Slashdot Mirror
8th Grader Suspended for Using 'net send' Command
HRH King Lerxst writes: "The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has an article detailing how a middle school student was suspended for three days for 'hacking.' His hack? Sending a popup message to the other computers in the school...from within the shcool." The 8th grader in question used the "net send" command to send a single word message ("Hey!") to the 80 machines tied to his school's network. How this can be construed as "hacking", I leave up to you.
If it's OK for this little bastard to do this, then it is OK for the big firms to do this and also send spam and virii and junkfax.
I could understand the suspension if he sent "fuck you" to everybody on the LAN. Since he didn't, we obviously have to look at the incompetent network administrator. He was probably hired under the "reforms" made by Bush there as governor. Why didn't this "qualified expert" that he thinks he is not disable the command line or the run button if he knows so much about security on LANs? Besides, I'd like to know what happens to kids there who do something really serious, like fighting or being late to class or something. Sounds like a bunch of incomptents hired by the chief incompetent (Dubya) when he was there.
C:\>
I did that all the time back when i was in school just to piss off teachers... and nobody gave a damn. Course they were all so clueless they could never even figgure out what was going on in the first place.
This does remind me of my school days, I got apprehended because I was playing with a magnet during lesson. It also reminded me what school (well, Italian school to be precise) seems to be all about: taking away the fun away from culture.
:-)
;-P
Because that's what hacking is, it's a form of culture and fun. And that 13 y.o. boy is a hacker, or at least he has a hacker attitude, which is good! Honest fun with computers should be encouraged by the school, not reprehended.
And did you read the email from the teacher? "Before you make comments you should be a teacher". Quite typical. Using the same argument I would then say, well, before calling someone a hacker, you should be a hacker too, right?
Oh, by the way, when I was his age I was hacking my Speccy... fortunately for me, it was not in that school otherwise I would have got expelled!
Now for the karma whoring: "It's Micro$oft's fault! If they used Linux then there wouldn't have been any chance of NET SENDs"
By the way, what would have happened if he did launched a batch file like this (say it's called a.bat)
net send foo Hey!
call a.bat
? That IS annoying...
My Stack Overflow user
Most schools have a usage policy to which all students must agree before using computer resources. The article doesn't state whether use of the "net send" command is permitted or not.
I know it's not hacking, but it can be seen (incorrectly, of course) as a subversive activity by paranoid faculty. Imagine if the student were Arab-American, and was sending "Hey!" in Middle East-speak. All hell might break loose.
Probably because 'net send' was not on the list of Microsoft-Approved commands that they had to agree to in exchange for free copies of PowerPoint for Tots.
After some kids realized that net send was annoying and unblocked the district decided to punish all that used it (and got caught of course).
But, all they had to do was disable windows messenger service...
This really shows the naivety of some of our schools towards technology, which in my school, was always a huge problem. Teachers could NOT keep up with the kids in computer classes, which left a whole slew of kids "left behind" per se (thanks Bush).
paul
who always sets the IE start page to goatse everytime i use a public/school computer?
...because the people in charge (Teachers, parents, school board, etc) don't understand what's going on.
It's just that simple. Whenever someone does something with a computer that they don't understand, it's hacking. A High School friend of mine got accused of 'hacking' by downloading Netscape once.
Fear and ignorance, ignorance and fear...
=Smidge=
blah blah blah.
But, really, all we had was a mainframe with paper teletypes terminals.
The most subversive things we did was use the banner program to print dirty words in large letters.
I have misplaced my pants.
the principal suspended him for misuse of the computer and disruption of school - and only for 3 days. it's the teacher trying to say he was "hacking," and the columnist sounds off against her on that. she indicates her misunderstanding of 'hacker' terminology in an email to the paper, so she'll certainly read this column.
however, what the kid did was wrong, and that's that. his punishment was overkill, and we'll all (/.'ers, that is) agree. detention or a mandatory essay was probably more appropriate.
(btw - does anyone think that forcing students to write about what they did wrong, either instead of or coupled with detention/suspension, would be more effective in the long-term for controlling behavior of disruptive students?)
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Richland Middle School.
Possible illegal use of trademarked/copyrighted picture on Principal's homepage.
Homepage of the author of the letter to the Star Telegram: Mrs. [Beverly] Sweeney, Social Studies
I did this once in high school (probably around 10th grade -- 13 years ago?..)
Sent a message "hi" to the cafeteria terminal (with the name of the "lunchlady" on it.) Apparently, to my chagrin, it actually froze the cafeteria application that was running. I did it outside of normal cafeteria hours, so it didn't cause too much fuss, but my account became suspended... stupid me for using my own account and not a "student" generic id at the time.
I was never spoken to about it, and just accepted the locked out account as punishment... a few months later, after an upgrade, my account was unlocked. I learned to not do stuff like that again, or if you do do it, just to think first and act later... use an anonymous account, from a machine that's used by more than a few students a day...
Karnal
Beverly's email address, for those too lazy to.
Proof-positive that there's an opening in Richland Hills for anyone who knows how to disable windows messenger.
Get your resumes ready!
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Happened to me a few years back for almost the same reason (except it was just chatting to a friend, not bulk messaging). It just motivated me to write a program that changed the name of the sender. They got confused when they tried to ban an empty computer from using the facilities.
Seriously though, while its not hacking, it is bulk messaging, which I'm sure they could suspend the kid over. And while 'Hey!' might not be a 'F*ck you all!!', if they let it slide, the problem will get out of hand until there are 2000 vulgar messages popping up every lunchtime.
Disabling the messenger service would solve the problem a lot easier though, assuming they didnt need it for printer notifications or something.
His mistake was in not using the samba version of the command. There, you can manually specify the name presented for the sending party. Sending a message from the headmaster asking if any teachers could bum a smoke? Now that would have made the three day suspension something to be proud of!
From the article the teacher was quoted as saying, "Hacking into a system should be highest on the list of tampering violations. I believe the other students are now aware that the district takes this seriously and will not tolerate such misuse of our equipment." In addition to "Rollins told me that students had been using campus computers in unacceptable ways, and he hoped to make an example of Carl."
It looks like to me that the teachers can't/won't secure the computers and decided to throw the book at the first kid to do something that they were able to catch in hopes that it scares the others into submission.
The writer seems to get two important things - that using net send is certainly not hacking, and deeming it so is demonstrative of the school district's lack of understanding of a subject area they purport to teach.
How about emailing the principal of that school and telling him what you think of his actions?
meh.
The kid knew what he was doing was wrong, and his teacher (or in this case principal) should have corrected or punished this in some way. I have no problem with that. It's only hacking in the sense that it's an obscure enough, um, "feature", that it must seem mysterious to the teachers. Regardless, the lesson they are ending up teaching is their own fallibility. The crime, even in their imagined fear of what they thought it was, simply does not merit the punishment. Is this the same treatment they would give someone who grabbed the school PA and did the same thing (a worse act, since it involves a bit of physical trespass, too)?
Most of the people who run our public educational system are, unfortunately, not very well rounded. Often they are too quick to make presumptions while drowning in ignorance.
Back in my computer class in high school, I often finished my assignments way ahead of schedule, so I had a lot of free time.
We had a Novell network where I managed to gobble up 25% of the network storage space by hiding my files in a directory with a difficult-to-type name.
The teacher couldn't figure out how to delete my files, so he wrote me up (without even asking me to delete them).
Since the school didn't have any classification for this kind of "deviant" behavior, they decided to call it "computer vandalism", and gave me the same punishment as regular school vandalism, three days suspension.
If they had asked, I would have just deleted the files.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Maybe Beverly Sweeney should take the school's Computer Literacy class.
I have misplaced my pants.
It certainly warrant some action, though most here would argue against it. After all, it does affect every computer on the network, and you and I would hang the kid if the message was spam.
But a suspension? A three day suspension? Friends of mine have been suspended for less for bringing weapons to school. That one was bullshit too, but at least was a bit more understandable. Now this, a kid is suspended for doing something not forbidden (oh, they have rules against 'hacking'? Then it's their responsibility to understand the term).
And as for that teacher, she's right. Most people have no idea what the inside of a classroom is right. Of course, it seems she doesn't either. Any competent teacher should recognize that experimentation leads to the most learning.
Second, it doesn't sound like he did it during a class. It may warrant a detention if the child habitually ignored the teacher for his own experimentation, however this doesn't seem to be the case.
The primary problem I see with education is that it is nearly impossible to evaluate teachers. If good teachers (and there are a lot of them) could be supported and not interfered with by others, it would be great. But this isn't the case. The good teachers out there are more than offset by ignorant policies, moronic teachers, incompetant administrators, and yuppie families.
If I were only looking at education, the future would look really bleak. Fortunately, kids seem pretty good at surviving their schooling.
Years ago when BITNet was the only connection to the world from campus, a friend and I using the library VAX stumbled upon a way to use PHONE to contact people at another campus. Unfortunately for us, the person we contacted was an operator and within twelve hours those permissions were revoked without a word.
This doesn't surprise me at ALL.
When I was in highschool, I was given a stern talking to by two teachers, a counselor, the vice principal, the prinicipal and then suspended for "hacking", too.
What was the hack? Well, when you boot the computers, a little ANSI graphics screen comes up with a crude representation of a desktop computer and the flashing words "WELCOME TO COMPUTER LAB!" on them.
I found the ANSI file, pulled it up in 'edit' and changed the words 'COMPUTER LAB' to "HELL". Some hack. Hmph. Mind you, I only did this on *ONE* computer.
I guess I'm glad my school didn't figure out a few friends and I were bypassing their computer locks by using the File->Open command to run any program we wanted, then playing Doom and such on the school computers.
Maybe they'll let everyone have the administrator password, and then expell anyone who attaches to an administrtive share.
I have misplaced my pants.
Imagine if the student were Arab-American, and was sending "Hey!" in Middle East-speak. All hell might break loose.
Imagine if he sent 'hey' in some of that crazy tagger writing and some uptight teacher who was listened to Fox News tell its viewers to report anything suspecious immediately one too many times saw it! He'd probably get shipped down to Gitmo while stenographers pour over his message looking for hidden instructions for terrorist cells!
Enough of the "my god, this is unfair! He should sue!" posts. Leave the frivolous lawsuit pitching to the professionals. ~Darl
This kind of thing can even happen at places like RIT. I once recieved a friendly visit from a campus safety officer. He told me the neighbors upstairs had some sort of personal firewall running and that it gave them a message that someone was hacking their computers. The IP address was that of my, my roomate and our friend across the street. Of coruse I was like wtf? It turned out that whenever we played a LAN game of half-life using IPX it set their firewalls off because we were all behind the same switch. It was quite hilarious. Thankfully the situation was rectified quickly because there are indeed smart computer types at RIT. Stupid art majors.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
How low have we sunk? Back in my day there WAS NO "net send" command. We had to write it in assembly before we could use it! And maybe then people would give us our due credit and call us a "Hacker". Mind you, this was after hiking to school 8 miles in the snow, up-hill, without shoes. Do you know how hard it is to write code under those sorts of conditions? Damn kids got it made these days...
This is exactly what's wrong with our education system. The computer teacher said in an email to the reporter, "If [the students] are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished." Experimentation *is* a form of education, arguably the most effective form. If I had a student in her class, I would demand her resignation.
Messenger and Alerter services are stupid and useless, just as 'wall' is. Maybe they should turn off Remote Registry and administrative (C$, D$, etc) shares too. I wrote a script that can remotely disable all this junk and secure a machine for public network usage. The default XP, 2000, NT configuration is dangerous to use OotB.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
After reading the article all I can say is that I hope she gets a little "personal time" herself. She's a pretty good example of what is wrong with today's educational system (here in the US). A high and mighty "I know best" incompetent.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
First things first, I'd like to say that yes, suspension was overkill. A warning is all that's needed.
