Hacking,This???

The recent HBS 119 issue really struck me hard….Here was a School, or rather an institution which has acted as a model for schools around the world, one that is indeed a factory of knowledge…One that has produced amazing cases on all aspects of management thought, but most importantly on those relating to Ethics & Technology….

Considering all this, i indeed find their decision to ding all the 119 people who had a peek at their app status very very surprising !! Where were the famed leadership abilities of the decision makers at HBS?? And where were the technologists…The ones who pioneered hacking back in the heydays of the blueboxes et al…Didn’t all the snoopers follow the highest levels of the famed MIT “hacker ethic” !!!…But hey, Show me one true hacker who’s gonna accept that this was a “hack” and these poor souls are “hackers”!!! Its about time people started to acknowledge the fact that any computer knowledge, other than clicking and browsing sites does NOT constitute hacking…Indeed has been a big letdown to see a school of the order of MIT succumb to some pathetic media reporting and the spin woved by THE biggest culprit in the entire episode, Applyyourself!!! Hell, it doesn’t require hackers from MIT to say that this wasn’t a hacking issue, a school kid could tell ya as much !!

Indeed, one of the very surprising twists to the entire episode has been how both the schools and a section of the larger applicant community (less the 119+42+1+……..) gave ethical dimensions to the actions of the 119…Yes, Ethics indeed are something that is something amiss in the current crop of people the worldover…But isn’t that the result of a more generic problem of increasing materialism?? To talk of failing ethics as the reason for these people to “hack” into the system smacks of a total lack of understanding of practical realities, both in terms of what is ethical and what is not and also in terms of how getting to un-linked pages is termed hacking !! And not to even mention of the umpteen number of other applicants who, having missed the 9hour window, now cry hoarse from the rooftops about their higher moral ground !!

As I see it, THE sole people responsible for the entire fiasco are the HBS’s Info systems team which decide to outsource the process and more importantly, Applyyourself, which has a system that allows their clients to upload pages that can be directly accessed by the customer before the date annointed by their client….In other words, for having a real crappy piece of software…. My heart goes out to all those people who have been dinged at various schools….And to all the real “hackers” at MIT !!!

Come to think of the entire episode, really have to admit, the IIMs exhibited a VERY high level of maturity and understanding when the CAT results leak issue came out and we had to issue a clarification Very sad indeed that the same can’t be said of HBS, and in my personal opinion, of MIT !!!

ps: Prolly this article @ the Harvard Crimson, sums up how even the staff of Harvard’s oldest daily newspaper feel about the entire fiasco, the result of a st00pid software !!!