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Student Suspended For Taking Teacher's Challenge
CygnusTM writes: "The Seattle Times has a story about a high-school student who has been suspended for cracking a school computer after being challenged to do so by a teacher. The teacher says he wasn't serious. Raw deal." Aaron Lutes apparently got tripped up for what should have perhaps gotten him extra credit. The article notes: "The Lutes family and the district also acknowledge that Lutes' computer-science teacher, Giovanni Colombo, told students they'd get a reward from the software company if they cracked the security system and that Colombo wanted a 10% cut of that reward." Welcome to school, take a seat.
No. That's the way it should work. Fixing bugs and gaining status from improving security is proper. Punishing folk for being able to demonstrate a security problem is improper. Perhaps vile is a better word.
... well, don't expect any plaudits from those folk. If you tell the sysadmin what the problem is and let him fix it, then you should be rewarded (at least with status). But you had better be sure that you tell him before he tracks you down, and before you have reason to know that he is tracking you down.
Someone who punishes a person for alerting them to a security problem should be fired immediately. Possibly also sued for their eyeteeth.
Doing damage is something else. And broadcasting the information about the problem is in-between (the sticky part).
If you do damage intentionally you should definitely be punished. If you do damage inadvertently, then you should possibly be punished (depends on what you do, etc.). If you broadcast the information irresponsibly... difficult. Depends. If you broadcast the information because the sysadmin (or his representative) won't hear you, and won't fix the problem
If you are responding to a challenge issued by someone that you have reason to believe is a responsible authority, then it should be a straight reward (status counts). If some specific reward is promissed, then this should be considered a contract.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The problem is that, while universities and colleges have the resources to shop around and look at different security packages, budgets are so much lower for high schools that they really have to make do with the crap that they get from their school boards.
This, of course, leads to a tighter security-though-obscurity focus. (Plus, realistically, what are the chances of a high school student being hired by a school board for such activity? The school boards are supposed to have people to handle these things. Those people are going to be right pissed that some upstart's taking over their job. Likewise, the amount of additional money that it'd cost in support costs, etc., to switch to a better security model typically eclipses what your average school board can afford. And yes, I realize there are quite a few that can afford them, but they prove to be more the exception than the rule.)
A college degree on the other hand is not. Why finish high school when you can go on to college?
Now I know what you might be thinking, that someone can't go to college without a high school diploma, well that simply isn't true. You probably won't get into Harvard or MIT, but there are scores of well respected universities that will be more than happy to accept a "high school dropout" with high SAT scores and good scores on their GED test. Believe it or not your grades in school are less important to a college or university than your SAT scores. Do well on it and you can go to lots and lots of places with or without a HS diploma.
If you decided you wanted to go to some place like MIT, and you had the money, then a year or two at a university or even junior college will go a long way if your grades are impeccable and you can get reccomendations from your instructors.
So any way you look at it high school is a waste of time and energy, unless you're in honors/AP classes and actually maybe learning something. But if you've already left then just move on to college, even if you have to start out at a community college. If you're a hacker/geek type then chances are your test scores will be such that you'll be able to start wherever you want.
But you are right that he should not think he is going to keep making the same ammount of money he is making now forever. I was thinking the same exact thing and would have said so myself if you had not beaten me to it and done a better job of explaining the reasons why.
He should save up as much money as he can right now from that big paying job and use it to pay his tuition through school. Then when he's got a degree he can take a trip back to his old high school and put a copy of it on the principal's desk and greet him with a hearty "fuck you!"
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
If you can get enough students and parents to complain about the things he is doing, he'll be out on his ass in no time. The last thing the school board wants is community involvement and if he is seen as the source of that involvement he will be eliminated ASAP.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The old high school I went to was a private school. They had a policy saying if you managed to break the security on the network you were to report it immediately to a admin. Also the policy was to immediately suspend the person who broke the security and to permanently revoke computer privledges. There were so many security holes I wanted to report to the school, but I knew that if I told them I would be suspended. Schools are not doing themselves any good punishing those that try to help.
The few of us in school that actually knew how to use the computers were watched closely. I couldn't do anything without a teacher standing over my shoulder. I once got in trouble by opening a telnet window to connect to my home computer. Apparently anything on the screen that looks different to the teacher is immediately dangerous.
We need to educate our teachers on how to properly teach students, not let them monitor things they don't know. Public school or private, the US education system is seriously flawed.
bah.. I think all he's learned is that children have no rights and will never be treated fairly in our society.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm 23 years old. If someone asked me to see whether I could get through their trivial little network security program I would not think twice about it. If a lecturer at my university asked me to check their network security, I would do it. And if an admin showed up and started screaming and yelling and saying he was gunna call the cops both me and the lecturer would tell him to piss off. But that didn't happen here.. why? Because he's a 17 year old kid and he has no rights and is shown no respect.
How we know is more important than what we know.
but in this situation it is highly unlikely that the seminar is filed with kids. If you were to successfully disable the alarm of the bank and then get in trouble for it you could always call forward a dozen other people from the seminar and have them testify that they believed you had the ok of a representative of the bank. What's more, they could stand there and demand that the reward be paid. But in this situation the classroom is full of kids and our society doesnt give kids the same rights as adults. So when the victim here calls forward a dozen of his school mates and says the teacher said it was ok, he and his class mates are ignored or assumed to be lying. Especially if the teacher disagrees with them. This is a simple case of age descrimination.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If I don't lock up my gun and someone steals it and uses it to kill someone, I AM AT FAULT. Should be the same with computers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I was in a similar situation a while back. While working on the terminal of our proprietary system at my job I accidentally found a backdoor that gave me access to a shell. I notified the Sysadmin, a good friend of mine, immediately. He told me mess around with the backdoor and see how far I could get with it. He wanted me to test the severity of the exploit before he reported it to the vendor. I ended up getting quite far and giving myself access to manager's functions. I told the sysadmin of my success and he thanked me for my help. I left it at that. It is a military system on the base LAN so I had no desire to use the system for personal gain. It would have been suicide to do so.
So time went on and one day our Lieutentant was playing around with the system and saw my profile was setup with manager access. He changed it back to it's proper access levels and told me "it's taken care of". Later that day the facility manager returned. She is an older lady of the sort that fears technology, change, and progress. He told her of my actions and she went through the roof. She documented my actions as though I had committed a crime. She contacted my Commander and tried to get me demoted. I was in quite a bit of trouble.
I was fired and moved to a different facility (This is common practice in the military). I was put on a bad shift with a notoriously gruff supervisor. Life sucked.
My only revenge is the knowledge that when the time came to write my annual performance review, I ensured that the incident was documented as a positive occurrence. The review notes that my actions increased the overall security of the proprietary system. Due to the nature of the information the system contained, this is quite significant.
Isn't it sad what closed-minded people can do when they refuse open their eyes to new ideas?
i once knew a kid who could lose his completed[!] homework on the bus to school.
he shows up for math class that day, and since this was not the first time he showed up without the required assignment the teacher told him, "if you are not going to do the work in this class don't bother coming at all..."
so the next day the kid shows up at the vice principal's office rather than the math class and when asked why he is not in class, he relates what the teacher told him!
of course he got suspended for 3 days, yet he did the right thing IMO by showing up at school rather than playing hooky.
don't tell children to do things you really don't want them to do, their sense of irony or sarcasm may not be as finely developed as an adults'...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
yet another good method for teachers to get students they don't like to leave school, isn't it? Psycho terror, bad grades and now that ...
GOD DAMN. If they pulled that shit at my kids school I would be knocking on people's doors bearing gifts and organising picket lines. When I was in school the students aranged the strike because they were going to close down grade 12 (the final year) because they didn't have enough students.. we were in our final year so it didn't even effect us but we knew that it would be bad for the school - kids would have to go to some other school to get their final certificate. We protested for days and recruited the teachers to protest with us (after all, they had no-one to teach). In the end it was called off. You can't let this stuff slide man.. you gotta get in there and change things.
How we know is more important than what we know.
not end of story. If the salesman was talking to a kid on the lot and the next person to walk on the lot was his father and the son told the father about what the guy said the guy would say "shut up kid" and the father would probably say "billy, don't tell lies". If the person in the next booth was a kid and he called the cops the cops wouldn't even show up. The point here? We don't give kids any rights or respect in our society -- especially when they are in school.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I remember my chemistry teacher used to teach us stuff that was pure speculation but I didn't find out until I started reading Science regularly. I would find something that was a brand new discovery.. ie someone had finally proved it and I'd go to the teacher and he'd say "oh yer.. but I knew it was correct". Apparently teachers do this a lot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I never said it was entrapment. I said it was the same principle as entrapment. The teacher enticed the kids into doing something and then had the kid who actually did it arrested for it. So now you're arguing with my definition of entrapment, whereas earlier you were attacking my logic in concluding that the same principle was involved in this case as in an entrapment case. You're not making much sense to me. I think we're done here.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"Now, if a school has just paid out thousands of dollars for this program and a student can easily break thru it, don't you think they would want to know this? Why wouldn't they challenge the students to do this so they could probably go back to the company and say "Look, your software sucks, we want our money back"
This is exactly why they WONT blame the software. Undoutably some slick marketer conned the school (and taxpayers) out of thousands for this so-called "security" program (as if some third party program will allow idiots secure a system better than a competently installed and administered server).
Why won't they blame the teacher? Why the teacher has a UNION... They will either have to file charges, or defend themselves in some court.
It's far easier to punish the student. Minors basically have no rights, and schools can punish students pretty much at will.
Basically the school's administration drones took the easy way out. And the easy way is NEVER the right way. The only harm this kid caused was to expose wasteful spending by a PUBLIC institution.
I hope this case gets a lot of bad publicity for this school, and these administrator types get theirs.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
According to the article, the student was taken to a police station and threatened with criminal charges for his actions.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Duh.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
First, I am not 17 years old. I'm now 28, and have ten solid years experience working on UNIX systems. I am able to command the salary I do because I have a reputation for fixing problems that no one else could, and fixing them quickly. This is more valuable to my employer (a major network-services-provider) than a BS ever will be. This ability comes from years of careful study of how computers work.
As for a lack of education: I am currently working on bachelors, in philosophy (although I'm trying to transfer to a school that offers classics) with an eye towards "cashing out" of the computer industry and going into ministry.
