Lords of Kutztown

In the small town of Kutstown, Pennsylvania it seems that trouble has been brewing in the school system. Evidently the school had a deployment of Apple iBooks to the students in the high school. The students got to take these laptops to each class and home with them. The students wanted to do what every high school student wants to do, surf the web, IM friends, and download games. But soon after receiving them they found out that they were unable to do so, do to security restrictions on the laptops. Well, it seems that the system wasn't so secure after all. The students evidently seemed to find the administrator password on the back of each and every laptop. The word quickly spread and many students had unihibited access to the laptops shortly thereafter. I'm not going to type out the rest of the article, as many others already have, some of which are here, here, orhere. In the end it seems that 13 of the students were charged with Felony offenses of "Computer tresspassing".

Now, I will admit that these students did do something wrong, and that they did do much more than read the password off the back of the laptops. After the network admins found out that students knew the password, they did change the password on all the laptops they could. But evidently the password was not very secure, and one of the students used a password cracker to obtain the new password. The students did attempt to go around the system admins precautions, and I agree that a punishment for that should be given, but felony charges a bit much in my opinion. These are high school students, and a felony is going stick to them for a long time. Is this how we are improving the future by sending our thinking kids to jail?

To me it seems that the school got in over it's head when they figured out how much work securing these machines would be, especially when they are in the physical ownership of the students. The system admin got into something he didn't fully understand, and the students showed him that they knew more about the system than he did, by example. Now instead of the admin and school board realizing their mistakes, and trying to correct them it seems that they just went after the students. The articles state that the school deployed a revamped security system after these events took place, but I question exactly how much better this sytem is. Of course I doubt any of the students will test the security of the system since 13 of their classmates were charged with felonies.

If you feel inclined to contact some of the related parties in this incident, contact info can be found below:

Kutztown Area High School
50 Trexler Avenue
Kutztown, Pennsylvania 19530
(610) 683-7346

Kutztown Area School District
http://kasd.org/
District Administration
50 Trexler Ave.
Kutztown, PA 19530
610) 683-7361
fax (610) 683-7230

Several students and apparently some staff and parents have put together a website here that has more information, as well as ways to help the students.

Systm of a down

Cool little site out there for all you tech-heads called Systm. The owners of the site create how-to videos demonstrating various things in the computer and technology field. Systm is from the same people who brought us thebroken and you may have seen many of the people on the now non-existant TechTV. They use bittorrent for most of their file downloads as most of them are quite sizely videos. This is one of the few legitimate legal uses of torrents out there on the net. I'm sure there are several other sites that use it, but aside from linux iso's, this is one area which bittorrent was designed for.

Florida was great, but I think I got a bit too much sun. I basically spent 3 days on the beach. It rained every day, but only for a short amount each day, which was nice since it cooled the temps down quite a bit. I am sending my camera our for repair soon, and hopefully the warrantee will cover the expenses, but maybe someday, I'll post some photos.

Asta la Vista!

Well, finally saw longhorn first hand today. The only words that I could muster after seeing that was "It took 5 years for that?" Seriously it looks like XP with a new fancier theme (with some very interesting "similarities" with OSX!). If you are wanting to see some screens of it yourself you can see some here. I wasn't running it on a good machine so I didn't get to see the "glass" effect, but I will give it some credit by saying that it looks a bit better, even though many actions seem to involve way too much clicking.

As for the title of this post, Windows Codename:longhorn was recently renamed to "Windows Vista", which seems like a strange deviation from the other names. In any case it doesn't seem to have any significant improvements over XP.

Anyway, enough ranting, I should be getting back to packing so I can head out to sunny Florida tomorrow. Hopefully this trip turns out a bit better than my others recently....