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.