Cyber Education’s Ministry
Even if the calendar says that public education was on holliday those april’s weeks (depending on your zone), Education never stops…
Another denial of service at Ministry? At the last time to posts their wishes for higher education, lots of students were not able to reach parcoursup (name of this dedicated french service). The government said the servers where well sized, so the most obvious explanation implied an evil hacker (not worth mentionning: coming from Russia). The reality may be more complex.
First of all, let’s speak about the purpuse. We do not doubt that Vladimir Poutine’d love to hurt France but we have difficulties to find how this temporary failure of the higher education orientation service would seriously jeopardize the future of the Nation. Note that if you take into account the temporary failur of the CNED (french’s tele-education) while COVID’s lockdown, there must be a Great Plan (ineffable).
The answer is more pragmatic. ParcourSup is one of those services that have a variable crowd. The consensual way of life implies an elastic infrastructure that adds and removes servers on demand. But it needs lots of resources; brains to make it works and servers ready to launch (rented costly to “cloud providers”). Against the flow, the ministry chose a more classical fixed infrastructure; managing usual demand but failing at peaks.
Reaching the deadline, students rushed until the server was overflowed. The excessive students were not able to submit and had to come later, which increased again the crowd but a minimal flux of student were able to proceed. Only a fraction of the students didn’t submit any whish so, the day after, the government moved the deadline a bit and they finally were all able to submit their whishes. End of the Story.
Virtual Workplaces on waves. After those false alerts in schools, RCF ask aryliin how to better secure those virtual workplaces to avoid it happens again. Roughtly speaking, facing phishing, and as for any other website, everything lies on the users which must keep vigilant. We must educate them to best practices because technological solution only add more technical problems.
Special case for pronote (the virtual workplace for secondary and high school in France): adding any 2FA is useless. Firstly because teens use the smartphone’s app (only way to get notification about home works because the mails don’t work) and the app does’nt ask for credentials at all. Secondly because school will have to allows smarphone in classrooms to connect to their computers.
Since we talks about smartphones in classrooms… Cyrille (at restez-curieux.ovh) have just published, as a teacher, his point of view about those news technologies in schools: education and basis are the keys. Nothing related to the arsouyes but we agreed and thought it was worth sharing it with you.
At our side, we waits to replace the removed “tech” hours into “cyber education” lessons.