However, netsend can be one god awful command on a network. In a summer program for particularly bright high schoolers in Georgia (Governor's Honors Program), I was fortunate to be lab assisstant for a department.. We were teaching every student in the department at least Delphi, and some C++ on Cygwin. The last thing we wanted to do is lock the computers down - I personally wanted to demonstrate trust towards the students, as the last thing you want as an administrator of thirty brand new Dells is ten really really bright computer nerds trying to break them.
Well, they ended up netsending one day, and it ended up that they were broadcasting quite a bit. All of the other computers that weren't logged on at the time ended up receiving the messages, and storing the messages until the next person logged on. Needless to say, I wasn't too happy about this. I told those responsible that on no uncertain terms they were to stop.. And fortunately, they were bright enough to.(*)
So no, I didn't suspend them, but I didn't shut the computer down like some people suggest. There's a middle ground here, and that's something both the writer of the article and that teacher don't understand. Yes, learning is good, but broadcasting netsends isn't really that conducive to learning. Neither is overly broad, vague, and ridiculous rules and punishments for simple annoyances.
*: Of course, I did give them something to be busy with until the next project came up.. Never before have I seen someone try so hard to translate an IOCCC entry into human-readable code. ^.^
This statement is false.
From the "computer teacher's" email (quoted in the article):
If they [students] are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished.
If this were the policy when I was going to school, I would never have learned anything.
Beverly_Sweeney@birdville.k12.tx.us.
"Students should not be of the opinion that it is acceptable to abuse the privileges that are afforded them by the taxpayers. If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished."
When I was a senior in high school they finally added high speed internet to our computer classrooms, mounting the modem and router inside a cabinet inside the classroom. On a whim, I telnet'd into the gateway IP and got a password prompt. First thing I tried ("admin") worked right off the bat, and I was in the configuration screen. Pfft.
Not to mention every machine in the class was infected with SubSeven.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
A couple of years ago I convinced the administrator of my school's Linux lab to disable open TCP connections on X by making a little script that ran xscreensaver to blank everyone's screen out and require a password (mine). And, to this day, the lab is a safer place for it.
This kid should have been given a gold star or something. The idiot who should have been raked over hot coals is the network administrator who left the (more than well documented) "feature" open.
Punishing children for being curious and innovative is NOT a good idea, nor is it a school's job. This kid learnt his lesson: don't try to learn anything, and if you do don't let the system know about it. Play dumb, and you'll be rewarded. Kudos to that school...good job morons!
Yup, I'm sure many of us have similar stories. We get curious, we're young, and instead of taking us aside and giving us some good advice, teaching us a lesson for the future about how the world works, the adults in our lives overreact and do stuff like this.
:-)
My war story? Sending some POKE's to an Atari something or other that turned all the text upside down. Yes I "broke" the computer. They didn't want me to show them how to "fix" it by turning the computer off and on again. But I won't bore you with that...
I was in HS more than a decade ago and I figured by now, all the teachers would "get" how computers worked and even though they wouldn't understand the technical details they'd understand it's pretty easy to do things that look like they are "hacking". Guess I was wrong.
Sometimes I wonder, psychologically, what effect does it have on these kids? Does it teach them that "using net send is the same as hacking into the government's computers, why not do the latter" or something? Or does it teach them "adults are stupid, I'm going to ignore them from now on"? Or does it just bounce off because kids are used to that kind of stuff?
Oh well, I survived HS mostly unscarred, with only a deep distrust of authority to show for it.
I know someone who pulled a similar stunt, however the "Hey" was replaced by something along the lines of "I love you".
Bush didn't have anything to do with teachers being so behind the kids when it comes to computers. As a student I got into trouble for messing with their now retired Novell system along with a few other friends. It was the same back (92-93).
They even hired me after I graduated (98) and it was the same then, the teachers were always behind and didn't understand how it worked.
Interestingly enough the ones that did know what was going on were long time Mac users who were pissed when they were told they couldn't have their Macs any more (some had laptops they'd bought on their own they could use but no more desktops). They too were then behind after being thrown into a Windows environment. (Not to say Macs are better just thats what they knew.)
No sig for you!!
I've never known anyone who is really proficient user to say nothing of becoming a programmer or administrator who doesn't experiment. It's the people who are afraid to touch anything on their computer who drive me nuts. You can't teach them anything because they are to afraid they will damage something.
Take a kid with a bit of curiosity using a command that the school made available to him and saying nothing more than "Hey" and expelling him for being curious and experimenting with things. This is a really sad statement on how this school is run. And the pundits lament the low numbers of students who go into science/math/etc. With curiosity beaten out of them it's no wonder.
Disclaimer: I couldn't get the article to load so I'm only going on the posted message. There may be more to the story than I know.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
1. Send Bev an email with a web bug
2. Get IP address of her box
3. Net send her insults
4. ??
5. Profit!!
it's a feature!
Junior year of high school--I showed a few classmates in my AP Comp Sci class (which was a large Mac lab) how to bypass the "At Ease" security program (Apple's then-answer to problem of keepings Macs in a public space from being trashed).
I hit a keystroke, dropped into the debugger, typed "gfinder" (I believe) and it took you to the full featured Finder.
I didn't do any trashing myself, but the kids that I taught this to told others and someone trashed a Mac. So I got suspended for 3 days. They couldn't spare the time to track down the kids who did the real damage and instead decided to take me down instead. This was about 9 years ago.
Eric Raymond, compiler of The New Hacker's Dictionary, lists five possible characteristics that qualify one as a hacker, which we paraphrase here:
In the article we learn that this boy (13 years old, so see in correct perspective) enjoyed learning and experimenting with the computer system at school, which makes correct use of the word "hacking".
However I totally disagree with the punishment he received from his school principal. People should be motivated to experiment. They should be allowed to make this small mistakes too. As I understood it didn't repeat so the annoyment wasn't to big.
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
I noticed /etc/motd was world-writable on our univ suns, so I typed /etc/motd
echo 'hacker alert' >
A couple of hours later, the sysadm came running to me, shocked and very angry. Wasn't suspended, though.
My personal 'hacking' story was a typing class back in junior high. We had PS/2's booting from floppy, 'networked' through a ABCD printer switch (read: no network).
;-) ], and probably got a better education than most... I certainly had a better time learning than most.
I remember modifying the autoexec so it changed the DOS prompt> to "Virus>". At the end of the class, the floppies all went back to a central box, so the floppy went to a different student's machine the next day.
Well, needless to say, all hell broke loose the next day. The student asked "What's this virus prompt?" and then the poor teacher freaked out. He started ripping plugs from the wall, disconnecting the printer switches (just in case it could spread over the parallel port), ejecting floppies... It's was pandemonium. Poor guy.
Looking back, I can see the situation from his point of view, and I feel a bit bad. These days, I probably would have gotten suspended just like this poor kid, and with a bit more reason, I pretty much pulled the DOS equivilent of yelling fire in a theatre.
But it seems a suspension is way over the top. Every kid goes through their "Hey look what I can do" phase of learning, and I'm glad I had the chance to act out a little without dire consequences. I used all the resources I had available to me [I have other stories
No, if they are allowed to experiment and do things ANYWHERE that they have not been given specific permission to do, it's called learning. Why should computers be any different?
When I was in ninth grade, I went to my school's measly computer room (all of ten computers) at lunch time and put passwords on all the screensavers in the lab. Little did i Know that there were several seniors writing papers over the double block (one class before, one after lunch)... holy crap was I in trouble! Not only that, but my best friend ratted me out to the admin... I can still see the scene: i was called to the computer room after lunch, and as soon as he saw me my best friend pointed at me and said "He did it!" Ah, those were the good ol' days.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
He learned this command from his father and decided to experiment with it at school. Are educators now in the business of making children afraid to experiment and learn?
Back when I was in elementary school we were encouraged to experiment with computers as long as we followed the guidelines. If we encountered an issue where the guidelines were unclear on, our teacher told us what we did that may proove to be problematic later and the guidelines were updated.
It would be interesting to note if the school has updated their guidelines on this topic and have take the (simple) steps necessary to insure this doesn't happen again, but saying that what this kid did was wrong is borderlining on the dangerous.
Is it any wonder why some people grow up afraid to learn computers? I'd hazard to say maybe we'd do well to have better trained educators and more concise guidelines rather than knee-jerk suspensions and "computer educators" that don't know how to secure their own networks, nor how to handle the children whom the parents put in their care!
Clearly the best action the school could have taken was suspending the student. Obviously taking the student out of the classroom and thus denying him of some education is the proper way to treat an offense for which there was no warning, or, most likely, no rule on the books.
This was possibly the worst knee-jerk reaction in a school about which I have heard in a long time. I cannot imagine a school administrator suspending a child for 3 days for causing such a minor and benign annoyance. It is possible this boy had been repremanded in the past and told that any further transgressions would result in suspension, but I'm guessing that was not the case. This is completely rediculous.
Isn't it obvious? He did it by typing "commands" at a [shudder] "command prompt" instead of clicking stuff with a mouse like normal people. ;)
This is the thought process of those people that George Bush and his cronies love so much and would do anything for, like giving them a job in government.
C:\>
The teachers and adminstration at this school should be embarrassed at their ignorance but their inherent status prevents them from being exposed to that risk. I think we know from experience they're not worth the breath to clue to them in.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Good thing I am not as young as this kid. I have played plenty of net send pranks.
I remember my first CS lab where the TA had his computer hooked up to the projector. I kept sending him messages that the network was going down in five minutes. He sarcastically responded, "Uh oh, guess I better do as the computer says".
If I was 10 years younger it'd be me getting suspended in Junior High. I guess that is a big difference about college. No hand holding. Nobody cares if you are not learning crap, so you are best learning and experimenting as much as possible on your own.
Later on when I was a lab assistant. I put my junior programming skills to the test and built a GUI in front of netsend to make it more like a AIM. Pretty soon most of the lab assistants were using it to message each other and broadcast messages informational messages to the users, like the lab was closing. From what Beverly Sweeny was saying, that is exactly what she does not want the kids to do. The kids should not experiment, only do what she says. That way she can proliferate the next generation of retarded users.
He's a Texan for jevas sake!
What's he still doing in school in the 8th grade?
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Once did this very thing, except to protest some rules.
The computer lab in our school is for "academic use only". of course, it is used for any number of other things, and certainly not "academic use". However, to protest, he sent a net send message to all the computers that:
The Technology Center is for Academic use only.
Fortunately for him, the administration realized they had no clue what he had done, and called in the sysadmin who had tracked him down to basically decide his punishment.
He was only given only detention, which is the appropriate punishment for such a crime, not 3 days suspension.
~skeeter
How the fuck can you defend this guy, but criticize spammers who do the same thing?
Sending a popup message to another computer, using the popup messages in a way which they were not intended to be use, is hacking. If the popup messages were not a built-in, but rather were part of a flaw in MSWord or the like, then using the exploit would be the SAME DAMN THING. A three day suspension is extreme and uncalled for, sure, but don't sit there like a fucking idiot pretending he didnt do anything wrong.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The ability of the vitriolic liberal to take a subject and warp it to his own perverse ends never ceases to amaze.
Heard any good Ghandi jokes lately?
BC
Good morning, The Worm, Your Honour,
The Crown will plainly show,
The prisoner who now stands before you,
Was caught red - handed sending messages.
Sending messages of an almost human nature.
This will not do.
Call the schoolmaster!