Now, those who say that the purpose of education is not to make money are, in general, correct. The point of education is to learn how to think and to have something to think with (i.e. information), ultimately applying that to the human condition. However, most technical programs are more like vocational training than education. So, when I decline to pursue a CS degree (even though I could get one by a couple of years of yawning with my background) I do so because that degree is worthless to me.
Frankly, at my current level (very senior in one of the biggest companies around) my education or lack thereof is irrelevant in the face of my experience and the things people have seen me do. After spending years in school being told how "drop outs don't succeed", I take a certain satisfaction in the fact that I have slags of people with BS's and even MS's in computer science coming to me for advice and even assistance.
Is this pride, and thereby a sin? I can't deny it. I should probably be working on that.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
You go for any senior IT job here in the UK at a major company, and they want an honours degree from a decent university.
Worse than that, a lot of them are expecting science degree as a minimum, and some are even starting to demand a Computer Science degree.
I don't like this, I don't necessarily agree with it, but I have noticed the trend. And yes, I will be pissed if I ever miss out on a job because my degree is in Accounting and not CS.
~Cederic
You can have one (and only one) of the following lines on your resume. Pick one:
- "I screwed my school by driving them nuts"
- "I started a web programming firm"
The difference between these two is non-trivial.
Letting yourself get caught up in the system (i.e. public education) is a great way to waste time. Take a step back and recognize that the opinions of your educators are insignificant and that you should do what will be best for yourself in the long run (e.g. not completing school, barely getting by to finish that high school diploma), not "showing them who's smartest by getting straight A's".
Read the article.
The company knew of no reward.
If I was the kid I would have done the same thing.
Why would the teacher want access to something he probably allready had?
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Wait a minute?! If you're telling me that the teacher should be blamed than you got it wrong. Why you ask?!
Well, if my boss or anyone else, tells me to jump off the 10th floor window and I took the dive without "looking into it" than it is my own doing and no one but "I" to be held responsible for the consequence.
However, if I was dumb and was tricked into it, than it's a different story. With this teacher/student story, I don't think the student is dumb -- otherwise s/he wouldn't figured out how to hack the system.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Brutal analogy.
A closer one would be if this was a lock-smithing class and he was told he would get a reward if he could pick the front door lock to the school, went ahead and did it - after hours when the school door is actually locked - then got busted for letting them know that he did it. A student makes little distinction among the authority figures in his school, so ends up being perceived as more than a little deceptive, and of course, completely unfair.
The teacher obviously didn't believe any of his students could pull off the crack, and is too spineless to step up for his students when one of them gets into trouble as a direct result of his teaching. The example this teacher is presenting for his students is appalling. What ever happened to integrity?
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
The moral of the story: schools are the most oppresive organizations out there. I mean, hell, you can't even carry a gun or drugs into them! 8^)
Actually I thought the problem was, people DO carry guns and drugs in and don't get caught, but if you do something antisocial like wear black or question authority, you're in eleven kinds of trouble.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
maybe he is due the money from the school system.
??????
Are you nuts? The school system does NOT owe the kid money any more than the mysterious "security company" does. So sad.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Indeed common sense should apply, but to the teacher, not the student. These are kids we are talking about, and the people that are supposed to be their role models. I'm not suggesting that all highschool kids are mindless sheep, but I am suggesting that teachers have a huge responsibility to kids, to lead them, teach them, and mentor them, quite apart from giving them academic direction. As a parent, I'm also not suggesting that parents assume the role of parents - or usurp it, I should say - as our government, and many parents, seem to want. I am, however, saying that this sort of casual attitude towards kids is not something we should blame on the kids. Yeah, the kid did something stupid, and he should be disciplined for it. But the teacher who encouraged the student to break the law should not be simply forgiven with such a lame excuse as "well I didn't really mean it." Kids are impressionable, and a teacher's entire career is about creating the right impressions on those kids. This sort of thing is inexcusable.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
You misspelled "possessive".
(Incorrect Grammar During Dictionary Flame, -3)
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Umm... you could work at McDonald's and make more than a high school teacher makes.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
hehe. Me too. 6 figure income without a high school diploma -- gotta love it. This really just underlines the utter unimportance of what education has become.
Congrats, at the age of 45 you will be doing the exact same thing and making the same salary. If that's what you want, more power to ya.
-josh
Well, if my boss or anyone else, tells me to jump off the 10th floor window and I took the dive without "looking into it" than it is my own doing and no one but "I" to be held responsible for the consequence.
Taking a flying leap off the 10th floor has no discernable benefit besides being a Darwin Awards footnote. The teacher, on the other hand, is acknowledged to have said the software company was offering a reward. Not only that, but Lutes wasn't the only student to take him seriously, according to the superintendent. Completely different situation here; looks like the teacher didn't realize how much power his words carry among his students, and one of them got burned as a result. I'm rather disappointed the teacher (as far as I know) hasn't come out and stood up, publicly, for his student.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Is education all about gaining income?
What if you were poor when you were a child...and never had access to a computer until coming to school. So do you think you would be a young sysadmin then?
Education may be unimportant to the extreme few who are lucky enough to be smart, talented, motivated and provided with advantages from birth (smart parents who provide for their kids, access to computers, books, musical instruments, etc.).
For the other 6 billion, education is and will always be utterly essential.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
Ten bucks says we've just seen the subject of JonKatz's next book
. . . and perhaps even a majority of the content between the covers.
--
Rob Carlson
A year or so ago, I used to visit this message board that allowed user ids to have underscores. There was a big discussion one time about metal detectors.
One person said they wouldn't work that well, so the another guy (his user id was 'evil_genius') dared him to try to get a gun through a metal detector.
Of course, the guy got the gun through a metal detector, and got arrested. Since 'evil_genius' was stupid enough to suggest this, I feel like all people with underscores in their names are also this stupid.
The above was total bs, just like the original post.
--
The order goes:
Engr --> CSc --> Poli Sci --> Physc
Yikes...
I have an engineering degree with a Poli Sci minor, and I did grad work in Comp. Sci...
I'm not ever sure where on that chart I am...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
He also was hauled off to the Elma police station and held briefly for investigation of unauthorized use of a computer to access government information.
Wait? Wasn't the charge based on using a computer to acccess "government information"? Which would mean, you know, accessing a file? Something ain't matching up here kids, and it doesn't look like Aaron's the bad guy here...
The Lutes family and the district also acknowledge that Lutes' computer-science teacher, Giovanni Colombo, told students they'd get a reward from the software company if they cracked the security system and that Colombo wanted a 10 percent cut of that reward.
So it's agreed; the teacher went out and said the software company was offering a reward for cracking the software. The teacher lied to his students for yuks. Great teacher.
"But the teacher was only joking!"
About what part? The phony "reward" or the "10% cut"? I joke about getting a cut of others' work all the time.
Elma School Supt. Bill Myhr, duly noting that the issue was confidential, did say that while some students took the challenge seriously, it wasn't intended that way.
So Aaron wasn't the only kid who thought the teacher was serious? So one can't argue that Aaron claiming his teacher was serious is just an excuse; he wasn't the only one confused by the teacher's statements.
So far, it looks like Aaron's only crime was being too good with computers for the adults' liking.
He did acknowledge that Aaron Lutes was disciplined last year for using a school computer to call up inappropriate Web sites.
Probably 2600, attrition.org, Peacefire and the like. Nice use of ambiguous terminology to besmirch Aaron's character. In large legal cases, this is called "leaking selected information to the media," and is considered a rather sleazy P.R. tactic.
Really, it looks like Aaron's being persecuted for making the teacher, the school, and the district look like fools for using such an easily-circumvented "security system." The kid does what the teacher is known to have said to the students, expects the reward the teacher claimed was being offered, and instead gets punished for being too smart. The ol' bait-and-switch; wasn't this used on Winston in 1984? Root out the undesirables by offering exactly what they want, then turn and stab them in the back?
I think Aaron Lutes has learned more from this experience than any high school could teach in four years.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
This guy got in trouble for something stupid. At least you have a teacher that will say something like this. Ours school seems to put down computers as much as it can. This year we got a new principal. This guy brings in teachers for token jobs, like history teachers, oh it just so happens the guy is a great basketball coach. Our principal apparently thinks very very little about any club except for the sports ones. Niether the computer club, nor the dramam club got any funding this year. Over the summer the new guy decided the school need some "cleaning". His idea of cleaning was throwing away over $20,000 worth of computer equiptment, the stuff we had been collecting for 3 years, that groups before me had been collecting since the school opened 10 years ago. He threw away _everything_, including an SGI Indy we had just gotten last year. He also cleaned out the drama department, which i'm not all that involved in, but he threw away all of thier props. The dramam department actually made money for the school, we used to have 6 plays a year, we're going to have 2 this year due to lack of funds and props. The drama club tried to raise money by selling candy, he put a stop to that saying it violated school policy. As if all this wasn't bad enough, we got ANOTHER gym, bringing us to a total of 3 gyms, basketball courts indoors and out. Ok, i'm done ranting
I know a guy that did this with calculus...
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
That's what you get when you work for a contract on a project, and don't have paperwork to back it up! Next time get it in writing. Especially for security work.
And he's hardly the first youngster to get royally screwed this way by his teacher! It's only rare because it happened in High School and not College.
-Ben
Ok... so what has not been said yet? The article comments that the parents have been told that all criminal charges will be dropped - so just what are these other aspects? I think until that not-so-subtle issue is cleared, I can't say anything about the student's actions. I will say, however, that the teacher definitely sounds like a moron - the article made no attempt to hide that.
so there you have our take - take it or ignore it
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
My eigth grade year in middle school, I was in a computer class where we did stuff with Hypercard. I did the normal assignments and used the rest of the time to program stuff that was more interesting. Because I had figured out some simple ways to bypass the security, the computer lab teacher was deathly afraid of me.
Some kind of rumor got started that I was working on a disk that could be inserted into any of the school computers and would then bring the entire district network down. The first I heard of it was when I was summoned to talk to the principal (and all the administrators who had also gathered in the office specifically to discipline me). My computer priveleges were revoked for a month because they didn't want to "take chances".
