale from an organized gang of super-techy hackers who extort millions. Canvas doesn’t have any brains.
Fortunately I didn’t REALLY need a Canvas testbed anyway. This arrangement started two years ago because the publisher wasn’t convinced by previous trials on “borrowed” testbeds. After those trials I understood the fussy differences between Canvas and generic courseware, and had already fixed those little inconsistencies. I can go back to the generic ScormCloud, which was much easier to use BEFORE this outrageous shit started, much less expensive, and still functions normally now.
= = = = =
It appears that the authorities aren’t trying very hard to prosecute ShinyHunters. Per wikipedia (if I’m reading it right) only six members have been caught and imprisoned, mainly in France. The group has been massively extorting in many countries since 2019.
Pulling back from my own annoyance, this incident has also spurred many schools to abandon Canvas. It’s one more nail in the coffin of total digital life, one more reason to switch back to paper and human contact. Subscription software and e-books, deletable and modifiable remotely, were the first. AI was the second, and it’s still hammering hard. Cybersecurity run amok is the third.
Polistra's Mill 