I always said he'd come to no good,
In the end, Your Honour.
If they'd let me have my way,
I could have flayed him into shape.
But my hands were tied.
The bleeding hands and artists,
Let him get away with murder.
Let me hammer him today.
Crazy.
PC's in the attic, I am crazy.
Truly gone fishing.
They must have taken my marbles away.
Crazy.
PC's in the attic, he is crazy.
You little shit, you're in it now.
I hope they throw away the key.
You should've talked to me more often than you did.
But no! You had to go your own way.
Have you broken any homes up lately?
Just five minutes, Worm, Your Honour,
Him and me alone.
Baaaaaabe!
Come to Mother, baby.
Let me hold you in my arms.
M'Lord, I never meant for him to get in any trouble.
Why'd he ever have to leave me?
Worm, Your Honour, let me take him home.
Crazy.
Over the rainbow, I am crazy.
Messages in windows.
There must have been a door there in the firewall. For when I came in.
Crazy.
Over the rainbow, he is crazy.
The evidence before the court is incontravertible.
There's no need for the jury to retire.
In all my years of judging I have never heard before,
Of someone more deserving of the full penalty of the law.
The way you made them suffer,
Your exquisite principle and teacher,
Fills me with the urge to deficate!
No, Judge, the jury!
Since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fear,
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers.
Tear down the wall!
I checked out the teachers webpage, and she doesn't qualify to teach computers in my opinion. If she were to apply to teach the Computers Merit badge, I would have to turn her down. (I have been the person who makes that decision for a district or 2 and have taught the merit badge myself for over 10 years).
She owes the student an apology.
Oh, and if a command like that isn't trapped out, it is the teachers fault, not the student's.
It's more an ignorance powered decision than a hacking punishment. And as long as 13 years old kids will be more IT-aware than their teachers, it is gonna happen everyday.
____
nico
Nico-Live
I think he should install UDP speed test. Given there computer knowledge is between slim and none they will never know what hit them.
Check out her web page:/ TechApp .htm
http://www.birdville.k12.tx.us/043/CompLit
Clearly she's an expert. Only highly trained web designers imbed sounds in their web pages.
because i figured out how to put a BIOS password on my system. How is that hacking?? This was about 1994ish or so in my QBASIC programming class, so if it didn't run in windows or in an MSDOS command prompt, it was hacking.
But I agree with the parent. No teachers or admins knew what a BIOS was, so I must have been the most 31337 kid they ever saw. Though IANAH
What, me Tweet?
Our society doesn't value education or teachers so as a consequence we have people teaching conformity not fostering growth in academia. Who in their right mind would accept a job for the wages teachers make? Hell, they should have skipped college and just continued waiting tables.
Remember, in life you get what you pay for, since we live in a Republican run country. You pay for war, not education. No child left behind, right.
similar thing happened to a guy in my school, except he got detention...
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Or am I the only one to think the kid deserved to be punished, not encouraged? Call me troll all you want, but sending "Hey!" to the whole domain isn't education, it's disruption.
Now, a 3-day suspension? That's a little steep IMO, but those of you asking for him to be rewarded and/or encouraged are missing the larger point.
jc
I was suspended from high school back in 1997 for this exact thing -- sending a message to 'all' on some netware workstation.
Apparently the DOS netware client wasnt too friendly handling these messages, and i crashed several DOS typing labs during some big test exam (or so i was told).
I was lectured about how much of a hacker I was and how i probably did things 'they never even found out about', so i deserved to be suspended for several days.
Later that year i took over the school's closed circuit TV system (which every TV was tuned to) and made fun of the administration during the morning announcements with a couple of our class clowns. The lady that suspended me eventually found our pirate broadcast studio, but i shrugged and told her i didnt know how to turn it off....she was helpless.
I got suspended for "hacking" the network, because a "repair tech" left himself logged in on the Novell Network as whatever the equivalent of "Superuser" is on that old system, and he was using the workstation that I was assigned to use. I went and poked around, and then installed QBASIC from another computer that was on the LAN, so I could code something, when I was done with whatever boring WordPerfect or dBase III+ project we were working on.
Oops.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
wow... that's not nearly as bad as what i did on my high school network. of course, the only time anyone noticed i did anything was when i filled up the hard drive on the server (only 2 gigs for 500 students) by downloading doom to my home drive. ah... those were the days...
Anyone notice she has two BA's and an MA... What does sociology have to do with computers other than studying the "First Post" phenomenon
/. a school system?
NO Technical education whatsoever.
BTW, If anyone considers a certificate in desktop publishing to be a CS degree, it must be another Arts weenie.
Also, is it accpetable to
Thou shall not know more than the teachers!
It would seem to be a difficult rule not to break at that school. Arrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! MORONS!
What a bunch of idiots that kid learned to use a command that his teacher did not know so he was hacking. Later that day a student was suspended for using the dir command. Damm hackers!
P.S. My sisters are both teachers. They think it is stupid as well.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
School is a great place for a kid to learn a fact of life: that if you do something somebody doesn't like, a law can be found and applied.
_______
2B1ASK1
Dunno about you, but this sounds just like my computer science teacher would have tried.
rant:
Most high school teachers for computer classes are grossly underqualified. In my experience they are ignorant and petty people. To this day(4 years later), I still doubt that my CompSci AP teacher really knew C++. The year began out with her complaining about me teaching other students how to complete their programs (had read a book on C++ the summer before), and by the end of the year she tried to get me in trouble for *refusing* to help other students.
Anyways, the reason I said that rant, one day I was getting pretty fed up with our crappy, as in ineffective and stupidly restrictive, security program (FoolProof). So I told my teacher I was going to get rid of it. Thinking I was just an ignorant 10th grader she said "sure, go ahead try it". So, knowing what would probably work, I downloaded some C++ code to kill a process and then preceeded to kill both the Foolproof process and a 2nd process which served solely to make sure that the first wasn't killed. From there I spent about a day changing everything about the system. At the point I got tired, I rebooted into dos(win95/98 days) and typed "format c:". Not realizing that the computer was completely unsecure, despite my promises it was, she "dared" me to push enter and say yes... Long story short from here, she tried to get me suspended, and the fact my dad was the president of the schoolboard was my one saving grace.
So this teacher, having supported (although ignorantly) my actions, tried to inflict punishment upon me once she realized her mistake.
Back when I was in high school at Strake Jesuit here in Houston, we were using NT4 systems, and some friends and I (fellow geeks, all picked on by the jocks) programmed a nice little utility to target the jocks' computers with net send messages... over and over with a distributed network, and they came at intervals, like popups now, so that they clicked it off, it'd pop back up, and so on.
The priests eventually caught us, and we did a few hours detention each. Nothing big, but it was worth it.
Commentary with text:
"If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished."
But if we hadn't experimented in the first place, you'd still be using DOS, lady, and it wouldn't matter. Actually, odds are you'd be using a proprietary OS on a, oh, DEC PDP-11 or something.
"Hacking into a system should be highest on the list of tampering violations. I believe the other students are now aware that the district takes this seriously and will not tolerate such misuse of our equipment."
Really? What about the teachers who check web e-mail in class? They download viruses and worms into the systems.
What about the students who look at porn on school grounds?
What about the students who download MP3s, thus making you liable? (Hey, if the netadmin didn't disable Messenger, odds are he's stupid enough to let Kazaa through.)
Lastly, what part of this disrupted the system/penetrated it in any way? A two-second popup from the system doesn't bother people. If it does, you turn the service off.
Of course, if you had a brain, you've had it off since September 2002, so...
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
What is it with grade schools and incompetent computer teachers? Using net send hardly qualifies as "hacking". Heaven forbid that this poor student learns something other than how to use Google to find out about dinosaurs. This reminds me of when I was in 7th grade. I changed the default foreground and background colors on my Tandy 1000 terminal (remember ANSI escape sequences :). My teacher about had a coronary. She thought I broke the freaking thing. Then again, this is the same moron who "lost" $500 worth of educational software by leaving the 5.25 disks on top of a running PC for 2 days. It's a sad state when the child knows more about the subject than the teacher.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Phone number: (817) 547-5700
Web site: www.birdville.k12.tx.us
Surely using a build-in feature in Windows, as it was intended, is not hacking.
This is just another example of overzealous administrators and beaurocrats (i.e. school administration) overstepping their bounds and exuding their ignorance about technology.
Moreover, this type of behavior is likely to cause a chilling effect with regard to innovation, creativity, and learning among our young people.
At most, the student should have been admonished not to annoy his fellow classmates. At best, an observant instructor or administrator would have realized this student's creative potential and curosity and encouraged him to learn and do more with computers (perhaps, however, not during class time).
This Big Brother, we know best attitude in the US needs to end. Overreacting to beneign activities involving computers is just another example of the system gone awry.
What lesson is this 8 year old and his peers going to take home from this?
None worth learning, IMHO.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one, jeffy.
Surprise surprise, ignorance and fear in the American public school system? This happened to me monthly when I was in school and I never hacked a god dammed thing. If the typing teacher accidentally deleted a student's account without realizing, I would be accused of hacking and often given in-shool suspension or detention. No, I wasn't a trouble maker, nor did I ever, ever, ever hack anything in my school. I kept to myself and didn't talk to anyone unless I had to, but because I was the best student of anything with buttons, blame was constantly given to me for any discrepancy.
Parents need to start speaking up when those charged with our children's education act like fools. Egad, what am I thinking? Most parents send their children to the nearest public school without investigating its history or quality because its more convenient that way. They need to care before they're motivated to speak up, I suppose, and what good ever came from fools criticising fools?
"Okay, let's all sell our souls and work for Satan because its more convenient that way!"
Oh, Lester, you tickled me so.
-Nick
Maybe slashdot should get some sponsors to send that boy a prize. How about a Mac G5 or Athlon-64 loaded with Linux. Throw in a bunch of O'Reilly books for fun. The new annual I was punished for being smart award!
Okay how about a GBA SP?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yep, the admins at the school need a good thrashing. Yep, Ms. Sweeny is not as l33t as most slashdoters. Someone has posted all the relative links to the school, and we have plenty of anecdotes from peoples school experiences showing the same behavior, and the same treatment.
What I don't see is "Hey, I am volunteering my skillz at the local school to help out the admins. I also work to show these young hackers how to help grow thier skillz and to put to good use all that creativity and energy."
But, nah, that would take work.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
He did access 90 other computers without authorization from the users.
That clearly fits the definition of most regulations I've heard of.
Thank that wonderful "Make an example" policy.
Should the student have done it? No. He was probably feeling just as clever and superior for his technical knowledge of the net send command. And he probably did it for showing off. Nothing bad about that, but at the same time, he knew that he would annoy a lot of people. He shouldn't need a written policy to tell him to not annoy 50 people through the net send command. He should be able to deduce that from common sense.
Is it right to suspend him? Maybe. I'm not sure I understand all these crazy american school policies anymore, but a fair comparison would be with graffiti or tagging, but without the economic damages. I am not sure being suspended for three days is over the top for that. But it sure isn't way beyond reasonable imagination. Move on, I'm sure you are able to find better examples of injustice than this.
Dear Mr. Rollins,
_ li eber/7643262.htm
Before continueing, I might want to inform you that the following article has appeared on a major internet website, one visited by tens of thousands of technicians and other professionals a day. You may want to prepare your inbox.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/columnists/dave
As per the content of the article, it may be biased, but I am writing to assure you of the following:
The "net send" command is in no way a 'hacking' tool. "Net" is a command used by windows/windows-users for many network tasks, and "net send" is a communication command which does not adversely affect any machine.