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
No. No, there would not be. This is neither logical nor feasible What you're saying is tantamount to suggesting that a crime is the fault of the victim. If we adopt this stance in relation to one type of crime, then it could be extended over time to every sort of crime. The foundation of justice systems, since the beginning of recorded law, has been laying the fault for the crime with the criminal. We can't turn around now and start saying "it's your fault i hacked/cracked/whatever-ed your box- you didn't have tight enough security." That is ludicrous. It is the fault of the criminal who gains illegal and unauthorized access to a resource, not the person who fails to control sufficiently that resource.
Following in your logic, we would soon reach the point of "it's your fault i shot you... i was just firing my gun around at random, and you stepped in front of my bullets. and you weren't wearing bulletproof armor. i'm not to blame." I can't stress this enough... crime is, and always will be, solely the fault of the criminal parties.
What you're saying is essentially that computer crime should not be a crime if the box is not secure enough. Essentially, you seem to think that if the crime is too easy, it shouldn't be a crime. That's absurd. Think about what you are saying. Read some law. Apply the laws of logic. Then rethink your opinion. Just because there is a new paradigm doesn't mean we have to change the basic laws of justice and morality. Humans are still the same... the basic codes of justic that human society has been following for millenia will be too.
--Use this space for notes--
He stood at the front door of his house and said...
Actually, unless I misread the article, he was breaking into a system owned by the school, and one that the teacher had no direct authority over.
I think that a closer analogy would be:
He stood at the front door of the office he worked at and said:
You can't break into my office because they installed a new lock which can NOT be opened without the key
And the cops showed up, and his boss, asking why an employee was encouraging non-employees to break into an office.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This story really brings back some memories of my first couple years of high school. When we weren't being challenged in our programming classes we really had nothing else to do but to try to bypass the system so we could play games.
The security software they had installed on the computer systems was incredibly easy to bypass. My advice to high school network administrators where any of the machines are macs (these were the machines in the programming lab so they were the once we put the most effort into, the PCs were even easier, it took 5 clicks from the standard student user interface to be in Windows Explorer and have complete control) is as follows:
Netware is so easy to get around on PCs its not even worth bothering.
The point of this all is that there is always going to be a group of kids on any high school network who are trying to do this stuff. They aren't trying to do it to get access to files they shouldn't have access to. If we wanted to we could have done that, but we didn't. We just wanted to beat the system to beat the system. Eventually we grew out of it and ended up helping the network administrator keep things clean.
At one time I was suspended for 5 days for related incidents, and it really didn't stop me from doing anything. It's not the answer. Let the kids beat the system, make it better. Let it evolve.
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All circuits busy.
Dang, why do other teachers get all the bright ones? I spent a year teaching computers at a middle school and when I arrived none of them could write a web page or "Hello World". (A few of them could by the end of the year). It was kind of disappointing; I was hoping for an apprentice jedi or two.
Heh, maybe if you'd finished school you wouldn't be an ill-tempered badger now.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
It's just like the South Park movie -- where the parents protested the vulgarity of a movie about parents protesting the vulgarity of a movie -- except I don't think Parker & Stone intended it.
One thing is for sure, though. Aaron Lutes just learned a lot more from his Computer class than he bargained for, about how people who have skills and knowledge are feared and persecuted by those who don't.
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." --Albert Einstein
The story says the kid was in trouble last year for bringing up innapropriate web sites. I'm trying to paint a MO here, just a theory..
/..'rs should do the same. I had teachers fuck with me because I was too smart in school. It's nothing but peasant mentality on the part of the school district. Then again, I've been to washington, back in the 80's when I listened to the cure and dressed funny, I remember kids from my cousins HS in their farmer overalls asking me, "What are you some kind of faggot?" I guess things haven't changed much.
A few years back Mr Columbo recomends site blocking software A. Kid breaks through software. Mr Columbo looks like an ass because some 14 year old kid comprimised his recomended security. Rather than be a professional about it and say "gee ok maybe I should ask this kid what we should use" He probably spent his time thinkin of ways to get back at him.
Over the course of the next year, Mr Columbo does his best to alienate this kid from the rest of the population. Prolly embarasses him in front of the class, continually tries to opress his free though.
Eventually the kid gets to a state where no matter what he tries, he knows Mr Columbo (god i love saying that) does not like him, he wants to do good in school so he's willing to do whatever it takes to get back in his good graces.
Mr Columbo makes a joke, telling the students to crack the file security system. Kid is so desperate to get on his good side he takes it literally, so he begins his work.
After comprimising system, kid goes back to Mr Columbo hoping he will acknowledge his work. Mr Columbo acknowledges it, then turns around and reports to the school "hey this kid is a 3v1l h4ck3r" to get the kid who made him look bad a year ago out of his hair.
The whole thing smells like entrapment if you ask me. Just like the corporate world except if a job is this bad, at least you can quit.
I'm willing to donate $100 bucks to this kids legal defense fund. It's not much, but its all I can offer right now. Let me know where to send the check, maybe the rest of us
--Toq
I find the best way to deal with school is to completely ignore your surroundings, including your teachers, and instead teach yourself as much as you possibly can about computers. If you have the intelligence necessary to be a hacker, you'll pick up tidbits in class, do well on exams and tests, and pull average marks. As an added bonus, you won't get into these situations! Of course, I'm assuming that most hackers are like me (i.e. they prefer to teach themselves rather than be taught).
--Skatche; the name with no meaning whatsoever
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
Winston Churchill
I think he said something more in line with "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."
Anyway, school is a pretty important part of education. I was an outcast myself in school, and it taught me to appreciate the things that were really important. That is, not tailoring myself to make others happy, but to conduct myself in a way that made me happy (I was a dirty little punk rocker in HS =).
That's quite a broad generalization there. I would have to disagree.
:)
1. Some people teach because they have to (that's all they know, or they can't get a job better than that).
2. Some people teach because they love to.
Obviously, you're going to run into some teachers in the first category who hate their job, hate the students, and might even hate life too. If you combine that with frustrated students, you're only asking for trouble. Unfortunately there are all to many teachers who fall into this category, and they are probably responsible for where the public school system is today.
The teachers in the second category are really the ones that CAN make school how it should be: EDUCATIONAL. Still though, if you have a teacher in the second category and a student who makes that teacher's job a hassle to him/her, you're still asking for trouble. This should be solved with the teacher realizing that they're just kids, and you've got to brush most annoyances off.
So there you have it. Often times, yes, the teachers are the problem, but not all the time. You've got to remember that an adult interacting with a group of teens going through puberty (or kids at any age) has got to be incredibly hard no matter what you're doing...
So, give them some credit
The law you're looking for is "contributing to the delinquency of a minor". The teacher induced a minor to break a law by claiming there was a reward for taking the action. That's a serious offense, especially for a teacher.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
The real problem here is ignorance ... LEA's are ignorant, teachers, administrators ... They are afraid -- when people challenge their beliefs, it brings their plastic fantastic world to a halt, they're insecure and scared, in order to put their world back into perspetive, they have to criminilize the messenger instead of the institutions that are lying to them ...
That all said, I am a little suspiscious about how he could break in to whatever it was he was supposd to have broken into ... the article has no details at all about the software, the computer, the attack etc ... I doubt with the level of sophistication the school seems to demonstrate, they could tell a misconfiuration from a compromise.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
What if you were poor when you were a child...and never had access to a computer until coming to school. So do you think you would be a young sysadmin then?
That's why it's a million times more important for teachers to ENCOURAGE students to learn about computers, rather than punish them for it. Those school lab computers may well be the only computers some of those kids get to touch - and the philosophy is exactly like, stay in the lines, use only these eight crayons, and if I catch you drawing on the back of the paper, you go home for 3 days.
This is ridiculous. Usually, a generation tends to want its kids to have it better than they did. So why are we stuck dealing with a couple of generations that are SCARED TO DEATH whenever we demonstrate that we know more than they do - and thus have a chance to have it better than they did? When did schools decide it was their job to keep kids dumb instead of make them smart?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
It's irrelevant. The teacher claimed the security company would pay. The teacher had no legal authority to enter into a contract on the company's behalf, verbal or otherwise. The teacher may have provided false information, but there is nothing the teacher said which would incur any monetary liability on his part.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
It was predictable that at least one of the students would take up the challenge. In fact, a good teacher who knows his students moderately well ought to be able to guess which ones might. But more importantly, what does this retribution teach all of the students there? He accepted a challenge that was openly given. When he succeeded, he annouced his success. And he was punished. Will the next student to do this quietly prowl around the system and say nothing? And is there anyone in most schools with the knowledge to discover that the system has been compromised?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
You can never garauntee that a 15 year old is mature enough to pock up the nuances of adult humor, or sarcasm
Some 15yolds are surprisingly good at picking up on this sort of thing.
My opinion: the teacher was making it up on the spot, on the assumption that there was NO WAY to defeat the security - or that no one would take up the offer.
Even so, this is a dangerous spot for a teacher to stand. It's the equivalent of: There's a tennis racket stuck in the rafters of the gym or some other exceptionally cavernous room, the teacher knows there's absolutely no way anyone can get up there and get it. A cocky student brags that he can in fact go get it. So the teacher - with poker face - dares him to do so. And that night, the student attempts this, without anyone's knowledge, and either a) succeeds, or b) fails and is injured, take your pick, the point is made either way. Can the teacher get out of hot water (for encouraging this dangerous stunt) instantly by saying "I was just kidding"?
School's just like the military. Drill sergeants and teachers alike can bust your ass for stuff THEY did, just because they don't feel like admitting they're not perfect.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
If the teacher asked the students to commit a crime, could it not be conspiracy?
Maybe not conspiracy, but certainly contributing to delinquency of a minor.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Interesting word: owe. The teacher, and by extension, the school system may be liable for any damage done by the student since the teacher is in a position of authority over the student. If the teacher told the students that a reward would be paid, he might be held accountable for such a claim. If the reward was substantial and this issue made it to court, it could be argued that the student earned the reward and his teacher (or the school system) must pay.
Congrats, at the age of 45 you will be doing the exact same thing and making the same salary. If that's what you want, more power to ya.
How is that different from any other career that DOES require formal "I played their game for 16 years" completion certificates?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I think there is more to this then we're allowing. Many of us have raised Cain about the fact that we "leave our rights at the door" when we (as students) enter a public school. This is because the school takes on the role of the guardian from the moment the student walks in the door to the moment the student gets home. While certain legal parentheticals exist in this, thereby creating minor exceptions to this rule (corporal punishment for example) the vast majority of the schools authority derives from this basic assumption
The teacher is an employee of the school and the school system. His role is also that of a guardian. While there are examples of teachers smoking up with their students and numerous other breaches of protocol within nations schools, these are pretty universaly reguarded as a "Bad Thing"(tm).
