mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Emerging Technology & Open Education Librarian standing for freedom of expression, fair dealing rights, and academic freedom.
"I don't know if the company actually understands how almost degrading and humiliating it is to know that you have to have a babysitter when you're in your 50s, and you've been doing your job for 30 years, and you've been doing it well."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/td-bank-bell-workplace-screentime-monitoring-9.7296526
Wow! Unable to confirm security, UBC has still not reopened access to Canvas, instead choosing to pivot to open source for continuity! WordPress, MediaWiki, and Moodle (!) are being offered as alternatives.
This is open educational technology at its best!
I was interviewed by Straight Arrow News about Turnitin’s plans to train AI models with student and instructor data (and how they may already be doing so):
“Turnitin is sitting on a gold mine,” Linkletter said.. “They’re sitting on a huge database of pre-ChatGPT works and they seem to have taken the legal point of view that they’re entitled to use these works essentially for any purpose they want.”
The University of Southampton publicly announced that it is moving away from Turnitin, effective immediately.
"We have a responsibility to protect the data, intellectual property and academic work of both our students and the University."
Link: https://elearn.soton.ac.uk/knowledge-base/turnitin-announcement-of-moving-away-from-turnitin/
It has been my mission for the past week to warn the public about the pending harms of the Instructure/Canvas hack.
I told 404 Media it is “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history” and am grateful I was able to share my concerns and help students.
Chegg updated their privacy policy in June to allow "user content" (instructor IP students uploaded) "to improve our products and services, including by training or fine-tuning our and third-party providers’ artificial intelligence and machine learning models".
“We have decided not to renew our contract beyond the end of the 2026-27 academic year and will begin phasing out the use of [Turnitin] immediately."
Link (must be logged in with free account): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/southampton-dumps-turnitin-over-use-students-work-train-ai
5 years ago today I sat for hours of cross-examination by Proctorio's lawyers. Today I am sharing the transcript in the public interest.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wLpa36A_plkJB4Q59i_vAbxzUjdZR1Uv/view?usp=drive_link
What is Instructure doing with user data?
On April 17, 2026, this "Usage Data" section had language added saying Instructure can use this data for "any lawful purpose". It prohibits customers from using their data to train AI, while allowing themselves to do so.
New Wikipedia page for the Canvas hack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Canvas_security_incident
This is BAD bad. Instructure has been bragging about their data hoard to investors for years, and now it's been stolen. This seemingly affects every school that uses Canvas.
In addition to names and personal email addresses, the hackers got personal messages and discussion posts.
Ransom paid!
"Instructure reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident."
I had a great conversation with Dexter Thomas about protecting students, institutional accountability, and rethinking our reliance on the LMS.
Everywhere in the world, students using Canvas saw this message:
"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again)... You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked."
https://www.theverge.com/tech/926458/canvas-shinyhunters-breach
BREAKING: Instructure has been hacked AGAIN. Students are posting to Reddit after seeing this message within Canvas.
"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some "security patches".`
More reports are being posted to Reddit every minute: https://old.reddit.com/search/?q=canvas&include_over_18=on&t=hour
I thought I would post screenshots of Instructure's status update regarding the Canvas LMS data breach. A notice has been added that there will be no more public updates to this page.
Despite the stated commitment to transparency, it is not clear how this could have happened.