Furthermore, the punishment for this "offense" seems neither fair nor warranted? You may not think that I have any cognisance of the type of things that occur in schools, but I can assure you - as an IT support technician/admin for a school-district - that I know a great deal about it. This problem would have been easily dealt with, and any issues caused by it not warranting such a punishment.
Furthermore, the student - in investigating parts of computing that are obscure to many - seems to be showing promise and intelligence. To attack the natural curiousity of the student is to stifle his natural inclination to learn and investigate. Rather than punishment, you should consider giving the student materials to learn about computing in a way that might be more productive and advanced than "net send."
Certainly I myself did a certain amount of investigating and playing with such commands when I first gained interest in computing. As my teachers promoted my curiousity I eventually found a lucrative career in both computer programming and administration. Had such a punishment been meted to me, it may have impaired the drive which brought me to my current employment.
Please consider that while the commands used may be obscure to many, they are not highly technical nor dangerous in nature. An offensive action taken against the unknown is neither ethical nor mature in nature, and such reactions should be the bane of modern education.
Sincerely,
(my name here)
IT Support Administration
(and yes, I do work in educational IT support. suspension for net send would be laughable in comparison to the other things students try to do or do here)
That someone has been watching too many "hacker" movies like "The Net" or "Swordfish".... lol
Then she asked how he did it, and he showed her.
At least she admits that she has something to learn from her 8th grade student :)
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
I expect this type of reaction from school boards. Let's think about it...
What competent person capable of landing a decent job programing or in IT would settle for teaching computer courses at the middle school level.
Sure, I might find the odd kid who is geeky enough to be enjoyable teaching, but I don't think it would be enough to keep anyone challenged.
A computer teacher is still a teacher, with teacher's credentials and training. I doubt you can find truly competent people (competent in real IT/development fields) who would teach grade 8 students to use Microsoft Paint.
At the board's "liaison" level, I would expect more perhaps, but we can see that this is not the case, at least not within the board mentioned.
This is a case of someone placed into a position at a board level who SHOULD know a deal more about IT and "hacking", but they do not. This woman reacted on fear and ignorance. And in her ignorance, she fails to be an educator at all, with a nice healthy dose of arrogance towards questoins, with another big ignorant cherry on top by falsely claiming that the right decision was made.
She doesn't even realize that she's ignorant in the first place.
Teachers are so ignorant and you can tell how much influence the media has had on them after these popular viruses and worms hit (Melissa, Lovebug, MS Blaster, etc..)
My friend and I used to format the PCs in the school library for kicks. The "techs" there had NO CLUE what went on or how to fix it, so they always had to call "computer people" in to fix it.
One time a teacher caught me as I was doing it and I thought, "Shit.. busted.." but instead he goes, "Yeah, don't use that computer, we keep having problems with it." and I was saved.
Now all they hear about is identity theft, viruses, worms, etc.. created by teenager and are suddenly more "aware" of the problem when in reality they're no more educated than they were 5 years ago. The result: an innocent kid who does a 'net send' has his education interrupted due to fear and paranoia.
That in itself is more wrong than a kid "hacking" computers could ever be.. and to think, we let these people teach our children. Sad!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
It is to be hoped that some parents there will hurry to inform and enlighten the school board, since the other adults involved are apparently substituting "authority" for prevention.
<grrr>
Early in high-school (Grade 9 or so) I was kicked out of the computers class for the semester for changing the prompt on the computer I was using (which no-one ever sees except administrators) to 'You've Been Hacked $p$g'
And again I was kicked out of computers in my last year because "we can't trust you, despite having zero evidence that we shouldn't."
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
I only got a 1 day suspension for fighting in grade school. He would've have been better off punching some kid instead of messaging him.
According to what he wrote, the kid set it to his teacher's wife's name, it wasn't already set to that.
The school is teaching this student a valuable lesson, and I feel certain he'll never get caught doing this sort of thing again.
-- this is not a
According to the kid's teacher, "suspension of students who are guilty of such tampering sends a message to all students that is beneficial and necessary."
So is sending a message to all the students OK or not?
WOW! If I had such rules/teachers at my school, I'd be screwed! I also used net send, with a simple script that would send it to all computers, or one computer but many times ;). What I noticed was that it would interrupt most games, including Starcraft, and some computers had problems switching video modes back to fullscreen, so they had to restart. This was EVIL, and maybe this is what happend to some teachers, so they were really pissed.
just a thought.
"Students should not be of the opinion that it is acceptable to abuse the privileges that are afforded them by the taxpayers. If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished.
I think that "abuse" is a strong word to use. Did he receive permission to send a communication to other systems? Probably not. This could have been handled by the instructor in the classroom. A simple "Please refrain from messaging all systems on the network." would have sufficed. Definitely, this child is a hacker, though not in the definition espoused by the media. He did not crack any system. Had this Sweeney individual been intelligent enough, she would have isolated the computer lab from all systems on the net to prevent such an occurence. Perhaps she should be supsended for her dereliction in security practice! Furthermore, in this instance, who taught who? I don't believe that this Sweeney character deserves the respect that the moniker "teacher" commands. She may have been a public educator for many years, but that does not make her a "teacher". She isn't "teaching" anyone, she apparently squashes the already difficult-to-encourage motivation for learning that her pupils displayed. I would imagine that she rotely follows her lesson plan making small changes as the "fads" develop. Her "experimentation" that she frowns upon is precisely what drives a child's desire to learn. Not the tedious hum-drum that is today's modern class. I wonder why American education is not where it should be in relation to other industrialized nation, and then I read an article such as this that anwers a lot of my questions. Thank you educator Sweeney for setting the example for poor instructors!
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
I was in Grade 11... like 13 years ago... and we had these wierd Unisys Icon machines running QNX. The hardware was roughly like a PC w/ CGA graphics, were 80186 based, and could emulate a PC (abiet agonizingly slowly... took 5 minutes to load WordPerfect 4.2)
Anyways... I had discovered these books which were basically printouts of the man(2) pages. I'm learning C at the time, and find the function to do..... basically the same thing as a 'net send', which would broadcast a message to all machines.
I wrote a 5-line program, that would take a message from argv, and plug it into the function, boom... every console in the lab displayed it.
I didn't get suspended, but once the program got around to others, and people started blasting expletives across the network... they wound up banning me from the lab for a week.
*sigh* This unfortunately was just one of many ways in which experimenting with computers in high school got me into trouble.
Have you painted a shed today?
What lesson is this 8 year old and his peers going to take home from this?
Obviously that of not experimenting and being curious. Don't you love it when the educators hinder education?
Also, just a techicality...but he is 13.
-caf
The message was something along the lines of "The harddrive is going to be wiped in 3 seconds. 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... Wiping harddrive..." And then it would blank for a couple of seconds and wait for a keypress. Obviously the next student freaked out and called the teacher over.
In today's environment I would probably be suspended. Instead, the teach editted the file and put a message about experimention being wonderful but to be careful because we would be held responsible for any damages. Basically getting caught (she knew it was me) but only getting a warning (and the fact that the teacher had the same level of knowledge) was a good learning experience.
I think the problem is partly because teachers today, for the most part, have lost the inquisitive nature and don't know enough to keep up with the students. That makes the teachers afraid: both because they are being outpaced in computer learning and because they can't control or understand what the students are doing.
Obviously, the kid hijacked all the school's computers at once. Only terrorists hijack. This is war time, and this war can go on forever. It's not our choice, it's the terrorists' choice. Move this kid over to Guantanamo Bay!
Bottom line:
Although this is satirical, FBI will probably not recognize it as such. This could be dangerous, since all communications are being logged and scanned. But because really sending people to Guantanamo Bay is a "reasonable action" in the current US under Bush, officials won't complain anyway.
Guantanamo Bay: A US place in Cuba, where normal people (suspected terrorists) are held without constitutional rights.
rather - one of not experimenting with other people's stuff
the school isnt stopping him from doing it at home
Hacking = knowing more than they do.
Discipline him, sure, though maybe not suspension unless he has been warned several times in the past. But to call it hacking is just an admission of ignorance. The last thing we need is more ingorant people teaching our children.
This is hacking under the new, modern definition of hacking, whereby hacking is doing anything to a computer that the computer's owner doesn't understand.
See, there are these people in the world called idiots...
Philip Sandifer's academic website
The way I see it, this is just a symptom of the larger problem: that of non-programmers who literally do not know ANYTHING about computers per se defining "computer literacy" as being able to run a few M$ pointy-clicky apps--because that's all they know how to do.
Now it's not a problem if these people stay in the f-ing typing pool, graphic arts sweatshops, stupid little bookkeeping jobs, or teaching history where they bleeding well belong. It does become a problem when the Beverly Sweeneys of this world get positions of authority which they're fundamentally unqualified to fill, and find themselves feeling threatened by anyone who knows more than themselves--and acting on their feelings of inadequacy with high-handedness.
Having a Beverly Sweeney teaching Integrated Technology Applications because she got a cert or two in running a few pointy-clicky M$ Applications is like hiring someone as a music teacher because they know how to play CDs on their stereo, who then busts students who play an actual musical instrument in class -- because it's not "an approved application". Sheesh!
Almost all of the objects at school fall in the "other people's stuff" category. So you're saying that kids shouldn't experiment in school at all?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
From the faculty list, here's the principal and here's the computer teacher. They want to make an example of him? Fine, but we get to do the same.
Just look at her CompLit/TechApp webpage. In particular notice this image where she adds the label: "Sometimes this is how we feel !!!" She apparently finds computers difficult and frustrating.
Someone who finds math frustrating is obviously a poor choice to teach calculus. Someone who finds computers frustrating is obviously a poor choice to teach computers.
According to her bio she seems well qualified in "social" fields, but she's just not a techie. She thinks the ordinary use of the net send command is "tampering" and "hacking". The certification program she took in computers didn't mention it therefore it must be "evil hacker black-magic". Sorry lady, it's not tampering and it's not hacking.
If they want to reprimand the kid for "being disruptive", fine. What he did was no more disruptive than sticking his head out in the hallway and shouting "Hey!". That warrants a warning, or at most detention.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
i can fully imagine this type of situation. the actual reason the kid got into trouble is probably making the teachers (read, dudes in charge) look like dickhead's. unfortunatly i speak out of expirience when i say that it may be cool, but it get's you nowhere. then again, the kid made /. .... ...nevermind my reply
Digitally Yours, Martijn Beekhuis. ]\/[ Here Cometh The Bandwidth
i would love to get that script as well. my email address is above under my name ;)
thanks in advance if you could do this
Mr Rollins,
The fact that you suspended a boy for using "net send" command on the school network made it into the new on http://www.slashdot.org, a highly regarded Web site for computer literates. The reason why this got the attention of the editors of that site is that the punishment for the act is way too excessive and the use of term "hacking" for such a simple use of a widely known application (which is part of Windows) demonstrate the lack of understanding of technology on the part of the school management.
I suggest you simply reprimand the boy and hire a qualified network administrator who will promptly disable the Windows service that makes the use of this command possible. Even better, you could ask the boy how to accomplish that straighforward task and make him do so as punishment.
I took the time to write that letter because I think it's important to encourage discovery and exploration instead of rising little sheeps that will conform to the system instead of improving it and the society as a whole.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
It IS hacking - if you are a fucking MORON and have never ever encountered anything other than Microsoft Word before.
the reason punishment in schools for any kind of computer "activity" is so harsh is the teachers are so ignorant about them. This reminds me of the time I was suppended for six months and fined $500. I cracked the fortress password which was "spoon." When i came back next year the students had cracked it again by simply holding down [Enter] at the password screen. and guess what the new password is? FORK!!! FUCKING FORK!! (extra exlamation points nesesary) apparently it took the stupid ass admin 20 hours or so to change the password on every machine one at a time so i had to pay his $25 an hour wage. overpaid moron!
