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Why Are Students Liable for School Insecurity?
yamamushi asks: "Within the past few weeks, students across Boerne ISD were being called into offices to discuss the use of proxies to circumvent the schools websense system. The problem is that some of these students are being suspended from school for up to 3 months at a time. Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity? Why are they punishing so many students for something that should be handled from the district's end? I know at the time I was going to school there, I was punished for using a Linux LiveCD to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable booting from CD-ROMs. They refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated." While security breaches by students are something to take seriously, should school administrations continue with their knee-jerk mentality to something like this, especially at the times when its obvious that no malicious intent was involved?
Well, clearly they were smarter than whoever set the system up in the first place.
And it's a stupid policy; completely arbitrary, and in no way worthy of a THREE MONTH suspension...that's so beyond the pale there aren't even words. What do they get for fighting at that school? Death penalty? Isn't the point to provide kids with more information? I've dealt with enough crappy filter software to know it catches as many good sites as bad ones.
If you provide internet access, you have to accept that people are going to use it for evil as well as good. Either you need to accept that you're not going to be able to stop a percentage of people, or you need to not provide access.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Why not? What if I was in China, and I was bypassing the filters there? Would you be the Yahoo exec turning my name over to the Chinese government so they could throw my ass in jail for wanting to taste the wider world outside the little mental happy place my government has set up for me?
It's exactly the same thing, and you'll say, "But it's for their own good!" and I'll say, "Who? My kids, or the Chinese?"
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Are you for real?
This is about school admins being lazy and wanting to make examples out of kids for doing something which is more or less innocent on the basis of them being "hackers."
The punishment does not at all fit the crime here.
+++ATH0
You had me on your side until you stated that you trashed the network in retribution.
Umm... how did you get that conclusion out of "My classmates... essentially trashed the network until the end of the year in retribution"?
The GP dropped out and was not there to do anything to the network. His classmates were the ones that trashed it, proving the GP's point about the security problems he found.
I speak as a school sysadmin. I am not lazy, I am overwhelmed. The same goes for my district admins. I cannot possibly close every last security hole in the over 600 computers I am ultimately responsible for. The task is too large. Either way, the rules were written and most likely(as is the case in the school where I work) students signed off on a form or booklet that said they would agree to abide by these rules. These rules include appropriate network use. The fact that a security hole is not patched, does not negate the signed agreement by said student(s) who signed an agreement that they would not do it and said agreement lists punishments (at least at my school) that will be meted out in response to breaking of said rules. Therefore the fact that a security hole is there does not give a student the right to breach it or use it to their own advantage.
At my school, we encourage students to report such breaches to us that they discover (and they are guaranteed not to get in trouble for the discovery) so we can improve our security. We like to try and keep the kids who are good at this stuff on our side in this way but if any student should use such a breach to their advantage in the way this article describes and they get caught, there will be consequences...not 1 month suspensions generally but still a message needs to be sent.
As an earlier poster in this thread said, part of being in school is teaching students how to respect boundaries. Same poster also said correctly that similar actions as an adult lead to far more serious consequences such as loss of job or worse.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
You have a very valid point, but I have one caveat:
Heres the story:
1) Day 1: Ask Teacher To Unblock Site
2) Day 3: Teacher Eventually Asks Admin to Check it Out
3) Day 5: Project is Due
3) Day 6: Admin has to verify this is OK with school board
4) Day 15: School Board Meets
5) Day 30: Admin gets the go-ahead
See the Problem?
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