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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?
Why bother improving security when you can just pass a law enabling you to arrest or expel anybody who tries anything funny?
After all, we all know that the most dangerous elements of our society are stopped by LAWS, right?
You come into my house, I say "don't fuck with the computer."
You fuck with the computer, I kick you out.
If anything, a public resource should be more tightly controlled.
Should they fix their security issues? Yes.
Should they kick out people who exploit the fact that they don't? Hell yes.
Malicious or no, you should not be touching the school computers anymore.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Check what the kids and their parents agreed to before complaining. Most I've seen explicitly state that using external proxies is against the rules.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It is malicious intent. If you are using the internet in an environment were you're blocked from visiting certain sites, then they don't want you visiting them on their network.
If you turn around and sneak through their system and do it anyway, that seems pretty bad faith to me.
If they locked up the computer lab after hours and because you are smart/skilled enough to get in anyway because you can pick locks, you're still doing something that you're not supposed to be doing.
To paraphrase Dragnet: "if you don't like the law you can try to get that law changed that doesn't give you the right to break it." The school network isn't "law", no, but they can still cause trouble for you if you go against it.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Just because the door is unlocked does not necessarily mean it's not breaking and entering. The students know the rules. If they choose to break them, they should suffer the consequences. The technological measures that may or may not be in place are irrelevent.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
"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?
No.The school apparently has a policy in place to forbid students from going to various sites. They use appropriate tools (like websense) to enforce that policy. Simply because there are ways around the tools, doesn't mean its okay to do so. There code of conduct talks about an agreement signed by the students. If they violate this agreement they should be punished.
This isn't really any different from other "crimes" (or violations of school policy). The school's rule is simply that you are not allowed to do certain things on the computers. Some of these things are restricted by their security systems, others are not. Just because you *can* do it, doesn't mean it's within the rules they've established. The students are responsible for their behavior -- it's not the responsibility of the admins to make it impossible for the rules to be violated.
I don't see any problem with punishing students for misuse of its resources, as long as they were given fair warning of those rules (and as long as those rules are consistent with the school's educational mission). A teacher can't prevent students from cheating on exams, but they'll still be punished when they're caught breaking that rule. Why should this be treated differently?
A thief who robs a house doesn't get any lesser a sentence if the front door was unlocked versus locked and bolted. The fact it's ridiculously easy there to beat their puny security shouldn't make any ultimate difference.
The school has rules. You break the rules, they toss you out.
Adding a computer into the mix doesn't change that equation.
There is no law that says "Oh, the rule that you broke involved the Internet! Well, that's an entirely different case!"
Three Squirrels
I am a tech director for a k12 public school district. Just last week we had to suspend 5 kids (actually bright kids) for using proxies among other things (and moreover being stupid about it). One of the problems was that a student found a website (that I have actually used before) that lets you boot to a floppy and recover a windows password from a computer. That student then had admin access to all of our 420 laptops. As the only tech there (and part time at that) it is much easier to suspend them than to re-image all 420 laptops, password protect the bios and prevent booting from anything but hd! I felt bad nabbing them, but they were dumb enough to leave their script kiddie programs on their network drives... a simple search for *.exe screwed them all. As far as proxies, they are coming out with them faster than I can (or care to) block them. As my case is not different from many other school districts facing harsh budget cuts out there, I don't forsee security in schools getting better any time soon mostly because most of us cracking down used to be those little nerds wreaking havoc on our school's sysadmins.
Why are students punished for stealing school supplies? Surely it's the school's fault for not keeping everything locked up well enough?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Why were those students even able to use proxies? All traffic should be going through a commercial-grade router. A few rules and all TCP 80/443 traffic will be going to the designated filtering system and outbound connects on any other ports will be getting only an "administratively prohibited" ICMP error. Once that's done it doesn't matter what the students do on the client side.
Yes, I know the downsides, but if you want a secure filtering system you can't trust the client end to behave. If you could, you wouldn't need a filtering system.
I'd say that I'm sorry that the kids are being punished, but I'm not. This isn't about the school district doing anything inappropriate. It's about kids doing something that they knew was inappropriate and being punished appropriately. I fail to see why anyone is upset by this. Part of the function of education is to teach children how to behave and what their boundaries are.
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore? Will they ignore the rules about bringing weapons to school? Will they ignore the rules about bringing drugs to school? Will they chose to ignore the rules about cheating on tests?
I've seen people walked off jobs for less. If there's a proxy, it's there for a reason. If the rules say that you have to use the proxy or you can't see that site, surf it from home. I would much rather see them punished now, while the only thing they get dinged for is some time out of school, extra curricular activities, etc. instead of waiting until they're grown-ups with a car payment, a mortgage, some credit cards, and a couple of kids who get fired for doing the same thing at work.
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
I agree that the 3 month suspension punishment was over the top. But to argue (as you did earlier) that kids should be encouraged for this creative behavior, I vehemently disagree. If they did not get a warning (including a school-wide warning, as long as it was focused on the proxy issue and not generic), then I think that a warning would have been the appropriate response. If they did get a warning, then a 1-day in-school suspension (or detention) would probably have been a reasonable response.