My teacher was only in charge of that class because he was the soccer coach and had to officially be a teacher at the school.
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
Her name is Beverly Sweeney and her email address is Beverly_Sweeney@birdville.k12.tx.us, which is posted publicly at:
h tm
p .htm
http://www.birdville.k12.tx.us/043/admin/contact.
Here is her public home page for the school, which contains an irritating applet and her (nasty, IMO) picture:
http://www.birdville.k12.tx.us/043/CompLit/TechAp
Two years ago, at my high school, several students had "compromised" several passwords, including those of teachers.
Thing is, these passwords were found in an unprotected text file using that handy-dandy "search" feature. The students (I was not one of them, but knew several) were expelled. Their offence read, no joke, "...using the advanced coding of the Windows search feature." Uh...yeah.
I'm not for obtaining (and distributing!) passwords, but they weren't obtaining information in a manner which, by any definition, constitutes "hacking."
(By the way, I have to give props to the students. At least they used this for something useful--like getting tests ahead of time!)
I have discovered a truly marvelous
I did exactly the same thing in 9th grade, net send * with a harmless message (no obsceneties). I got kicked out of the class for the rest of the year (but since it was only 2 days from the end of the year, no big deal). Still got an A in the class, because I was one of the 3 people who actually knew what we were doing in that class (the other 2 being my friends, both of whom also got kicked out for guilt through association).
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Instead of over-reacting and lynching the kid for being criminally-inclined they could easily have made this a stern warning and a lesson to the kids.
- A lesson in socially acceptable behaviour on The Net
- A lesson in privacy (and the lack thereof) on The Net
- A re-education on how to show off "new and cool" to the class
This could have been a great opportunity to turn disruptive behaviour into constructive learning experiences, but instead they stuck their head in the sands and cried "hacker" (which is actually unfashionable, these days they need to be crying "terrorist").(yeah that was kinda cool, but rude)
(look how easily and instantly we found you)
(know something cool about computers? bring it to 'tech show-and tell'... be cool without getting suspended)
Unfortunately the education system is geared to teaching children, as opposed to helping them learn.
(ie remember all the things we tell you, but above all else remember that thinking for yourself is not permitted)
"I'm sorry, that information is not a part of our curriculum. You're suspended."
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
How can we get this teachers e-mail address? I would love to /. this bitche's address
Sig: BEEeeeP,,Please press pound, so I can get on with my fucking life!
...of my script-kiddie years in middle school. Of course our clients were all win95, and the server was winnt 4.0, so we had to use winpopup to send nasty messages to the admins (via other users accounts, of course).
My high school actually just recently disabled the alerter service on all computers in the domain, after installing WinXP/Win2k to every lab and having some freshman let everyone know that they were "1337". The head of technology came to the network technicians demanding to know how this 'virus' had made it to her desktop. Perhaps thats why our most utilized computers are still 233s and the ones collecting dust are all new P4's....gotta love mismanagement!
Reminds me of my computer teacher. She knew nothing at all about computers. I taught her where the on/off switch was in the 3rd grade. Before that to reboot she flipped a switch on the wall to reboot all computers, or just made you share with someone else for the rest of the hour. Anyhow, I feel bad for the kid. Reminds me of my days as a 13 year old. EZboard forum + 3 friends + position:absolute + 1px image stretched over the whole forum = 4 happy kids. They threatened to sue us all for property damage or something. Kids.
SAILING MISHAP
I had this exact same thing happen to me. I was fooling around, and decided to see what would happen if I did a 'net send * foo'. Of course, it worked. Too well. Apparently, the message popped up for each person, the first time they logged into their Win2K account afterwards. The next day, the principal hauls me into his office and reprimands me for "harming" the network, and tells me that it took the three tech guys hours to "track down" what I had done, find out "what special program I had used" and "remove the message from the network."
I cheerfully explained to him that I refused to believe that what I had done was harmful, that I didn't use a special program, and that they knew for years that the NetBIOS messenger service was on, and that I would have been happy to show them how to turn it off if they wanted to know.
Apparently, some teacher was logged on when it happened and panicked, screaming that someone had "hacked the network!" This was, apparently, reason enough to decided that I had "caused harm," so what did I get? Two weeks' suspension from the network. Of course, since I had helpful friends, it meant nothing, but still...
Incidentally, the same week that this happened, someone brought in a laptop with a virus (I think SoBig, but could have been Blaster or something else) which managed to bring the whole network to its knees for two days. They knew whose laptop it was, but did he get punished at all? Of course not; that was an innocent mistake, despite the fact that it cost at least an order of magnitude more man-hours to fix.
In her email to the columnist, the Richland Middle School "campus computer liason" explained (emphasis mine):
In 1996 and 1997 I worked at StarText, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's online service, as a support tech. Our users were a cross-section of Fort Worth society.
Teachers, journalists (Dave Lieber excepted), lawyers, preachers, managers, and other members of the word-oriented professions usually resist computers. Many of these people, otherwise intelligent, fear technology. Fear leads to dislike or even hatred. Some react to a tech's instructions to click here or type a command as if they had been requested to dissect a possum off the highway.
I like to say this ultimately derives from the Greek philosophers' attitude toward the material world vs. the abstractions which were their stock in trade. But maybe not. Who knows?
At any rate, having started with no preconceptions, I soon learned to expect a tough time whenever I provided tech support to teachers.
Good! The little bastard is a spammer in training. Now he'll see what the reprocussions are of unsolicited e-mail and other broadcasts.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
"[...]let me say that suspension of students who are guilty of such tampering sends a message to all students that is beneficial and necessary."
Indeed if you want to send a message to all students:
C:> net send all Hey !!!
lol...
I wonder if the principal has an "Independent Thought Alarm" button on his desk, as seen in "The Simpsons".
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Interestingly, that image comes from here and she's violating their policy.
Litigious bastards
That's interesting.
I also think that image has more truth than fiction: It depicts an ignorant savage destroying a useful tool with brute force.
The same thing happened to me a couple years back when I was in junior high. I personally think that the school districts' IT should prevent this problem instead of trying to punish the kid. How much damage did he (and I) really cause? Nothing. Just a little pop up. I received 30 days computer suspension and 2 days of after school detention, and even that is too harsh. I find that even though this can be a serious matter, it really comes down to who let the commands be used.
The control issue is real. Why?
I think it is all the lawyers. When I went to school, things were not as bad. The staff had a lot more options compared to today.
Schools do not teach ethics and citizenship. Afraid they might offend somebody. In fact, most of the problems today boil down to lame procedures designed by lawyers to maintain a high level of "liability managment."
The schools would not have to go through the crap they have to today, if the parents were more involved. Nothing worse than a problem kid with rich, uninvolved parents willing to sue the school when something happens to their kid.
I have 4 kids and stay right on top of what they are doing in school. Takes a lot of time most of my peers are not willing to give. As they get older, the differences are beginning to show.
As an involved parent, I am qualified to say this would not happen with my kid. The suspension is bullshit plain and simple. Schools are supposed to be places where we build new citizens one kid at a time. Giving smart kids the smackdown because the staff is too uninformed to understand their behaviour is sensless.
The schools work for us. They don't often want to admit that, but the truth is they do. With this particular kid, they have just sent a message and shaped a couple of values in his mind that are unacceptable at best, scarring at worst.
In this case, both are at fault. The school being driven by its lawyers and the state instead of its responsibility to society, and the parents for letting this crap stand.
I know the schools have it tough, but if this were my kid, I would be in the office that day, and would stay until the suspension was revoked. Clearly the educators need to get some education themselves, and I would press this point hard.
Nobody wants a lawsuit over something this small, but we don't want our kids becoming compliant drones either.
In my experience, once this is explained to the staff, this sort of thing goes away pretty quickly. When they realize they are going to deal with a parent who knows the rules and the law and cares about their kid, they back off and pester the other kids whose parents don't care.
Another thing about this that burns my ass: I would be happy to work with kids in school for a few years. I have a lot to give, practical experience, and enjoy the subject matter. Plenty of other people I know are in a similar position.
You would think the State government would have programs in place to take advantage of this for technical subject matter, but they don't. Sorry if I offend a teacher or two, but the truth is most grade / high school computer educators really have no clue. I am sure they are fine people, working hard to make the best of the situation they are in, but still it sucks to know my kids could be getting much better...
Blogging because I can...
When I was in high school, the computer dept. had a policy *encouraging* us to try and break into the system, with the caveats of #1, don't delete everything if you somehow do break in, and #2, tell the staff about it if you do...
The network there used the 3Com ethershare system (this was '86 or '87), and we attempted to write a "brute force" password cracker in MS:Basic (basically just shelling to dos a bunch of digits starting at 00000000 and working up)... First time we got the program to run we were sitting around patting ourselves on the back in the way only 14 year old boys can, when lo and behold, about 2 minutes into the program running we found a backdoor. Turns out that you could log on as anyone with any password that started with "82". Talk about dumb luck.
We told the staff. They congradulated us. Called 3Com, who confirmed the backdoor and had to send someone out to patch the servers. They shut down the entire department for two days until that happened. No classes for over 200 students.
What a major pain in the ass for a school. Some of the teachers were really pissed about it, but the people in charge treated us like heroes.
I honestly can't imagine how my life would have been if I'd been stuck in a school like this kid. Of course, the open attitude of the school led to alot of the people I went to school with doing much more serious things and Getting busted (no time to find the real link).
Geesh, I just remembered I got an A on a project in 7th grade because we figured out you could load "*",4 when someone else was printing to steal their work on our Commodore pet network.
I think that kid needs to get a better school.
"It didn't say who it came from. I just deleted it."
Actually, he ckicked the "OK" button underneath:
Remember: umount it before you fsck it.
I said "No Text".
Remember: umount it before you fsck it.
Unfortunately this kind of thing is not uncommon. When I was at school I got in trouble with the apparently computer illiterate headmaster for "hacking". My offense? Reading a Word document that someone had left on the hard drive.
10 X=0
Apple used to have a big (in size, not storage) network/hard-drive called Corvus. You could get all passwords, including admin, doing the RAM dump of a connected Apple ][. Random chars just spill all over the green CRT, similar to The Matrix. Once in, you could wipe the whole Corvus volume. I basically came as close as one possibly can to being expelled (private school) without actually being kicked out. I had to do some fast talking to save my arse. Fortunately, it was like 3 weeks to graduation and the priests running the place were clueless about computers!20 X=X+1
30 GOTO 10
There wasn't any law back then (1985) which could possibly be applicable to my shenanigan. Kids definitely have it tougher today!
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
In my experience, educational institutions have no concept of security. Why should the student be punished for monumental stupidity on the part of the sysadmin?
..' and all was revealed. I never took advantage of this, but I still wonder if the sysadmin ever figured this out or if this remains the case to the present day.
When I was at university, every one taking the same subject had read-write permissions to each other's home directories, the same directories we used to submit our assignments. You only had to type 'cd
I'm currently in Jr. High School and everyone realizes that I'm far ahead of the rest in computers.
My school runs on a network of Mac OSX machines. So therefore, I can get at the terminal from the library and SSH to my home box to do some real work.Most of the reason I'm allowed to do this is because my sysadmin was a former Unix hacker and knows that I mean well.
He'll often allow me into the school network room where the fiber from the other schools in our district comes together and is routed into the 5 T1 lines that our school has. That requires some trust.
He shares the same hate of Windows with me and my friend, he once let my completely nuke a Win2K box and put Gentoo on it.