All in all, the teacher does assume responcibility for the control he has over his students and for the instructions he gives to his students. High School students are (for the most part) under the age of 18. Consequently we do not expect them to have as sophisticated a sence of right and wrong as we expect from adults. Hence we try them as minors, not adults, in a court of law. The same applies here, the teacher does, to a certain degree, set down the moral standards. This is doubly so in a moral question as complicated as computer security (we all agree that murder is, no pun intended, pretty cut and dry?).
Lastly, we must take into account the legalities of the entire question. Did the student do any damage? No. Did the student access any files he was not supposed to read or in any way breach confidentiality? No. Is legal action being pressed against the student? Not as far as we know. All that's happened is the kid is suspended. In short, the school is enforcing its rules and regulations on a student. However, the student was told, by a representitive of the school, that his actions were within the scope of his course and were not condemned by the school.
How is this different than a store owner saying "Oh, you can have that, its free" and then calling the cops as soon as you walk out the door with it, accusing you of shoplifting?
Bottom line, the teacher screwed up. His actions were totaly unprofessional and demonstrate a real lack of forthought. He should be fired immediately. The student's suspension should be revoked without further delay, and the school should issue a formal appology, both to the student and the student body as a whole.
When the system values itself above the needs and rights of those it serves it is corrupt and earns the distrust and contempt of its masters.
Yea my spelling is wretched. Deal with it.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
'sounds to me like you may still have some learning to do.
Yes, it's great to be smug about how much money you're making, but did you ever stop to consider that you're really not worth that? I mean, "to society". Your inflated wage is a product of market dynamics, skilled computer workers are in short supply, so basically, if a person can turn on a computer, they can have a job. The supply of people who are skilled such as you (and I'm not disputing your skill/talent/intelligence - whatever), is much smaller than the demand.
This is the same exact reason why the RIAA can charge 20 fucking bucks for a CD that costs 50 cents to manufacture. (only they artificially constrain the supply). Perhaps the supply of skilled workers is somewhat artificially constrained (although I'm a vocal opponent of increasing H1-B visas). But in that analogy, that makes you no better as a net admin than n*sync is as musicians.
If the market changes, without a HS diploma, you are well and truly fucked. Supply does seem to be guaranteed to be short, even with the corporate lapdog congress increasing H1-B caps - but you don't know for a fact that *demand* is going to stay high.
There is a buttload of EXPERIENCED sysadmins out there, with decades of Unix experience, engineering degrees, etc. Right now, you're taking advantage of a system that permits a company to exist on a rediculously inflated market cap from a starry-eyed stock market. With lots of market cap, they can get lots of credit to buy fancy web servers, and hire high school dropouts for six figures. But as the economy slows, (debatable) and their market cap drops (that's indisputable, have you checked NASDAQ lately?), it's going to be harder for banks to justify credit to these companies, and as they default when they have no revenue to show for it, their payroll will be scrutinized.
In other words, to quote Vader "don't be too proud of this technological marvel you've created - the power to destroy a planet pales in comparison to the Force" (that is, market Force).
You are wise to "grab your share" before the market drops out - but make sure you arrange things so that you can KEEP it. And stop spending your nights at raves, because you just may find that someday, you're looking for the same job as a college graduate. Finish school and get that degree.
What has education become? A pile of shit. I do not dispute that. Don't you know that it has always been that? But at the top of that pile of shit is a piece of paper - which comes in handy when you need to wipe your ass.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This whole "we're making an example out of you" is bullshit in it's extreme. The law/justice is supposed to be EQUAL for everyone. By making someone an example just because you feel like it is stretching the laws and imparting an injustice upon the person involved.
If this had happened to me, I would probably react by wiping their entire computer systems, regardless of what would happen after that. If I'm going to be unjustly penalized for a minor crime, then I'll commit a crime that I think fits my already given punishment. Hope you assholes kept backups!
Exactly the point. The teacher challenged the students to break into the computer. He is in a position of authority over them. He should have known better and should face the consequences of his actions. They should not be punishing a 15 year old kid for doing what his teacher told him to do. Hell, they're used to being punished when they DON'T do what the teacher tells them to do. To the kids, the teacher represents the school. If the teacher says you can do something, they believe he has the authority to authorize it. In this case that wasn't true. But it's the teacher who really screwed up, not the kid.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Look, I know this seems like a good thing right now, but you should really hold off on the pride for a bit. After all, it's clear that you don't understand a lot about the world.
There's a saying in Ireland: Show me a teacher who does it for the money and I'll show you a hooker who loves her line of work.
Okay, maybe I was lying about that being a saying, but if you do everything for the money, one day you'll wake up and realize that your life sucks. The fact that you'll realize this while commuting from a $3 million dollar house to a well-compensated position, in a modified Audi S4 won't help. It'll still suck.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Are you nuts? The school system does NOT owe the kid money any more than the mysterious "security company" does. So sad.
Depends on what you mean by 'owe'... legally, a verbal promise is a verbal contract... which is usually meaningless because it's 'your word against mine' but -this- promise was witnessed by an entire class. Thus, it's arguable in court (winnable being another thing) that money is due.
Now, if you mean, OTOH, 'sensible people would realize', well, sensible people should realize that, if it was a joke the kid took seriously, no harm done and pretty good job testing security. Maybe give him extra credit points for the effort.
Or, in other words, if the school is going to be nitpicky and leverage the words instead of the meaning of the law, then why shouldn't the student and his family? (turnabout is fair play... )
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
By and large, it is the administrators who are stupid. The teachers are usually just scared sheep. Remember, no matter what happens, teachers will be blamed. Bad test scores, violence in the halls, poor lessons, etc.
The kids (and their parents, and attorneys) will point their fingers at the teachers, who are not protected by administration.
Administration will point their fingers at teachers, who are not backed by kids.
Why should the teachers care? It's beyond me.
FWIW, I generally agree with you about who winds up in the teaching classes. I saw a number of people go from Bio or Chem into teaching. (I almost did myself, but went to Econ instead. Not from lack of ability, but because I really didn't care about the higher levels of chemistry.) But I also saw a great number of people (disclaimer: my wife among them) start college with the sole intention of becoming a teacher.
Finally, let's not forget that just because you are not an electrical engineer does not mean you are morally bankrupt and do not care about anyone or anything. Those people would have wound up as communications majors, not teachers. MOST teachers do at least begin their careers as caring people. The same system that grinds down the kids often grinds down the teachers.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The teacher induced a minor to break a law
/.
:-)
But the student didn't break any laws, as near as I can tell from reading a few articles about this. All the student did was bypass an internet filter installed by the school, and probably demonstrated this fact by calling up a subversive site like
But by bypassing a highly fallible system put in place by the school, he violated school policy, and he got the boot for a few days. Hmmm, 3 days off right before Christmas. I wonder if he was really just hacking school policy to get some time off at the right time
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I dropped out of high-school about a year later (and I'm making more money now as a 17 year old Sysadmin than any of my teachers ever have or will.
hehe. Me too. 6 figure income without a high school diploma -- gotta love it. This really just underlines the utter unimportance of what education has become.
I may be wrong - but Id venture a guess that you dont work for any Fortune 500 companies. You cant get a job here at XZY Auto (big 3 US Autos) without at least an Associates Degree. Which I have - and it was like pulling teeth to have the HR monkeys approve the dept. head's choice.
Im not discounting that the two of you may be talented (as am I IMHO) - but having an education can only help. Entering the workforce at 17 might seem like a good idea when your 17 but I wish Id have stayed and finished my second degree instead of returning to school at 25.
Times are good right now - and trust me, when things get tight, and the economy is at a reasonable level, finding a job is going to get very tough when you dont have a high-school diploma. Not impossible, but tough.. excepting your 0.001% 31337 troops of super keyboard ninjas - If either of you are that good you have nothing to worry about. If that is not the case (as laws of averages would probably say) you might realize later that education is not utterly 'unimportant'. Im not suggesting that it is an absolute must - and nothing else is important; but it does have value and says alot about the type of person you are and not just about the knowledge and skills you may/may not possess.
It got him fucked, not the same thing.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
---
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Or as the great Athenian philosopher Mediocrates once said "Aim low, you can't fuck it up!"
That fine young lad learned a valuable lesson: Just about everything they tell you and teach you is wrong, a lie, or plain bullshit. When will people learn that the way to succeed in school is to do the absolute minimum requested of you. Do not draw outside the lines. Do not remove tags. Do not listen to any kewl teachers who tell you they are your friends because a) they are not, b) are probably ready to quit and don't give a shit anymore, c) are being investigated themselves for something d) probably don't know or care about the rules in their own school e) never EVER have the backing of their administration.
And the adjunct theory to this is: Nothing related to computers in your school can end well. You will be mistrusted, abused, scrutinized and thrown away. Unless its to aid in some fundraising effort.
I am a comp.sci teacher, and you just cannot cut today's students short. After a few months of intensive class, I had students sniffing my POP mail and cracking my SMB password with l0pht. Maybe not the most challenging tasks, but it just goes to prove that us teachers should "put our money where our mouth is".
As a teacher, if I dare my students, I should be able to live up to the consequences.
An employee of the school asked kid(s) to do something that was of potential benefit to the school. The teacher had apparent authority to do so, or at least to the student.
The school can argue that the grade is appropriate compensation. But, they can't punish for it.
Fight Spammers!
Well, this now proves that most teachers do not know the full potential of their students, if this was a decent comp. teacher he would of noticed the tell tale signs of a hacker, you know, the backwards cap, baggy clothes, copy of 2600, skating around on rollerblades with a microcassete redbox, always talking about his date with acid burn.
Please don't visit the Seattle Times website, the Times' workers are currently on strike, and visiting the site is the electronic equivalent of crossing a picket line.
If the teacher was a police officer, this would amount to entrapment. The kid and his parents should take the teacher, school, and school district to court. I'm not sure on what grounds, but a good lawyer should be able to find something ...
Hogwash.
