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.

Comments

FYI: School's Homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:FYI: School's Homepage

[woobieman29]

Perhaps some of you taxpayers in this area would like to share your views on Ms. Sweeneys expressed opinions? This page lists all email addresses at the school. Play nice!

Re:FYI: School's Homepage

[jeffkjo1]

Somewhat amazingly, this page has been updated today... to remove the picture of Yosemite Sam. Google Cache here: Cache

Re:Article short on details

[Cy Guy]

The article doesn't state whether use of the "net send" command is permitted or not.

Did you read the same article linked from the story?

Carl did not send out a dirty word. Carl received no warning. No written policy prohibits what he did.

In case gets slashdotted, here is the full text regarding the incident:

Hey! Where's the problem?
Dave Lieber IN MY OPINION
Star-Telegram

Hey!

On its face, that expression is neither offensive nor disturbing. "Hey!" is an informal way to say hello. It indicates kindness, simple courtesy and an economy of words.

But a 13-year-old boy at Richland Middle School in Richland Hills was suspended for three days in December because he sent that simple message to every computer in the school using an archaic form of instant messaging. The software was created years ago in the old disk operating system used in earlier versions of personal computers.

Carl Grimmer, 13, was suspended last month for sending a one-word message to every computer at Richland Middle School.

Carl Grimmer's father taught him how to send messages through network computers as part of a tutorial on how DOS worked. DOS, you might recall, preceded Windows as the dominant operating system during the 1980s and early 1990s.

"It was neat," Carl Grimmer told me the other day. "I had never seen it before."

I guess it's only natural that the next day, Carl went to school and in his eighth-grade computer class showed a friend how the messaging system worked. That's what learning and experimenting is all about. I think that's what school is about.

The result of his trick was that every computer in the school, approximately 80 of them, received his message of "Hey!"

At first, Principal Tommy Rollins didn't think much of it. "I saw it," he said. "It didn't say who it came from. I just deleted it."

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.

The matter worked its way up to the principal, who eventually suspended Carl for three days.

Rollins told me that students had been using campus computers in unacceptable ways, and he hoped to make an example of Carl. The Birdville school district does not have a written policy on what to do in this kind of situation, so the decision rested with the principal.

"You have to use your own judgment," he told me.

I respect Rollins as a kind and sensitive educator, but in this particular case, he may have erred. A three-day suspension for this "crime" seems excessive.

Carl did not send out a dirty word. Carl received no warning. No written policy prohibits what he did. Missing three days of school for something so minor is overkill.

There is some more about the school's response to press coverage, but I'll let you get that directly from the link.

Angstful memories of faculty ignorance.

[n1k0]

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

Re:Well...

[Wingit]

This network administrator (me) did disable the command line and the run button, but still had this happen at our public library. Since M$ Word seems to require access to the desktop, the clever teen wrote a one line batch file in Word, and saved it as text with a CMD extention onto the desktop. If it becomes an epidemic, I may have to go one more step and delete net.exe or at least rename it on public terminals. Still, I think the teen was pleased when I walked up to him an congratulated him for his ingenuity. I just asked him not to do it again and not to tell his friends. I have not had another incident since.

Personal experience

[nlaporte]

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.

Re:Sad to see a teacher struggle in the wrong subj

[Nucleon500]

Interestingly, that image comes from here and she's violating their policy.

Re:My school district had a similar policy...

[ChristTrekker]

We do have something for it to do. Several things in fact. Education is not one of them.

Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;

To establish post offices and post roads;

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;--And

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

If it's not listed here explicitly, the federal government has no business doing it. Remember, the Founders had just fought a war against a tyrant who controlled too much of their lives. This document, the Constitution, strictly limited government (not the people) as to what powers it had. The powers listed here are only those absolutely necessary to have at the national level to make the States appear, in fact, a single nation. A silly nation it would be that had only part of it going to war, or one that used different money in different places, or had different customs and procedures when persons and goods crossed various borders. But education is not a "one-size-fits-all" situation. And as if that wasn't clear enough...

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Raising children, including education, is the right of parents. If anything requires a bottom-up solution rather than a top-down one, it's education.

Re:Dead on. (PotatoHead not logged in...)

[Anonymous Coward]

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...