I guess my school career isn't as bad as some, but English still sucks. Why can't I take Java yet?
I hope someone has taken the time to inform the owner of the images. So that the TEACHER will be appropriately disciplined
When a person causes other computers to behave in an unauthorised manner, it's hacking! If his teacher had a discussion with the class before using the computers about what behavior is not allowed, then he should be punished. If not, the teacher and the school's IS personnel are to blame.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Beverly Sweeney, a computer teacher and campus computer liaison with the district, entered Carl's computer class and quickly figured out where the message originated and who sent it.
According to Carl, Sweeney asked him, "Did you do this?"
"Yes," he replied.
"Do you know that this is serious?" she asked him, according to Carl.
"No," he replied.
Then she asked how he did it, and he showed her.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
That was eeeevil!
That said, leaving it world-writable was moronic. Thank Gods you didn't decide to write out something "less polite".
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
Worse than being "Not a Techie" she runs the school webserver on windows. ...
Connected to www.birdville.k12.tx.us.
...
Escape character is '^]'.
helo
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 13:48:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 87
Less look fast, more go fast.
Or replace NET SEND with a custommade asemmbly reboot-utility.
I've never seen so many pissed hackers and dweebs in one class ever.
But that was back in the Novell days, when all the net-utils were on a remote drive, and last in the PATH-string..
I must admit I enjoyed that :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Dude. Nobody except nerds knows general computer use! Give a (l)user a new application, capable of doing excatly the same as their old one, now with slightly different icons and buttonplacing.
Maybe they even have to access the "Start-menu" to start it, as the installer didn't put a desktop icon saying "Click here to start wordporcessor" in place by default, and you sure as hell didn't.
Result? They'll need a course or tutoring. There is no such thing as users trying to understand anything more than necassary (trying to understand computers makes you a nerd, remember :)
Don't expect people to understand computers, even less networks. Networks are big and scary.
However. It is strange that clueless people are given the power (or the opertunity at all) to pass judgement on matters they don't understand.
But I guess, I would be expecting too much, if I assumed proffesionals were called in to investigate or clarify.
Moral? Keep out of trouble, don't let stupid people observe your actions :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
As found here
A bit over 10 years ago, my HS had a Novell network which was rather ... open. I had figured out how to send messages to other computers, or groups of computers. After sending one to the computers in the school library, a few teachers started going around to network-connected classrooms (there weren't all that many), looking for whomever sent those messages.
My teacher at the time was the former admin of the network, and was sitting right next to me as I sent the message (I don't remember what it was now, but I wasn't particularly rude). He was rather amused by the whole incident, and as the roving pack-o-teachers reached the classroom I was in, he informed them that no one there had sent the message.
It scares me to think of what would happen to me now, if I were in HS and doing this.
Nothing like suppressing a kid's desire to learn computers, eh? If the teachers don't understand it, then it *must* be wrong to use.
From the article:
In this one short letter She proves to me that she is clueless about computers, worthless as a teacher and a danger to children's development. I must be thankful I have no kids in THAT school system, for I would feel compelled to sue the school, and they are probably short on funds as it is.
She openly admits that she has no tolerance for kids thinking for themselves, experimenting, or investigating things for themselves.
If she is still an actual teacher, she should be investigated for child abuse, and lose her job at the very least. No person so narrow minded and mean spirited should be allowed near children. The kids are there to learn, not browbeaten into submission. She want to create an environment of terror for the children, so they are afraid to question authority.
Hmmm, maybe she WAS hired by dubya.
Nothing to say here... move along
Of course, "hacking" is a funny word to describe what he did, and it's not accurate to most of us. But he did something that was over the heads of the faculty and that was probably disruptive to the learning process. One "hey" on everybody's screen is a hiccup, but if everybody did it, you know the rest. He certainly should have been stopped from doing it, and a pattern of such misuse would warrant a suspension.
Quick example... when I was in the Air Force, we got a new HR system (I was in HR, sort of... it was called Personnel). Those of you who were in the Air Force in the 90s, in the Personnel field, will remember PC-III (PC Three), which was an AT&T 3B2 Unix system with dumb terminals. It was sort of a new front-end to Sperry, I guess, because I don't remember the Sperry system going away while I was still in. Wait, I said this was a QUICK example.
When PC-III came out, we could send e-mail. Not only around our base, but also to other bases (we didn't have full internet access at the time). I realized that there was like a worldwide directory of some sort and that I could put in a search string. I put in MSPUM (or whatever the office symbol was for my office -- I was in Manning Control) and it gave me every Manning Control office in the entire Air Force. This was a temptation I could not resist. I sent a message to all of them that said something along the lines of "MSPUM Rocks!" Something really stupid. And I sent it. I thought absolutely nothing of it, because I didn't really understand network communications yet.
A couple of days went by, I think, and the other shoe dropped. I basically got hauled into the Captain's office ("Captain" being a relatively low rank in the Air Force... he was my boss's boss... not that big a deal, really) and I got a lecture. I don't think I ever got a Letter of Counseling, which would have been pretty much the minimim punishment.
What I did was certainly a bigger deal than what he did, since there were at least hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of e-mails that went through the system all over the world. And I was in the military, where we're all supposed to be adults (I was about 22, I guess).
The point is that they did overreact at this guy's school, and their label for what he did is surprising to us. But they don't understand what he did and it was wrong to do it and disruptive to the learning process. So let's not pretend this great kid is being railroaded. He's smart enough to know that he knows more about these things than the teachers, and that they'll likely blow these things out of proportion. Those of us who are smarter (at least in terms of computers) than most of those around us have a little bit of responsibility to not intentionally intimidate those people with our knowledge.
And hey, it could have been worse. I'm surprised they didn't charge him with domestic cyberterrorism or something.
RP
Back in my high school days, the school had Wang computers and a Centronics dot-matrix printer. The data lived on an 8-inch floppy, and the report cards were carbonless pre-printed forms, run through the tractor feed printer. The computers were located in a classroom of sorts, as they were used for educational purposes as well. Four times a year, they had student helpers run the print jobs that became report cards. To save on postage, they would take the report cards and hand them out in home room, for the students to take home. Leaving nothing to chance, they notified the parents of report card distribution via the local newspaper.
I was one of the first people in town to get a personal computer (Radio Shack Color Computer, 16K w/cassette drive). I was definitely one of the first to get a printer. I paid the "student helpers" for some of the leftover paper stock at the end of a print job. After all, recyclingn is the environmentally friendly way of dealing with paper waste. I took the blanks and wrote a program to put names and grades into the blank spots on the pre-printed forms. I started a counterfeit report card service. For a price, my "clients" could give me their real report card with new grades pencilled in and I would manufacture the appropriate document. The clients would go home and claim they left the report card in their locker, as I busily started a print job of my own at home. You might say I took "self evaluation" to new levels. The deal was that clients were ineligible for my "program" if they were failing a course required for graduation. Everyone understood that their official transcripts remained unmodified, but the parents were unlikely to ever see the official records anyway. Some of the clients had cars that were provided by their parents, subject to an appropriate GPA. Thanks to me, those cars stayed on the road.
Someone tried to blackmail me; my response was "Go find someone who believes you." Nothing happened. Some of the kids started an underground newspaper, and I attempted to buy an advertisement. After all, they were distributing to my target market. Sadly, they declined.
There were no signatures on these forms, no copyright notice, nothing in particular that vouched for the accuracy of the document. At the time, I doubt I was in violation of any law. Even the scrap blank forms were technically retrieved from the trash.
If that school system was going to suspend someone for NET SEND, just imagine what they would have done with my report card factory!!!
I kind of understand what's happening here, because if we were busted in DOS (While I was in High School), that would be considered hacking, and we would get suspended, I think that was because DOS was a whole new world to the teachers who thought GUIs were the beginning and end of computers. Maybe it's not really the school saying he hacked their box', maybe they're more just getting him in trouble for the fact he was in DOS.
I read in the Star Telegram of the 8th grader who was suspended for three days for using the "net send" command to broadcast "Hey" to computers on the school network.
While I understand that this behavior was frustrating, disruptive to staff, and not in line with the day's curriculum, I challenge the administration at Richland Middle School to consider this behavior akin to other immature classroom behavior that many adolescents resort to during their developmental years to create an identity for themselves. I hold that young Grammer's antics, as reported in the Star Telegram, could have been more appropriately addressed with the school's policy on appropriate classroom behavior than as "hacking" the school's computers.
No doubt you have received correspondence from computer professionals that have gone to great length to explain the innocuousness of the "net send" command, perhaps explaining how it is the basis of the Instant Messaging protocol that has been well received by corporate America and Europe. It is unfortunate that the school did not have available to Carl the resources with technical expertise to know the difference. Perhaps the class would benefit from a guest speaker such as Carl's father, (who reportedly had educated him on the use of "net send"). Would a class lead instruction on now networks work, lead my Mr. Grimmer and son and under the instruction of Ms. Sweeney, not be a more creative punitive measure? I would like to hear a response to this recommendation.
I have volunteered as a teen educator for four years, taught computer science and algebra, and myself was a young kid who found a place of belonging with the crowd that knew more than the rest when it came to the PC Jr. and Apple II. I tell you that my middle school friends who did years ago the same as Carl has today, have all gone on to bright fields in Computer Science, two of us with masters degrees, a third with a PhD. I myself am Director of Internet Services for a national healthcare company. In the paper's account, you are quoted as having found the "hey" message a non-issue initially. When Carl was questioned, he did not deny that he had sent the message and when asked if he understood that it was a serious matter he indicated that he did not. This to me says that the boy is either not to be trusted, or that there was not a malicious nature to this action.
Please be gentile with the young minds of those already perceived as "nerds" to society. Social injustices perpetrated on the hearts and minds of those barely in their teens may never be overcome. "Making an example" of a student I find a laughable excuse for this action. To what other actions does this example apply? Other "hackers"? I would hope a true hacker would be arrested, not suspended for three days. Other computer students? I would hope that being creative and inquisitive when it comes to the nature of the tool, be it a computer or paint and brushes, would never again meet with this type of punishment.
Best of luck to you and your administration in working through this situation and finding resources to educate, not punish, those who can be easily redirected.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
That 7% is critical to schools today. If they refuse it, it leaves huge gaping chasms in their budgets. Especially given the costs of federal demands for equal access, special education, et al.
But, that 7% comes with hefty strings (more like high-tensile ropes) attached. Including things such as near a week of testing each year (meaning a week with no teaching), and mandating which test is used (thereby in part mandating the curriculum), and accepting the risk of being labeled a failing school and penalized if even one sub-population in your school underperforms by even 1%, with monetary and policy penalties for being a failing school.
The feds have an impact on local school policies completely out of proportion to their 7% funding level.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not using "Communist" as a prejorative.
I just mean that "everything not explicitly permitted is proscribed" (which was the usual rule in most Communist societies)!
In what better way is a North American school environment described:
- Theoretically "Benevolent" tyranny and, occasionally, neglectful/vacated leadership - school boards.
- Closed society prohibited from leaving.
-Cadre's/Teachers devoted to inculcating an unwilling population with a fixed set of limited ideas.
- The only enforcement of which is imprisonment (detention), ostrasism (suspensions), or re-education (councilling).
- All advancement is through the same Cadre's/Teachers.
(but as others point out most advancement is meaningless or extremely remote to the subjects of this artificial-society experiment)
Given the parallels how would one expect the rules, implicit especially, to be any different? What does it matter if the "teachers" understand? Behaviour such as this cannot be tolerated because of the disruption to the "student body".
School is not a democracy. Only a place we warehouse people until we arbitrarily declare that they are sufficiently brainwashed to "enter society" and ostensibly are finally responsible for their actions and thus entitled to "democratic rights".
