Felony Charges For H.S. Hacking

jayrtfm writes "Last year the Kurtztown Area High School approved a program which gave every student an iBook. Now 13 students face felony charges for violating the district's usage policy." From the article: "Shrawder said the secret password '50Trexler,' was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops, he said. The more computer-savvy students began to disable the administrations' ability to spy on the students' computer use. For others, it became a game, trying to outsmart the administration and compete with fellow students who held the secret, Shrawder said."

Comments

Re:Lets get the facts straight

[L0phtpDK]

The BCIU is clueless, and security is their lowest priority.

Clearly you are exactly right on this point... From the FAQ:

What about computer viruses?
A virus that is written for the Windows Operating System (Win98, 2000, XP) cannot infect the Macintosh Operating system.

Apparently they are relying on the fact of the lack of (not the 'inability to create') viruses for the Mac OS as their safe guard against this problem...

Besides, going off assumptions here, having only a single password to protect the End User from "themselves" is pretty inadequate.

I say instead of suing the students... sue the administrators (I guess Apple in this case) for not creating a reliable network. That would be a more valid case (breach of contract / negligence).

Re:Lets get the facts straight

[glitch0]

Funny (off topic) story here -

At my old high school, there were about 5 uber-geeks (myself included) that always knew the root password for one reason or another (cracked, admin trusted one person, etc). Anyway, we were all learning to program and one of the more savvy programmers wrote a program to calculate PI and store the results to the HD. Once he finally got it working he wanted to try to run it on the server as a benchmark. Well, we were all new to programming and it turned out that the program used an infinite loop and wrote directly to the HD. Yes, that's right, it accessed the HD directly, on the hardware level. Well, sure enough, he left it running for the weekend, and we came back to see that it had overwritten a large number of user storage space!

Luckily, we went to a school who was pretty cool about it. We had an awesome admin who understood that it was all part of a learning process and the only result of it was that all 5 of us were required to stay after school for the next week helping him fix everything.

Ironically, another kid did the same thing about 3 years later but although he was smart enough not to have the program write the output of the PI calculation to the HD, he wrote a wonderful algorithm that saved RAM to the HD when the computer ran out of RAM (similar to a page file aka virtual memory) which ended up overwriting the main server's operating system requiring a full reformat.