I do not consider school to be part of my education -- Mark Twain.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Obviously, this is another example of a teacher feeling dumb when proven wrong. Even if the teacher was joking this implanted the idea in the students heads. I think if the student is to be reprimanded the teacher should be also. The student should get an automatic A for the semester and start teaching the course himself.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't working hard enough.
There were two computer science teachers on my school, and the other teacher was responsible for installing anti-virus software. But he didn't do his work very well, so my teacher asked me and a friend if we could write something to get him moving. This was in the DOS days, I didn't come to learn UNIX before I went to university.
We wrote a small program that would increase the time between each time a keystroke would be registered. After a thousand keystrokes, the delay would be 50 ms, or something, and then go linearly with number of actual keystrokes. It was really fun watching people working with those computers.... :-)
Well, the next day, the fun was over. New virus-scanners were installed, and we removed the program. The other teacher never understood what had happened, ours thanked us.
Another time, our teacher managed to delete C:\ ("are you sure (Y/N)?" "Bloody hell, yes, of course, I'm sure", "whooooops"), and he was very happy tons of "unauthorized" software were installed on the computers to bring it back, because he didn't have any undelete utility himself.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Unfortunately, most high school teachers and staff do not understand when they have bright kids who know what they want to do in life and do it. Often times they tend to punish them for it.
However gloating about your success in your career doesn't mean anything above them. And if you are talking about college teachers I know one who would put you to shame (He's in a special niche, played his cards right and owns a lotus and a ferrari.)
The ironic thing, in my school everytime I rooted the servers they just asked me how I did it so they could patch it and let me on my way -- I earned a lot of respect from the computer department in my high school because of my maturity through everything. Maybe you should look at the actions of you - an aid is nothing, they mean jack. You should take the responsibility to talk to admins about it, as they are the final word.
You were not authorized to gain that access from someone who was capable of authorizing you -- therefor you were punished accordingly. Don't bitch about how unfair the system is if you aren't being fair with it.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Also, the defeating of the PC's security restrictions is not a crime, unless another system was cracked into. The student had express permission to use the PC, and received implied permission from the teacher to circumvent the security restrictions. Even without the implied permission, depending on what he circumvented and how he did so, he's probably in the clear anyway. (For example, it wouldn't be illegal to uninstall PC based software, or use another web-based proxy to circumvent proxy software, etc.) Bottom line is that he did not illegally gain access to any system. And, even if he did crack into another system, it could be argued that he received permission from the teacher to do so. And since, the teacher is a representative of the school (who, presumably, owns the computers) he had authorization to crack the systems in a security-audit type process.
Not to even bring up the fact that the teacher knew the student was a minor, and therefore prevented from entering into a contract. Unfortunately for the teacher and school, however, there is precedent for letting the contract stand (at the minor's/guardian's discretion), especially if a substantial amount of consideration has already been performed. And, in related news, if a minor has received goods &/or services due to a contract, but has not yet paid for them, there is also precedent allowig the minor to keep the goods (or services, but then I suppose it's hard to return services) and not be liable to pay for them. Unless of course, there was fraud on the minor's part. Lesson learned: don't enter into contracts with minors.
That's the end of my law tutorial today...now back to your regularly scheduled /.ing....
Yes, George W. Bush has his education to thank for where he is today. His third grade teacher must be so proud.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So he got suspended a few days. With all the press maybe he'll get a offered an after school computer job making more than his teachers. If he really has skill that is.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
What is illegal about a company asking to have its security tested and broken, if possible? Although the teacher had no authority to act as a representative of the company in question, the company itself could legally make such a contract.
I was also involved in a "prank" where I wrote a gwbasic program that looked and acted like a DOS prompt, but then proceeded to pretend to delete everything on the 5.25" floppy
:(
heh - we did that too - in assembler (actually, in BASIC with poke and peek), on a TRS-80 model III, it looked like the DOS prompt (we ran DOS, not CP/M on those machines- because they had floppies, the older ones did not). What glorious fun we had with that. The unfinished project that would have been cool was to try to get an Eliza-like program in as part of the prompt to totally screw with newbees. Never finished that one. Three years ago, I found the disk I had that code on. I still have a 486-33 that has a 5.25" drive, but couldn't read the disk.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
When ruling China, Mao once started a "let's speak out campaign" in which he EXPLICITLY invited people to write about what was wrong with the country, allegedly in order to improve the quality of government. Many people were elated at this "breath of freedom" and openly spoke what was on their minds. Mao then had the critics neatly identified, categorized, filed and then eliminated.
I saw this, IIRC, in a British Channel 4 documentary. Links would be appreciated.
Same thing happened to me. We used Hypercard to program little programs for our class assignments.
One day I did a little program that would just beep the computer a few times whenever you opened my hypercard stack. WELL, unknown to me, I coded the beep routine wrong, and it would beep the computer ~10,000 times.
As an added bonus to this blunder, I did it on Computer #1, the network server (unknown to me).
Yet to keep adding fun things on the pile, the code also beeped ANY hypercard stack that was oppened.
So to sum up the situation, by ACCIDENT, I created a hypercard stack that would Beep a computer 10,000 times whenever ANY hypercard stack on the network was opened. ALL BY MISTAKE !!
So the school called this a VIRUS, and i was givin 2 Weeks In School Suspencion, and I was almost Fined $2,000 for the 'Damages' I caused to the system.
God forbid a REAL hacker would ever break in. They wouldnt know WHAT to do.
How long will it be until Jon Katz pounces on this one and releases another derivative article talking about how geeks are kept down in school? Extra points for the number of times he'll mention columbine!
Don't show school 1337 skills.. pretend to have a hard time locating start button..
Articles like this make me very afraid of an upcomming witch-hunt, in which hackers - even this kid - could be targets for persecution.
There's no shortage of witch hunts in our future, that much seems certain.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
My Discrete Math prof. in college said that if I proved that P=NP, I would be rich and famous. I always wondered if I'd get suspended from college if I really proved it though...
oh come now, come now, you don't have to be so dumb now.
That Security is pretty much a joke field is because there is a high-demand market, with UNEDUCATED CONSUMERS. Software companies are only going to build features for which there is a high demand. Right now, that's pretty GUI's (if you believe Steve Jobs). The consumers (and I'm not talking just about Joe Sixpack - I'm also talking about Joe Seeeyeoh) are blissfully unaware of security. The press has made some noise about it, but they're trying to make it into a social problem, (one that's easy to understand) rather than a technical problem (hard to understand = hard to sell).
When the market at large truly begins to understand computers, technology, and the security and privacy ramifications (we're talking about a chilly day in hell, here), then security will stop taking a backseat.
It's only natural that people who are interested in security will feel the desire to educate those who are not. It feels like a good deed. The cause may be better served by staying out of jail, and becoming a key industry figure, important enough that people will listen to you. Wardialing and Portscanning is the short and easy path.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'm guessing he went to 2600 or l0pht or something, although the vaguarities will lead most people to think of pRon. Amazing how carefully chosen phrases like hacker and inappropriate web sites can sway opinion. Great reporting.
The teacher suggests breaking the law (even as a joke) and the kid is the only one to get in trouble. Another hypothetical teacher says well maybe you should try robbing a bank. Kid does it. I would expect the teacher to be charged as an accomplice. I expect though, the school district will hold to the line that the teacher was joking, and privately chew him out for drawing attention to the school in a bad manner.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
- The teacher was in class giving this challenge.
- The teacher was seen by the student as being a voice of authority and acting as a representative of the school.
- Other students in the class heard what the teacher had said and interpreted it in exactly the same way as the student in question.
Given these three points, the student should be walking away scot-free. Here's an appropriate analogy. A bank manager is giving a seminar about the security of his bank and during this seminar, he says that the alarm company servicing that bank is so confident in their security that it will reward anyone who can disable the alarm system from inside the bank. He further challenges the seminar attendees to do just that and says that he wants a cut of the reward if they can do it, but that he doubts anyone can. Then, when someone who attended the seminar actually does what he chellenged them to do, he says that he was just kidding about the whole thingThe problem in the story is that the representative of the bank is acting in an official capacity as a bank official, and it could be fairly and successfully argued that anything he ways about his bank is said with the full weight and authority of his position. The same principle works for the school teacher. When a teacher speaks, it is with the full authority of the school, and the school district. That's how they can at least attempt to keep discipline, set grades, and make standards for the grades they do give, set curricula, etc.
AFAIK, the teacher screwed the pooch here by making a challenge to his students without the authority to follow-through correctly. It's not the students' fault if the teacher overstepped his bounds. They had no way of knowing he wasn't serious, and that he could keep them immune from harm, as he seems to have implied in his challenge (i.e. you'll get a reward and extra credit. That's a reward, not a punishment.).
That's my take on it, anyhow.
-Jimmie
Something eerily similar happened to me once, actually. A teachers aide knew I was somewhat knowledgable about their network, and asked me if I thought a determined student could reak havoc on their systems. I told him I could demonstrate just the kind of havoc he could expect, and he asked me to show him. Using a silly NT4 bug that l0pht exploited and publicized, I gained rwx access on all the shares drives in the district (they were all using the same ancient domain controller). Long story short, it set off some serious flags with the admins, and although I didn't modify or destroy any data, I was brought in front of the ruling principal on charges of "Violating the student handbook's computer code and willfully gaining access to unauthorized resources". Even with the testimony of the teacher and teacher's aide, who confirmed I was performing a responsible security audit, I was convicted and sentanced to a two day term out-of-school. That was about the time I realized how much I hated the school system. I dropped out of high-school about a year later (and I'm making more money now as a 17 year old Sysadmin than any of my teachers ever have or will).
# wrote sig.txt, 23 lines, 31337 chars
I had many a teacher in my day who would gurantee an A in their class if their students could solve some impossible problem. I think some teachers like to flaunt that they know something that a 16 yr old kid doesn't.
In a high school chemistry class my instructor promised an A to anyone in the class who could name another positive polyatomic ion other than ammonium (NH4+). One student raised his hand an said H3O+, which is technically correct (IAAChemist). This instructor told this kid he was an idiot and said if he raised his hand again the rest of the semester he would fail him.