In parallel: School is a long benign way of educating "children" as to what will happen to them if they do not toe-the-line. Just ask them what they would feel about school if they didn't even get to do the schoolwork (after experiencing several weeks of a truly placeholder substitute teacher - the exact opposite of the guy from School of Rock)!
would have turned off the messenger service.
I'm a technology coordinator at a NYC public high school that gives linux shell acounts to all of our students. I teach a Linux / PHP class where I teach kids all fun unix things like write and talk and wall and such... I then teach kids when it is and isn't appropriate to use it, and I'm really explicit about how if, in the middle of a lesson, I do a 'w' and see people "talking," I'll disable the command or kill their processes. But they are welcome to write me from home if I'm logged in if they need help... and they do use talk to chat with friends, etc...
Yes, the school overreacted. This was not a suspendable offense. This was a 'talking to' offense. Here's what I would have said:
"That was disruptive. Please don't do that. A) It's a disruption, B) We don't want a ton of kids doing this and saying much less appropriate things than 'Hey.' C) Who taught you that? D) Do you like fiddling around with computers and learning lots of nifty tricks? Why not work for the Tech Squad here and learn more?"
a) you teach ethics.
b) you find a student's interest and point it in really good positive ways.
c) you treat the kid as a human being.
d) you use the entire event as a teachable moment.
Now, all that being said, I find the reporters justification for reprinted the entire email pretty weak, and the idea that he used this as a chance to attack teachers -- even though her response was equally weak.
Beverly Sweeney is the computer teacher for Richland Middle School. She has been teaching here since 1989. She taught Texas History before entering the computer world full time.
Mrs. Sweeney graduated from The University of Texas Austin with a BA in Sociology, a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Sociology. She received her first teaching certification from UTA.
Mrs. Sweeney was a Teaching Assistant at the University of Texas Austin before going on to the European Division of the University of Maryland in West Germany and teaching for three years. She has also taught at a private school here in Ft. Worth. She has recently completed her certification in Web Design, Digital Graphics, Desktop Publishing, Video Production, and Multimedia.
Yikes! What's with the Java applet?
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
when I was in school we were taught how to run netware (hey, it was cool at the time!) from a legit CNE. :( What did the teacher do ? He said "no biggie, I can install netware in my sleep" and reinstalled the server politely asking that further hex editing not be done to the server.
During the first week of class, he said "this is the test server, it is separate and will not affect the rest of the network."
Quickly someone asked about "hacking" it, his reply? "bring it on !"
One of my classmates took him up on the offer and edited one of the nlm's from the console in hex (I still have no idea what he did to it, but he had instuctions for how to modify it)
The result ? The server crashed and refused to load anymore
This is the difference between "real" teachers and wannabe promoted librarians...
I sent a message to the teacher, the principal, and the Millan.net contact address. We'll see what happens.l
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Things are really complicated in schools. To do technology right takes an enormous effort, and most schools, students and their parents don't have what it takes. I know, I've been there and left it behind. Given the collapse in the IT sector I expect many schools to just let their installations decay until there are no functional computers in the classroom. They are DEATHLY afraid of their charming students wrecking havok under the nose of the FBI and then having a bunch of politicos and gadfly parents descending on the school looking for someone to lynch (a favorite county Board of Education hobby). Teachers didn't used to have these worries...and are having increasing difficulty justifying the current situation.
So this incident might seem over-the-top, but it is probably just the tip of the ice berg. The techb binge is over, students will not be directed into technical areas because their will be not jobs waiting for them, and school IT is probably doomed as a result.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Your message
To: Rollins, Tommy
Subject: Suspending Carl Grimmer
Sent: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 10:02:18 -0600
was deleted without being read on Thu, 8 Jan 2004 12:46:26 -0600
I did not intend any irony, nor did I notice it either...
Litigation is the worst. The truth is you need to be willing to go that far with a school because they , for whatever reason, often don't realize what they are really doing. I have actually had to say: "Remember, you work for me..." in a conversation with administrators.
One good thing happens when you do have that conversation though. Future issues become a lot easier to resolve!
I truly think this still comes back to parents. --Americans if you will. If more people really thought about school and its effects instead of treating it like a day care, many of these problems would go away.
Totally agree with you on public schools. I too had the same experience. Maybe we were lucky enough to form a worldview that allowed us to take it for what it is and benefit from it. Maybe it was our parents or a couple of good mentors, maybe it's just genetic...
Once when I was in 13 my "friend" thought I was hacking because I was editing the text file that stores the high scores for Minesweeper on his Dad's Macintosh G3 with Virtual PC. Of course, this was the guy who claimed he did programming with M$ PowerPoint...
I love NetHack.
she runs the school webserver on windows
I doubt that she has any clue how to run a server. That server is hosting all of the schools in the region. She probably just made a few web pages with a user-friendly app (and felt like smashing it with a sledge hammer).
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Years ago, I got punished when I did this on my school's IPX network using a netware message command. It certainly was "hacking."
Know why?
Because the machines were locked down so you couldn't get to the console or execute arbitary programs. If you could do a net send, you obviously did something to get around this.
Think about it, people.
holy crap, please mod parent funny!
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
It is in my best interest to look out for my fellow man because it is my individual best interest, not because I am part of a collective called society. It is immoral to force me to do something "for the greater good". I don't have the right to demand money from my neighbor to pay for my kids' education, and government cannot have a right that the people cannot give it. There are very few things that are truly for the "general welfare" rather than the "specific welfare" of groups or individuals, and I think they're pretty well enumerated in A1S8.
Additionally, if your abrogate your responsibility to provide your children's education, your right to educate them as you choose is also diminished. If Susie Jones in Vermont is compelled to furnish some portion of your little Johnny's schooling, shouldn't she feel she ought to have a say in how her money is spent? Do you want her putting her two cents in? I wouldn't. Educating your kids is your business alone, so take responsibility for it. If you want to pool together with others, great, but it should be voluntary. If I want to teach my kids at home, how dare you force me to pay some sort of tax to a school I'm not using.
Just because someone is wealthy does not make them any less deserving of every cent they own or any more obligated to help you out.
I've been a part of the Constititution Party for over three years, and I have yet to meet anyone who wants a theocracy. They would all recognize that for the tyranny it is. Just because someone wants to run government by principles driven home by religious belief does not make them promoters of theocracy. The belief that we are answerable to something higher than human government is one of the strongest reasons for having a limited government in the first place. What check does a non-religious person have from abusing power he is entrusted with?
Believe me, atheists are much safer in a nation run by Christians than Christians in a nation run by atheists. Christians have a higher calling to do good by everyone; with an atheist you have no such guarantee. Even though Christians are fallible, I'd rather take my chances with them than the likes of Stalin or Mao.
Constitutionally Correct
Maybe it's me, but this sounds to be more of a problem with the teachers (and possibly the local school board) than anything Bush has done...
I think the "thanks Bush" comment was referring to "left behind", i.e. the idiotic No Child Left Behind act Bush signed into law in 2002.
here in dade county, My friends and I have doen this many times in school. Sent messages like 'all your bases are belong to us", and the "the priciPAL got pwned" we just got told we are annoying runts. no suspension just a warning . harsh district he lives in. i hacked my middle school website and the teach let is slide.
While my own are still in the house, I will likely keep working with them and the school to make sure things work out ok.
Later on though, I may well consider these things. I am a young parent, so there is time. Tutoring happens once in a while now though. We were the first in the area to have DSL. Sometimens I find myself working with some of my kids friends on homework. Basic stuff, searching, understanding what you found, citing sources, Internet dangers...
I knew somebody who started a small computer club. They basically just got kids together for bi weekly meetings about computers. In the beginning we just talked or played games, after a while we got into serious stuff.
Kind of cool to be 14, sitting around talking about the advantages of the 6809 compared to the 6502 and knowing what we were talking about. Learned a lot from that little club. Maybe that's the way to go.
There are days when I feel pretty burned out given the current state of things. Showing kids simple (to us) things helps bring back a little of the magic. That is if you like kids...
Blogging because I can...
Um. Isn't it up to the Systems Administrator to configure the environment ready for teaching? If they didn't want people to use net send then... um... why allow it?
What a lame school. The kid did nothing wrong other than to experiment, which is part of learning and should be encouraged.
Even if he was 'hacking' they should give hima medal for finding a 'vulnerability'!
I almost got expelled for hosting a business on my school webspace. =]
and so are they...
I think thats exactly what the parent post was complaining about. That the Feds only pay for 7% of Primary education, but they seem to make a lot of demands for that little bit of money. I know I'd support my local school, even if it mean a tax hike, if it meant that we could tell the Feds where to shove it. They have no business telling a local school what to teach. Schools aren't the only area where the Federal government sticks its nose that it really doesnt belong.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
We used to play around with net send, but usually just between people... I do recall one instance of the guy next to me using it to hit on a girl... `net send A26314 you are hot`... but they logged all of that traffic. Also, it was exceedingly difficult to drop into a command prompt... I ended up having to make a file called nothing.bat which contained 4 bytes: cmd. I was accused of hacking once when playing a MUD in a computer lab, however once I explained that it was a game, and not a virus destroying their system (virii don't cast spells at mobs to destroy files) they simply kicked me out of the lab for playing games.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
and copied the reporter too hoping he could get the mail to the family.
Enough of these and we will see another column.
Blogging because I can...
I remember causing trouble like that. We even set the Library computer runing win 3.1 to have the icons run away everytime you moved the mouse over it, then sat back and laughed at everyone trying to use it. In the end we didn't get in trouble, the school got us to fix up there computer system, eventually got a summer job building PC's at the company which supplied all the schools PCs. I guess it just depends how you handle these situations, you can embrace the skill of someone or punish them for it.
how long till we see the outsourcing of technology teachers? I mean, with al the money the feds and state govts throw at "teleconferencing" and "remote learning" type crap... why would it be such a long stretch to having someone from outside the US who actually has some knowledge and skill and maybe even the inclination to work with the kids.
we obviously can't afford to pay statesiders enough to get ones who know what they're doing to teacher, or to administer the networks, or to develop district policy, or develop curriculumn that produces technology literate kids.
Its our own damn fault the jobs are going elsewhere. If we can't be cheaper than other labor, we have to be better... and this is not how to get there.
and yes, I work in public ed. out of the five districts I work in, this state of affairs has been a constant. for example, my current dist: their yearly technology showcase? a) if it has flash in it, it must be good (nevermind that nothing lets you know those damn circles all over the place are buttons. well, some are, but which?) b) the organizers are more worried about making pretty felt banners than anything pertaining to the computers (what do you mean we can't have 14 laptops and projectors in a single outlet?) c) half the presentations are powerpoint with 4 static frames. (while the 8 year old kids who write their own programs/scripts to make "robots" controlled via serial ports are told their presentation is too hard to understand)
(sorry for the AC, but everytime I bitch about the obvious, they threaten to fire me. appearantly its wrong to air our dirty laundry, or to fix it)
the school isnt stopping him from doing it at home
Ever heard of truancy law?
Well, I'm ok if they send only 2 viruses. But if you're talking about virmlcmcmx, that's another story... :-)
--- root@127.0.0.1
Having seen all these comments where /.'ers were punished for messing with school computers, I figure I'll post my experiences of utilising school computer gear (this is going back quite some time, I was around the age of the kid in the article, the machines in my little tale here were running various revisions of Windows 95).
:D), and assisting if they had trouble teaching the other kids how to do things with the computers. This was all of my own volition, and I felt (and was) encouraged to do stuff, partly because I did know more than my teachers.
