First of all, look at who is teaching our children thes days! People who have ABSOLUTELY NO idea about computers are teaching computer science in middle schools and high schools, and people who don’t even know what a network is become sysadmins at these institutions! Recently a 13 year old boy was suspended for using net send command to send the message “Hey!” to all computers in his middle school. Sounds ridiculus – read the article! The sheer lack of knowledge and general lever of compuer lireracy of these educators is scary!
First of all, how come the school does not have a computer usage policy, and a form requireing parental consent, and agreement to it’s terms? Seriously – the parents in the district should really get off their butts, and push for such a thing. Because without any guideline on what is acceptable computer use, and what is a punishable offense it is very easy for a lousy teacher with bad temper to really screw a kid over for, oh I don’t know – something as minor as opening the command prompt, or god forbid – writing a batch file to automate some mundane task! If typing
net send /users Hey!
is labeled as “hacking” offence punishable by 3 day suspension, then just about anything the so called educators have no idea can face simmilar treetment? Give them a book of rules to follow fog god’s sake – if the rules will explicitly state that students are not to send private messages of any kind over the school network then the punishment would be fine (still, 3 day suspension is still ridiculus and only reflects the lack of proper education on behalf of the teachers). Otherwise this is a parody, and a joke!
Secondly, if your staff is paranoid about students “hacking” hire someone who has at least a little bit knowledge about this stuff, and make him reduce the privledges with which the students log in. Give them a set of minimum luser privlages and your problems are over. Then show the teachers how to login with the power luser accounts so they can install their bonzie buddy and all kinds of other crap on their office desktop…
And finally make that compentent person explain to them what exactly does the term hacker means, cause they seem to have no clue.
Oh, and talking about lunacy, check this out. SCO is going after Google now!!! These guys are getting worse than RIAA! How long can they be allowed to pull this ridiculus stunt? I wonder if Google will give, and make a deal, or will they put up a fight.
Seriously, next thing we know SCO will pull RIAA like stunt and start suing individual Linux users! lol Oh, wait – no, they wont. Unlike RIAA people who have no brain matter left whatsoever, SCO people are smarter than that. They are after money – and individual user lawsuits will only bring losses. They are after the big fish – first IBM, now Google… This kindoff reminds one those baseless lawyers only waiting to get oine of those “violence in the media” lawsuits on their hands, expecting easy money.
The whole RIAA and SCO things are very much like that obese guy who sues Burger King for making him fat. All you can do is shake your head, and say “sit down and shut up – you are an idiot, and I don’t want to hear another word!”
That’s just retarded. On my school I get to use old (over 9 years old) school as I wish so I now have a linux server running on unused math classroom and shortly I will be setting up linux computers on our computer lab. I usually do some machine maintaining that my user account allows, because almost even small problems would otherwise take weeks to fix because computer would have to be sent to external company handling these things. Also our school has competent IT staff in form of our math teachers who have programming experience on web applications that are used on many schools across the Finland(Helmi reissuihko, now developed by Nextime), and one of them has used linux distro he compiled by hand, but sadly they don’t have full privileges on the school network. They are also pretty relaxed:
Fellow student: “Teacher! is doing Hacking or something! Make him stop!”
Teacher: “, what are you doing?”
Me: “I am using linux on live-cd and SSHing to my server.”
Teacher: “Ok. Continue but remenber that if you break something you will also fix it.”
Fellow student: “! Are you fucking stupid or something! He is using something called xterm and he is clearly hacking with it.”
Teacher: “It is terminal emulator and he is doing programming, also get out of facebook.”
Fellow student: “It is hacking! Remember that I said that when cops arrive!”
I laughed so hard. Our computer class is usually just boring Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Photoshop/Publisher stuff because it is mandated to use that software and teach these things, but I am free to use software I want and do whatever I want after I have done everything I was ordered to do.
I forgot to use < and > in place of < and >. When you see blank where obviusly should be something add <my name> or <teacher’s name>.