If you set a challenge to a bunch of 15 year olds, they will try to beat it. Duh! Kids want to compete and win at things (for that matter so do adults), if you set up a contest, soeone id going to try and win. I am mildly curious to hear the teacher's side though... They kind of brush over him.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Although it's hard to really ascertain what all is involved in this situation, I think that if the teacher did mention anything about hacking/cracking and even slightly gave the impression that he okay'd the action, then the student should be given a break. As a former teacher - grad and undergrad level in college, I know the influence that some teachers can have on their students. To even remotely consider abusing this trust is immoral. Add in high school where students are less sophisticated, and the responsibility that the teacher has to his/her students increases.
If the teacher said it as a joke, then he should have sent the students a clear indication that he was not serious. If he was serious, then he abused his trust and left one of his students to hang in the wind. The teacher, not the student, should be disciplined.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
Yes, because as we all know, breaking and entering a public building and disabling censorship software are morally equivalent acts. I say the little punk deserves the chair.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Pretty vague. Did he crack RSH? ...or NetNanny?
There is a difference, and inquiring minds want to know.
-Eldurbarn
My initial reaction was that the teacher was kidding and was just telling the students about the reward from the security company, but they claim that there never was a reward. So what would make a teacher lie like that?
And as far as the kid getting in trouble, at most maybe the school should have explained that it was a joke, this kid caused no damage, and in fact, immediately told the teacher when he had accomplished it.
Of courser the major problem is this: This is just another case of people ignoiring the real problem, the fact that security is pretty much a joke field. The attitude of "our lock is broken, and you have to pretend that it isn't, and if you don't play along we'll penalize you for pointing out our mistakes." Gotta love that.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
My computer programming teacher had a program (can't remember what it was) that was on a disk that had some kind of copy protection on it. The standard TRS-80 disk copy command wouldn't work on that disk, and neither would copying the files straight either.
The teacher told me that he'd like to see if I could copy the disk for him. He didn't promise anything, not even extra credit. The TRS-80 had a couple utilities to convert Model III format disks to and from Model I format disks. Breaking the protection was easy: convert it to a Model I disk, and then convert it back to Model III. After that, the normal operating system commands could copy the disk without problems.
I did that in the year 1984, and it earned me a nice compliment from the teacher. If I had done that today, I'd have been arrested.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What about networks like www.pulltheplug.com (and soon www.inflexible.net [send us machines!!]) that allow you to legally hack machines and hold to to them for as long as you can? You can't deny the education that can be gained from using computers in a way the programmer hadn't intended. Security is a very nessary thing and sometimes the best way to learn it is to break it.
Now it sounds like this kid used something he learned on his own, not some pre-packaged script that doesn't teach him anything. There is a world of difference between breaking security for knowledge and breaking it for malious or other such intents. This kid should be rewarded for using his brain, something public schools definately frown upon. (I had a similar exprience at my school, and it seems that the story is the same. The administrators cannot see through their ignorance to realize what this kid had really done.)
My
If the student committed a crime, then the teacher, and the software company incited the commission of a crime. If the teacher asked the students to commit a crime, could it not be conspiracy?
Now, on the other hand, since the teacher is an employee of the school the student was authorized by the school. The student may have believed that the teacher had the authority, maybe he is due the money from the school system.
An interesting can of worms.
Fight Spammers!
No box is 100% secure. HOWEVER, if the software vendor has said "Do X or your box is insecure" then (I believe) YOU are liable if your box is cracked. You are not SOLELY liable; the crackers are liable too, but you should be treated as an accessory to their crime.
This reminds me of the computer classes that I had in high school. My school had just gotten our first real computer lab and the teacher was new that year. She knew that I had quite a bit of experience with computers and made a deal that I wouldn't have to do the mindless busy work if I helped her keep things running smoothly.
I did. I ran cable. Upgraded some the the PowerMacs, installed software and helped the other students.
Toward the end of the year we had a "project" that was actually going to be used by a company. Like an advertisement or something. I told her that I disagreed with it, that it was wasting the other students education with this mindless corporate crap.
She got angry and since I hadn't technically done any of the assignments for that year I got an F.
This wasn't a stand out example either. There were quite a few people in other classes with other teachers that had similar occurences. This is precisesly why i dropped out and got my GED and went to college.
there probably would be penalties fo
r not keeping your front door locked.
Actually I'm sure there are plenty of real-world examples, of gun-toting psychos breaking into people's houses (through unlocked doors, while the owners are away) and standing off against the police. One needs only imagine the psychos snipering the neighbors' houses and the analogy is complete.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Bleh. Big difference.
Three points:
1. If a school official with the computer program told me I could try to crack security software on school computers, I'd believe him.
2. Does anyone think it's possible that the teacher did intend to challenge the students, but when his bosses came up and said "Did you tell them to do this?" he replied something like "umm.. yeah, but I was just kidding..."
3. Who is the software company, and why is the school protecting their identity? Nobody seems to be questioning them. I'd be mighty pissed if I was paying thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money for software that is effectively worthless.
In fact, I am a taxpayer and I'm pissed that my money is being wasted on this crap. More power to Aaron.
How come people always tell you to "think outside the box", and then get mad when you do?
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference if he didn't mean it. He said it and didn't say he was joking. Let's say that I'm a car salesman having a bad day. I'm talking to a customer about how the business is doing and I say that I'll give the next person to come in here 50% off on any car of their choice. Well let's say that the next person that comes in on the lot is that customer's wife and she says I want that car. I advertised that I would sell it for have off (even if I didn't buy a radio spot and tell the world). If I don't honor it, that's false advertising. It doesn't matter if I'm joking or not. Another exmaple: Let's say I'm sitting at a booth in a diner and I tell my buddy that I'm going to knock off President Recount. My buddy laughs cause he knows I'm joking and of course I am joking, but the person sitting in the booth behind me might not realize it. They call the cops, cops call the secret service, and bam I'm in jail. I said it. I can't prove I was joking, they can't prove I wasn't. Legal ass-raping is what it is. They teacher said it and he didn't explicitly say he was joking. You can't say he implied it. He didn't say it at all. Period. End of story.
--
My college was also had a very large education department. I swear to God that I never thought that someone as stupid as some of them could make it in college, but too many (IMHO) managed to grind through.
True story: During my first years of school (CompSci), I worked as a night auditor in a motel to make ends meet. We had a front desk clerk who was an ElemEd student, and another who was studying business. One night I arrived at work to find business helping ElemEd study for a big geography exam. The challenge? Given a map of the United States and a list of the 50 state names, write the correct name on each state.
I am not joking. I almost had a coronary.
A few nights later, the same scenario occurred. This time, for a math test, business had made a sample quiz for ElemEd to practice with.
The sample problems were on the order of
This woman was in her junior year of college, and her challenging classes involved learning the 50 states and basic fractions.
I'm not implying that all teachers are dumb; I've been blessed with several truly brilliant instructors over the years. However, don't assume that someone is intelligent enough to breathe on their own just because they have a college degree, particularly if it involves education.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This was 8 years ago. The challenge in question related to one of those hardware cards that required a password to boot the system. We were offered 150 points of extra credit if we could tell him what the password was.
Wasn't really all that hard. I rebooted the machine one day, then wrote a program that emulated the login procedure then warmbooted the machine which resembled almost perfectly the legitimate bootup process. Then the next time he left the room, I installed the program on there and waited. He came back, typed in his password, it was saved to the harddrive for later retrieval and me and a friend of mine barely could stay in our chairs because we were laughing so hard.
I'm not sure if I ever got the 150 points of extra credit. I probably wouldn't have noticed it even if I did since I was always at about the maximum grade. I don't recall the word suspension ever thrown around tho.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Therefore, the teacher should be held responsible, the school should review its security, and people shoud ... GET SOME ACCOUNTABILITY!
It's all about the Karma Points, baybee...
Moderators: Read from the bottom up!
SIG: HUP
yes, but; how do you prove or disprove "intent" in a court?
With fancy lawyers looking for witches to burn (and notches in their gun-belt), and prosecutors looking for "examples" so they can have a record of "being tough on crime" - intent gets washed away.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Happened to me in College... (Hi Wash. U!). Introductory statistics was 50% homework. My fault, the prof told us this up front, and I blew off the homework anyways...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I had several similar experiences throughout my education - and an interesting statement from one of my teachers:
(names have been changed to protect the anonymous)
"Well, Mr. Coward, I am having a really hard time understanding your grades here. You act in class as if you haven't read the material - that is, when you show up. You have not done one single homework assignment, yet you consistently score 100% on tests. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that you must either be psychic or cheating. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let you pass this class on test scores alone when all of the other students have to do the work."
um- hello?
Where are these teachers being trained?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
login: gcolombo
Password:
Login incorrect
login: gcolombo
Password:
Login incorrect
login: root
Password:
Login incorrect
login: root
Password:
Login incorrect
Message From lutes@tty:
j00 have been 0wnzored!@#& No 10% for you biznatch!
WARNING: System is shutting down NOW
--
You know, like the Bastard Operator From Hell, only teaching Computer Science. It sure sounds like something right out of an episode of the BOFH...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
During my sophomore year of HS i bypassed security on our school's Novell Netware network so I could install Dune II and play it from any location. A (former) friend was playing and got caught, instantly screaming "DEREK DID IT!" to our librarian.
I got 2 days suspension and computer privilages revoked for the rest of the year, and thought I was being sh1t on. (I was told I was being made an example off) If this had happened today, I'd have been arrested for the computer equivilent of sneaking a gameboy into class.
It just goes to show the power of ignorance and how easily fear can induce witchhunts.
It's our job to help educate people if we ever want this to change. It can be done, and we can help by easing fears by becoming part of the defense. I did exactly that as part of my "plea-bargian", and the following 2 years I was hired to help manage the ever-increasing district computer network.
http://kered.org
The wonderful teacher who said, "go ahead and try to break the security system."
"The teacher was probably trying to get the students interested in computers and invited them to do it," he said. "He gave them a challenge, probably thinking they couldn't do it and didn't think of the ramifications of what might happen if they did do it."
Just another case where teachers who get to comfortable in their jobs make flippant remarks to people (teenagers) who have a lot of extra energy and zeal. They tend to forget that a few of their students might still be awake, paying attention to their words - and even more so when there is a possibility of reward and challenge!
The security software company has said it isn't aware of any reward for anyone hacking into its software.