;)
Way back when I was in school, my teachers didn't even know HOW to use the computers. In fact, I ended up being the one who taught them how to use their equipment correctly - two of them actually firmly believed that shutting down Win95 was done by clicking 'Shut Down', then yanking the power cable out of the wall as fast as they possibly could before the machine displayed the "It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer" (or whatever it was) message or powered off on it's own!
So, being the curious and helpful sort that I was, I decided that helping them out would be a good idea, and I was never stopped or told that I was wrong (although I do recall that if I was told something I'd said was wrong, I'd provide a detailed explanation as to why it wasn't, as well as translating it into non-techie speak on-the-fly, and then all was well). As well as helping to fix the machines when there were problems (I sometimes helped out with other equipment too - they most-kindly let me play with all the tech-related stuff they had/got, including helping to set up and learn brand-new just-out-of-the-box gear
I was also allowed to set up my own laptop and play games/create artwork/write fiction/work on other assignments in class because I finished my own work way ahead of everyone else.
The teachers didn't even mind when I changed desktop artwork, various settings, and the placing of taskbars and such on the school machines, because they knew that not only did I help to maintain the things, but also that I had no ill intent in playing around with even the most advanced stuff I could find on them (I'd also taught them quite early on that there were innocuous things that were absolutely nothing to freak out over, and what those were).
In short: Experimenting and playing around with the school computers helped my education a great deal, not only computing-wise, but because I was allowed to use free time doing stuff on my own machine to learn even more whilst everyone else continued with their standard given tasks. Not just that, but I also picked up valuable skills about good ways of imparting one's knowledge to others, and was able to refine how patient I was with such things, too. For the first time, I hadn't been shunned for being a geek, too.
Having read other comments here, though, I guess I was VERY lucky to be encouraged as I was. Unfortunately, I doubt the teachers I had will ever see me say this, but major kudos to them, they made a positive impact on what (and how) I learned in their classes, and I can only hope that others are lucky enough to be encouraged in similar ways during the course of their education.
I remember when I was in high school we got to do some real playing with the computers (which were 286 units on a BNC network that really only ran 'teach typing' type programs well, and word processors (the non-graphical wordperfect sort) poorly) in the library; Once I discovered the existance of Qbasic I spent every lunch designinig 'cool stuff' to leave it running for the next person who'd come by (of coruse with no hard disk that I could access and no disk drive the data was all lost at the end of the period)- Eventually I had put together a quickly compiled script that I could quickly rebuild that let me and my friends make our own 'choose your own adventure' games.
Though we did get in trouble once for making fun of the teachers in those games; we never got in trouble for using the computers: Because the admin's were compotent and everything was sealed down, save actually screwing with the hard ware there was nothing we could do to those computers that a quick press of the reset button woulden't fix.
A few weeks ago, I was doing some work for my dad (who is a teacher at a school) to assist them with some problems on a windows 2000 computer connecting to a windows NT network (the windows 2000 boxes refused to use the roaming profiles of the student's- still do actually; if someone knows the problem I'm talking about tell me!), one of the peices of software on those computers is a littel program called 'deep freeze', basically it images the hard disk after the admin has set it up properly, and that image is restored every time the computer is restarted (which slows down restart a bit, but not much, it only looks for changed bits, and all student information is on the roaming profile- except on those damned 2000 machines!) so the students can do whatever the hell they want to those computers, it dosen't matter- if the machine is behaving badly, it's just a restart from going back to 'default' (of course the image for that is updated with security updates regularly too)
Now my dad dosen't know a hell of a lot about computers- but I know he woulden't throw a fit if someone in his class did something cute like send 'hey' to everyone in the class, heck he might even ask how it's done so that he can use it when a kid is asleap at the monitor (he teaches typing and internet skills; not computers BTW).
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
This just means that the teachers and principal of the school are stupid, that's all. How the heck can netsending within the school be hacking? lol that's dumb.
"Remember, you were a n00b once." - Me!
I was encountered with a similiar situation. My response, with the consent of my parents was suspend me and charge me in a court of law and prove it there, or stfu before I decide I have suffered and have my parents sue you.
I ended up transferring out of that school district, but it stopped the shit. The bottom line is don't stand for that crap. That's what it is crap. They are fearful and have nothing to go on other than ignorance and popular culture. I have never found ignorance and popular culture to yield much more than crap when combined.
i was given an assignment to do as homework, teacher gave out disks to take home. came back and unknowingly gave the school's computer a virus(jolly roger??). i was suspended for school for three days but before i let the school i was asked to empty my pockets.i told them not unless my parents were involved(well within my rights)...i was suspended for a total of ten days
The message is not "netsend is hacking" it's "don't demonstrate our ignorance in front of students causing further loss of control".
So how does getting suspended ostensibly because "net send is hacking" help a kid to figure out that he should respect the intelligence of his teachers???
After numerous punishments, the kid will more likely learn to "respect the stupidity" of his teacher by avoiding the institution of school entirely.
What you said above (that I quoted) was honest and sincere. But I've never heard any teacher say this to a student! Most teachers would prefer to believe they actually are smarter than their students in all matters.
C'mon teachers! You ought to know that "what goes around comes around." If you can't respect your students enough to be honest with them, you're certainly not going to get any respect in return!
No actual disrespect was intended by this kid. Rather, the school responded with its own message of ignorance and disrespect.
One hopes that they will "make an example" of her.
The only way of stopping bad behaviour, and by allowing the bright, curious kids to remain interested, is to use a decent OS which provides adequate security and control over the facilities available, so that the morons can't do anything bad. The bright kids, or maybe all of them, will get their very own virtual OS to play in, where they can't damage anything. Give them a good sandbox, with lots of toys in it to play with.... Young kids are not able to discern the difference between playing and hacking, and it is not fair to expect it of them. But, they will learn far more if they are allowed some experimentation on their own than if they have to follow the teacher all the time.
User Mode Linux is one way of achieving this, another, more expensive, involves the use of multiple OS running on something like an IBM mainframe, which might be viable if shared between a group of schools. There are other methods also, but AFAIK none involve products of the Convicted Monopolist, who simply have not got the technology, and certainly not the security.
In view of the inevitable shortage of funds in education, a worldwide problem, the best way forward would be to use a Linux setup, with OpenOfice,org and various other nice packages. Most of the ancient DOS software used in education would still run, under emulation. The trick would be configuring the server so that the teacher could turn things like mail and instant messaging on and off easily, so that necessary things like sending messages to the whole class could be explicitly allowed when required as part of the curriculum, and blocked, because of nuisance value, at other times.
With *nix, the problem of keeping other people's work areas secure is nil, if the system is set up properly. It might be better to use *BSD rather than Linux, because the "wheel" group concept is useful, but that is mere detail. If the huge cost of Monopoly software is avoided when updates are due, education must benefit. Remembering that Win 98 support ends in a few days, many schools will be about to face huge costs, they should spend the money mainly on new hardware at Wal-Mart or wherever it is cheapest, and get some decent, free software.
This kid has been unfairly punished as a result of incompetence by his supposed educators. He will not have learned anything useful from this.
Does anyone remember who wanted to eliminate the federal Dept. of Education? Ronald Reagan. Why? Because the DoE comes up with dumb ass policies that cost thousands of dollars while Congress never approves enough money to fund said policies. The Republicans want to give control BACK to the local communities and eliminate these un{der}-funded federal education mandates.
But clearly it's Bush's fault since some people can't handle war and that's what we're in. But let's sit back and watch everyone and their mom start a war over in the Middle East so Israel has no other choice but to launch a nuke. And THEN we'll all be very very happy.... {sarcasm gushes from the screen}
Turns out he hit an * (or whatever the wildcard was) and sent it to the whole domain. The way I heard it, teachers saw this and flipped out. The lunchlady turned on her computer (don't know why a lunchlady had a computer, though) and called tech support thinking she had a virus.
I think the poor guy was suspended for at least one day, too. Sucks to be him.
check this out:
http://nightmarecandles.com/HEY!.html
Greetings and Salutations, SlashDotters!
Carl, the 8th grader in question, is my son. I am the guilty father that taught my kid the nasty hacking skills of reading HELP at a command prompt in Windows. Anyway, I helped Carl write the full story for everything that happened. We posted it on our website, and we'll keep it updated with new links and any other news that comes up because of it.
Just so you know, we understand that this is not news because Carl did something cool. It's really just because the school did something stupid. My son was simply experimenting with DOS commands in class. But for the whole story, click on the command that Carl should never have typed:
NET SEND * HEY!
That explains the lag ;)
Is anyone else sort of freaked out by the fact that all these (male) administrators went to Texas Womens University? What's up with that?
This kid has been unfairly punished as a result of incompetence by his supposed educators. He will not have learned anything useful from this.
Actually I think he learned quite a bit about how paranoid and insane the real world is.
It should give him a better place to stand when dealing with people like this in the future.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
that reminds me of getting yelled at for pressing the degauss button on a monitor in high school...
yeah, 7th grade i used to enjoy writing that exact program, and starting it on all the computers one by one in our library. i also used to throw fireworks in kids backyards while they were watching tv. i think being young you are just a punk, whether on computers or otherwise. :-)
Would you expect any less from Texas? Come on!!!
for using a similar windows based net sending application when I accidentally sent a message that was meant for one person, to every single machine in the school. 500 desktops at least. Whoops.
I couldn't think of a sig.
Just look at her CompLit/TechApp webpage.
I was going to say something like "Oh great, now a hundred freaking slashdotters will want to modify her home page to say 'Beverly Sweeney is the computer teacher for Richland Middle School. How a moron like this got to be teaching a computer class is beyond us because she doesn't know a thing about computers beyond using MS Applications. She prohibits any actions that might lead to real learning and is a prime example of what is wrong with out educational system.'"
But then you posted this on Wednesday so if someone were going to do that they would have done it by now. And besides, it is on an MS server and probably written in Frontpage. Who would want to even touch that.
I think that teachers should be required to learn and demonstrait use of vi before they should be allowed to teach a class. Then again, I think people should be required to learn vi before they get on the internet. Do emacs people have similar feelings?
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
I'm not the only one! My High School "Computer Science" class was nothing more than word processing as well... and get this: IT WAS ON TYPEWRITERS! I guess I couldn't expect much in rural western Kentucky, but typewriters? Come on! This was only a few years ago too... I am in the class of 2k. Needless to say, moving to Denver to finish high school was a good decision...
Well, there are tons of high schools where using computers for what they view as unauthorized use could cause a suspension. I'd likely be suspended if they uncovered that I had done something similar. The problem is really the stupid 8th grader who got caught in the first place.
The eloquence was unfortunately spoiled by the lack of spell checking.
I had my account suspended last year on the school computers for doing exactly the same thing. I think the admin had a napoleon complex. Then my printer at home broke the day before I had to hand in an important piece of physics coursework. Life? Don't talk to me about life.
i did the same thing tinkering in cisco class one day and was nearly suspended. i would have been, too, but i had special priviledges due to my intelligence and the fact that i scared the faculty. dont want anyone unloading some lead salads in the place, do they? pansy ass worry-worts.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
PHONE.EXE?? You were ABUSING VMS then. Probably tried to login as DECNET too, Damm hackers. Be sure to try account/password QSRV/QSRV and QSRVBAS/QSRVBAS on AS/400 systems. If you can logon as QSRV then use command STRSST to access the System Service Tools. Before you do that use the SNDBRKMSG[PF4] command first to tell everybody 'Hey!' then enter SST. Be sure to overwrite Machine Context and library object QSYS/QSYS with 'Hey!'.
He told his friends to RTFM, from where I come this is a sign of greatness!