And probably won't be any - that's not the greatest publicity: that out of a flippant challenge, a high-school kid broke into your system. Mind you, there's not a lot of details as to what the measures were, and how he circumvented them (probably protected for our safety by the DMCA).
I honestly would have done the same thing if I was in the student's shoes. It sounded like a cool thing, and if you can't trust your teachers...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
except I was banned from the mac lab, there was only one windows machine in the mac lab. I got caught in MSDOS. ;-(
happy holidays...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Integrity? That's not taught these days in schools! And besides, what if the students actually founf out about integrity, cracked the code for that, and blamed it on the school? They'd prolly get arrested for that too. This case just proves that no matter what anyone says, the schools are not educating the students properly. This student should not have been in that class. He shoudl have been in the equivalent "honors" section of his computer curriculum. The kid chose to do it because he was obviously bored with everything else that was being taught and needed a challeng. This is the exact thing that happens when somebody wants to challenge themselves, they get in trouble for it. The authorities shoudl leave the kid alone and reprimand the teacher for not knowing better. The security company should be offering this little kid a job so he can fix their buggy software, with obvious security holes. Would I be sitting here in my office designing ASICs right out of college if I challeneged myself? Probably not, I'd be in jail or without computer priveleges for the next 10 years if I had actually payed any attention in my CS classes as an Engineering student. I, for one, and many can attest, that if I try to do something, it will get done. Things get boring real quick and I usually move on to something else that can hold my attention for a while longer than silly classes do.
> "He gave them a challenge, probably thinking they couldn't do it and didn't think of the ramifications of what might happen if they did do it."
Reminds me of last weeks South Park. Kyle wanted to go to a concert, but was told he'd have to clean his room, shovel the driveway, and end Communism in Cuba. When Castro announced that a little boy in South Park convinced him to end communism, his parents said he still couldn't go to the concert.
I think the kid should not only have the suspension lifted, I also think the teacher should pay the kid the reward that he was promised.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
A good friend of mine (Hi Bryce! - who now, incidentally works for RedHat) was challenged by one of the sysadmins at my university to get root on their Sun server. This was in early 1992, when we just had Linux 0.14 too ;-)
I was there. I know the sysadmin made the challenge. This was also when the encrypted passwords were visible in /etc/passwd on Sun boxes, too. I watched him do the usual tricks (dictionary crack), then write a program, distributed on all the Solbourne workstations, that brute-forced it using the then new fast version of crypt().
When it became clear to the sysadmin (hi troot!) that the crack was about to succeed, he got his account locked and he was sent to see Big Boss in charge of the computing resources.
He did get his account back, but he was quite badly reprimanded for this - and it was very unfair too, since one of the sysadmins made the challenge.
The lesson is: if someone challenges you to hack their system, get it signed and in writing, and witnessed as well. If they do it word of mouth, you'll probably get shafted as soon as the admin realises his security is crap, and you're just about to defeat it...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Anyone ever notice how grade school teachers tend to treat everyone like gradeschoolers? The ask lots of redundant questions and speak in very simple language. It as if they spend half their waking hours to be simple minded, to be on the gradeschooler's level, and then they can't pull themselves back out when they're around adults.
I've seen it before, and I think this is something different except that the teacher is being immersed in a high-schooler's world instead. What other's think tends to be important to high schooler's. Personal pride and presentation mean a lot to them. As people get older^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H grow up they begin to learn that what Joe Blow across the room thinks doesn't make a bit of difference on thier weekly paycheck. The need to appear elite to peers dimishes greatly.
This teacher seems to be suffering from a need to appear elite to students. Immature? Yes, but consider where the teacher spends half his waking hours. Is there counseling to help these people immersed in such unnatural environments to cope with the tendency to mimmick the social structures around them? Is there something to remind them that they are adults and should act on a different plane than the adolescents they are nurturing?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Unfortunately, when you step foot on school property, you basically sign away all of your rights. IANAL, but this was the spiel that I got when I was "busted" for running an underground newspaper.
I was also involved in a "prank" where I wrote a gwbasic program that looked and acted like a DOS prompt, but then proceeded to pretend to delete everything on the 5.25" floppy. I thought it was hilarious, but one of the computer teachers wanted me expelled for it. Luckily, I had teachers on my side and I wasn't banned from the computer labs.
The moral of the story: schools are the most oppresive organizations out there. I mean, hell, you can't even carry a gun or drugs into them! 8^)
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Looks like they took the "important phone numbers" link down. Fat chance, wankers! Your precious POTS numbers are immortalized in a +4 moderated Slashdot post.
Interesting... but, well, I think if the kid were smart enough to hack the software, he should have been smart enough to at least check up on the reward. (Who cares if you get suspended as long as you get the reward money??!!!)
Since the story comes from the Seattle Times, which is on strike, one should point out that the alternative is to visit the replacement paper put out by the striking newspaper workers, the Seattle Union Record and then use their PHP driven (non-MSFT) search engine to find the story there. Again, www.unionrecord.com is the site.
And, one should point out, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is also on strike.
I've cancelled my subscription to both papers and buy the Union Record at Bulldog News in Fremont myself, and get the New York Times on Sundays.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It sounds like the teacher needs a remedial course in childhood psychology, focusing on the teen years. It sounds like the school principal and the school district may need to attend the same class.
Everyone involved needs to lighten up.
What the system adminstrator at my college did when he discovered a student bright enough to break the pathetic computer security was... he immediately HIRED them, at which point they were on the same side, and did everything they could to prevent other students from breaking in!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Speaking as one of the people "in charge" of a High school computer system I can at least tell you how it is here. We put security software on teh computer not because we want to, but because it's required by the school board. Half the time this software causes us more headaches then the students and facutly using the computers. And we know all the way you guys have of getting around the security, most of them we leave open so you CAN get work done. We know how hard it is to work under such strict controlls that we don't go to all the trouble of closing up every hole in the system. Personally I know that sometimes I will "forget" to turn on some of the filtering on lab computers if i know a class will be using them for research soon. We really arn't trying to make life a living hell for you :)
The naivete and juvenille indignation on slashdot never ceases to amaze me. Your actions have consequences and you should accept the responsibility for those consquences.
You broke into a school computer and changed it. You got in trouble for it you cry "witchhunt"!
Let's get a couple things straight:
What you did was not the computer equivalent of sneaking something into class. You "bypassed security" intended to keep you out and then you made changes which I'm sure the school needed to fix once found. It was the computer equivalent of breaking and entering and vandalism.
You leave out the details but I hardly think your ordeal" qualifies as a witch hunt.
Were you falsely accused by someone with a grudge against you? No. You were turned over by a friend for an act that you committed.
Were you found guilty without the same processes and rights as other students had? (which admittedly are probably not many)
Face it. You did something wrong. You were caught and punished for it. It sounds like you didn't learn your lesson, though.
The Math Maestro Tutoring Services in Seattle
sulli writes
This saying brings shame upon those who utter it. While teaching does have just as many incompetent members as every other job classification, it has far, far more people who truly care about their job and not about their paycheck.
I think everyone, no matter how awful your school was/is, can think of at least one outstanding teacher who changed your life- who challenged you to do something you otherwise would not have done, who helped you to pursue an interest that would otherwise have been out of reach, or who showed you a broader viewpoint on the world.
Most teachers *could* do plenty of other jobs if they wanted to. We should thank them for choosing to teach in places where they are sorely needed rather than pursue a selfish self-interest. Think of all the sacrifices many teachers make for their jobs (money, community support, time, in some places personal safety) and ask yourself if you could do the same.
Yes, there are some serious problems with a public education system where our most gifted individuals are unchallenged at best, persecuted at worse. Focus your attacks on the system. The teachers themselves are often victims as well.
-OT
zero tolerance frequently equals zero sense. i could write better rules for my system than the school district can for their students and behavior. by the way, my rules would be open source and able to be improved upon. too bad these can't be.
http://www.eagles.edu/
Elma High School
360-482-2822
360-482-3121
Fax: 360-482-1200
1235 Elma-Monte Road
Elma, Washington 98541
further info from the website (may be old):
Superintendent Bill Myhr
Business Manager Michele Young
Director of Special Services Lois Parks
Director of Vocational Services Bob Pattee
Director of Athletics Steve Bridge
Maintenance Supervisor J.D. Boling
Payroll and Personnel Officer Kay Rotter
Administrative Assistant Mike Jones
Office Manager Doris Keeton
REMEMBER!
Use this Information for *good*, not evil!
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
When I was in high school, the computer teacher told us that it was impossible to crack into Novell Networks, and that if we did don't bother telling him, just call CNN. Two of my friends and I did indeed crack this network (well ok, we just logged his key strokes when he was logging in), and when we did they threatned us with 2 3rd degree felonies. Since we were all pretty good students, they were only trying to scare us, and nothing much happened to us.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
You've all heard the story from the news' perspective, now you'll here it from mine, a student at this particular high school.
Last year, I was a TA in Columbo's class. I like Columbo, despite how this story makes him look, he's really a great guy. He had installed Foolproof, to stop people from saving files, and getting access to the registry, then he locked IE5's internet settings tab, so people couldn't bypass the school's proxy.
Anyways, he asked me to try to bypass it, and he tacked on that he'd try to get me a government job, as someone who hacks into computers. I took the attempt as a challenge, and the remark as a joke. He witnessed me messing with it for a few days, then I forgot about it.
--Fast forward to the present--
About a week or two ago, my autoshop teacher accidentally blabbed that Lutes' got arrested for hacking. Intrigued, I went to see Columbo, to find out what he did. He was in a class, and had other faculty present, and played dumb. He pretended to know nothing about it.
Coincidentally enough, I had Lutes in my next class, I'd talk to him. Second period came, and he too tried to play coy. Until he found out I already knew the basic information. Surprised, he started talking, the words 'witness', and 'Federal court' were heard.
Lutes, by his own admission, 'couldn't hack himself out of a paper bag'. He had apparently been told of a similar challenge by Columbo. I don't know when he heard the challenge, but he had. One day, when Columbo was gone, he booted into Safe Mode, then removed Foolproof. That particular machine hadn't been configured correctly to overwrite the MBR, and block safe mode. The next day, he showed Columbo what he had done, and all was good. The following day, however, he was called into the main office, and expected everything to be just dandy. He saw Columbo, and handcuffs.
-danielson
This whole punishing people for breaking *secure* systems is very weird, misunderstood, and a little bit frightening. It really needs a bit more thought than the 100 odd posts to the thread, but I guess we need to talk about it. I find it really disturbing that there is even the remotest possibility of someone recieving a criminal charge for by-passing what seems to be - from our perspective - a totally inadequate security system, especially when the intent was not malicious. It is very disturbing that when people - re: ludites - move into a system which was originally based around trusts and sharing, the only public way they can think to secure it is by "cracking down hard" on those scary hackers (who, lets face it, are seen to have "magical" abilities). Articles like this make me very afraid of an upcomming witch-hunt, in which hackers - even this kid - could be targets for persecution. I don't know, i'm just rambling now. I'm pretty disturbed. Maybe I'll post again after i've thought about it a bit. Maybe some one else will be a bit more insightful. This is pretty serious, you should treat it as such.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
This case sounds like it should follow the general pattern of a mob trial:
1. Hitman (kid) gets caught in crime, and arrested.
2. Cops discover it was a conspiracy of a small time mob capo. (teacher)
3. Kid turns informant on teacher, in exchange for clemancy.
4. Mobster (teacher) claims it was all a harmless joke. "Hey, when I told that gavone to talk to da gentleman in particular, I meant he should TALK to him, not off him. It was a misunderstandin', capice?"
5. Authorities don't got too much on the capo, so, what the heck, might as well not lose the whole ballgame and prosecute the kid anyway.
High School has never been a more accurate slice of life.
When someone breaks into a computer containing sensitive information, it makes a certain amount of sense to hand out punishment... to the idiots who left the computer unsecured.
Seriously - who is being irresponsible here ?
If I leave it at this, I'm bound to have some moron respond by saying "what - so you should be punished if someone breaks into your house.."
Here is a clue, I'll speak slowly for your benefit: c o m p u t e r s a n d h o u s e s a r e d i f f e r e n t
If it was absolutely impossible to catch thieves, and they could break into your house from the other side of the world, and then break into other people's houses once they had got into yours... there probably would be penalties fo
r not keeping your front door locked.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The kid probably has a good case for false arrest. He should get a good lawyer and sue the teacher and school district. It'll probably pay his college bills.
----
i'm still looking for a comment here somewhere by some possible being who can acknowledge that this kid has any responsibility at all for his actions. so far he's a victim of a)the school b)the teacher c)culture (knew that was coming) d)hibachi, which is about as backward as you can get. i mean, come on. if somebody breaks the law, they have to pay the consequences. if it's a kid, they should try to correct it even more so he doesn't grow up a reprobate delinquent. severe discipline are also in order for the teacher, since what he did was stupid, and it'll teach the kid to think for himself (ie don't mindlessly do what teachers tell you to). that lesson in itself is worth the discipline if he learns his lesson from it. chances are he won't, since justice seems to be in short supply these days...
In case you are interested and feel like voicing an opinion... Elma High School 1235 Monte Elma Road Elma, WA 98541-9038 (360) 482-3121 (phone) (360) 482-1200 (fax) Sorry, no website (worth mentioning) or email
The reason the quality of teaching (and teachers) is so low in the United States is the low pay and high level of responsibility.
Some states only pay a first year teacher 19K a year. Remember they only are paid for the 185 or so school days they really worked. Assuming a teacher works at Wally World or somewhere through the summer at the same rate as he is paid to teach, for a full work year's you only get 26K as a starting salary. Let's see that's ~$12.50 an hour if you base it on a 40-hour week. Here's the kicker most teachers go to work around 7:30AM and go home around 4:00PM with half an hour off for lunch. Then they start grading papers until 7:30 or 8:00 at night. That's a 65-hour workweek people. So, that is ~$7.70 an hour. Hmm minimum wage is $6.25 an hour. Most clerks at the mall and Wally World greeters make $8-$10 and hour. Mall clerks and Wally World greeters don't have to put up with the stuff a teacher deals with on a day-to-day basis. Most middle school and high school kids are completely self-absorbed and treat their teacher and fellow students horribly. Parents treat teachers somewhere between baby sitters and hand servants. Parents generally only go to see a teacher to complain about the teacher's treatment of their child.
How would you like a job where you do a great job every day and yet get obscenities screamed at you 7-8 times a week for 30-40 minutes at a time? You also get punished for complaining about your scream sessions. As a bonus prize, your supervisor decides your retention by showing up in your work area for one hour a year and bases your evaluation on that single hour. You could walk on water the rest of the year but get canned because a little 'Bart Simpson type' passed gas and caused the room to break out in laughter. That's just the minor complaints. Try counseling a pregnant teenager on how (or if) she is going to tell her Neanderthal father about her situation. (Remember you have to be able to live with yourself after she loses the baby from the beating she gets from her Daddy.) Or being required by law to report 'any signs of child abuse', you observe during the regular course of your day to the State Child Protective Services Office. Or being expected to teach morality and good citizenship to kids but not offend any of the local loony-toon's personal values. Yup, I'll do that for eight bucks an hour until I have 10 years of seniority.
After all with a college degree you can get a job as an executive assistant and make twice as much with better conditions and spend more quality time at home.
But if a teacher cracks a joke, it's just a joke.
Good thing I got that straight.
When I was a senior in high school, I happened to be taking AP U.S. government [one of several AP classes]. I had this little habit, though; I generally refused to do excess homework or busywork, instead demonstrating my knowledge via do excellently on tests.
Well, this particular teacher very heavily weighted the [massive!] quantity of busy-work she assigned. Thus, I ended up making an F in the course...
However, I happened to make a 5 [a perfect score] on the AP exam. And, even though this qualified me as having two semesters worth of college credit on the subject, and I was one of only three students to make a 5... I was required to take remedial US gov in summer school to earn my diploma.
At the time, it almost seemed like something out of Gilliam's Brazil. Ah well, memories...
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Well, anything taken to extremes can be made to look silly. Obviously the teacher doesn't work for the bank, and therefore would have no authority to give you permission to rob the bank. But you obviously didn't give much thought to your analogy. You just enjoy being a (not so)smartass.
In the case we were talking about, a teacher, who is an employee and representative of the school and has authority over the kids in his class, challenged a bunch of 15 year olds to break the security on the school's computers. There was no reason for them to think that he didn't have the authority to give them such permission. It even makes sense really, that is if you aren't familiar with the DMCA and other such laws, which I'm sure most 15 year olds aren't. He was asking them to act as white-hat hackers and test the school's security, and then punished the kid for it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I have been challenged by the computer teacher at my school to hack the webpage, as long as i tell him and don't do damage. I know he's being serious, so why is it unreasonable for another kid to think the same thing when challenged? The kid did the right thing: hack on but one computer, and then tell the proper authorities that it has been done. The kid did the right thing, followed hacker ethics, and was still punished. I think this is another example of mass paranoia of hackers brought on by media sensationalism of crackers. Unfortunatly, the feds are trying to pass laws, or already have, to prevent white hat hacking. This is becoming like 1984: even thoughts of resistance are being punished.
Dateline San Francisco CA:
An unnamed high school teacher was hospitalized with lacerations and contusions about the face, neck, legs and buttocks.
Apparently two of the school's top linebackers misunderstood when the teacher said "I'd like to see a couple of fags TRY to screw me!"
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The administrators of Elma High school have proved them selves incompetent once again. Bill Myhr the Elma School Superintendent made a comment that shocked me as a educator.
/ chapters/31/subchapters/iii/parts/4/sections/secti on_1232g.html
"Myhr said there are "other aspects" to the story, but the school district has chosen "not to bring them out at this time."
He did acknowledge that Aaron Lutes was disciplined last year for using a school computer to call up inappropriate Web sites." - The Seattle Times Company (Friday, December 15, 2000)
Myhr clearly told the paper that he was disciplined last year for using school computers for the use of inappropriate web sites. By doing so Myhr violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 U.S.C. 1232G paragraph h (bellow).
(Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 20 U.S.C. 1232g)
(h) Disciplinary records; disclosure
Nothing in this section shall prohibit an educational agency or
institution from -
(1) including appropriate information in the education record
of any student concerning disciplinary action taken against such
student for conduct that posed a significant risk to the safety
or well-being of that student, other students, or other members
of the school community; or
(2) disclosing such information to teachers and school
officials, including teachers and school officials in other
schools, who have legitimate educational interests in the
behavior of the student.
The entire section can be found at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/20
Now I know that if you violate the rights assigned to a student in FERPA that case law supports for damages to be paid by the person who violated a students rights (Myhr) and the employer (Elma School District)
The basic principle of FERPA is that if you are a educator, or a employee of a educator public or private that the release of any information on the student other then what is prescribed by law is going to get you sued, big time.
Aaron Lutes has certain rights as a student that are spelled out in federal law, Bill Myhr violated his rights.
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Craig Borchardt
Live Free or Die
borcharc@uswest.net
When I was in HS we didn't have computers in the library, but we had a lot of books *and* electronics class. We made these "librarian annoyers", a small timer circuit with a piezoelectric chirper that made some extreme noise at random intervals. Buy a book at the used book store, hollow it out and put it on the shelf someplace with the annoyer and a fresh 9V battery in it. Because the sound is so hard to locate ("it's coming from a book") they drove the librarians nuts. We had some that lasted for several weeks -- we, ah, liberated books from another HS library, hollowed them out and glued them together, giving is a large chamber to store 6 D batteries to run the chirper on. It was good fun.
Now he can tell his future employer that he was the subject of a story on Slashdot, get a nice salary from a computer security firm, and wreak revenge on his oppressors in a Count-of-Monte-Cristo style. Sounds like he's got it made!
You're civilly liable if you leave your car door unlocked and someone steals your car and causes property or personal damage with it. You're liable if someone sneaking onto your property at night falls into an open well, or steps in a hidden beartrap you left out. You're liable for all kinds of careless things. Just because you're the victim doesn't mean you're not ALSO responsible for the harm caused by your carelessness. This doesn't apply to everything - otherwise we'd have parents held responsible for the crimes of their 35-year-old adult children. But there is clear precedent, and a lot of sensibility, in the argument that you should be held liable for damage caused by computer crimes that were facilitated by your negligence.
Taking things to the logical extreme is stupid. The universe is gray.
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
You could be right. Is Phys Ed not the normal abbreviation for this, though? Is that a localism in America?
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