To argue for no response whatsoever, however, seems irresponsible.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Here's an example. Little Johnny accesses port. Susie, sitting behind him, sees it and tells her parents. Parents call the school/press asking why Susie was able to see pornography at school. Susie's parents sue the school for not protecting the students from pornography. Think it won't happen? It has many times. Johnny is certainly hurting more than himself.
Additionally, schools must take reasonable measures to block student access to inappropriate materials in order to receive the Federal E-Rate funding that pays for most of districts Internet access. Johnny potentially jeopardizes that funding and the entire Districts Internet access.
Omeganon
I was shocked reading the content of the slashdot posting! 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. Read that again. This person is blaming the administration for allowing him to do something that was against the rules. Perhaps he would like to be chained to his desk so that he cannot get up, move about, disturb the class, and get in trouble with the teacher?
It's so absolutely outrageous that I don't know where to begin discussing how terrible it is. He's asking for a nanny state (most Slashdotters seem to think that a nanny state is bad). He's asking for stronger censorship on the part of the school (blocking access to proxies). He's asking for the admins to change the computer security settings so that he isn't capable of doing something that he knows will get him into trouble. It's truly insane, and honestly, it sounds like someone managed to troll Slashdot into fighting for these absurd things by appealing to the "OMG, highschool kids have no rights!" crowd.
The thing is, In real life, the employer makes rules, if you don't follow them, you can lose your job. If something gets damaged in the process, you can have to pay for it. It doesn't matter how stupid the sys admin or the rule is or how lazy for that matter, it is their property you are using. And If I had to constantly check and change stuff to make sure your not going somewhere your not supposed to be on the company network, Guess what, you don't have access anymore and you will be lucky to have a job. You are costing the company money they shouldn't have to pay. Plain and simple.
Employers and schools aren't like your parents were they have an obligation to keep you around. If you want to violate the rules and treat someone like shit, stay home and live off your parents. Cause you will get fired or suspended anywhere else. And in some cases, you could be out some money with lots of bad credit following you around.
I don't think anyone who isn't related to the owners of a business or fucking one of the owners can seriously say they have some right to poke around where the company says they don't (this include bypassing a proxy or Internet restrictions). And IF you seriously think your too important to get fired, Keep it up, they just haven't found your replacement yet. But as soon as you start costing them money, you can bet they will look even harder.
Sounds good if the company never requires me to do a job that can only be reasonably completed by bypassing their network restrictions. Say, I need to connect to an outside database with my special debugging client to find out why the customer's application is not working. The logical way to do it is to tunnel through an HTTPs proxy, but this is presumably against company's policy - they meant to block all traffic besides web browsing. Say, I call you at 2am on Sunday and ask you to reconfigure the network for me, since the customer is getting impatient. Given that it takes you great trouble and expense to even "visit a workstation in person", I doubt that you would solve the problem before the customer gets pissed and drops the contract. In this case, give me a good reason why YOU shouldn't be promptly fired and the $10M value of the contract charged against your paycheck?
I never saw a company that accepts its own security restrictions as a valid excuse for not doing the assigned work.
Well, Chances are you won't be hired at this company. All the software they use is purchased and not developed on site.
But in the case you are working there and need something like that, All you have to do is inform someone you will need the access with a decent reason for it, and you will have it. It isn't very hard, All you have to do it give someone VPN access to the part of the network that isn't restricted and off you go. But remember one thing, Everything you do will be monitored and logged so visiting smut sites or doing your on line banking from work isn't a good idea. Surfing Slashdot for hours on end and then billing the time isn't a good idea either.
The costs to administrate the network and everything involved has been cut by two thirds after restricting were people can go and such. We had a few people quit in protest but only one actually left and word is he had another job waiting before throwing a fit. Virus problems have been almost nonexistent, Slowdowns and downtime from Spyware and stuff have almost been completely eliminated. Mysteriously, Problems with computer crashing and general repairs have been almost completely eliminated. Employees are more productive and they are making more money (through a combination of profit sharing and small raises). It is something else when you look at a controlled network like this.
Bull! Before someone claims that schools should block 100% of the "bad sites" out there and that not doing so gives students the right to use them, try this:
Now ask yourself... how much time did you just spend doing nothing but blocking proxy sites? Do you think it would be easier/harder if you had 1200 kids who might or might not be trying to find proxy sites instead of 6? Would you be willing to spend that much time every day? (New proxies appear constantly you know.)
And in the end is it which important? That you stop every kid who wants to break the rules and an agreement *that they signed*? Or that your firewall is set up right, the servers work, all 600-1000 PCs are up and running, Windows is patched, networking is Ok, Internet access is working, the servers hard drives aren't filling up, etc.?
I could probably do a fair job of blocking almost every proxy out there if only I spent 1/2 of my day every day working at it. But why? When did "You didn't stop me" become the same as "I'm allowed to"?
What if life was like that? Someone stole your bike? Sorry, we can't punish them. You may have had a lock and chain on it, but the chain wasn't resistant to acetylene torches. You didn't take full precautions.
Someone broke into your house and stole your computer? Yeah, we caught them but had to let them go. Why? They said that your doors and windows were locked but that they smashed your bedroom window with a rock. A rock they found in your yard. You should have either used break-proof glass or removed every rock from the yard. Your security was too flawed so we had to let them go and keep the PC too.
If Linux or mac could run the programs that need run, they would be there too. And no, I didn't decide to babysit, I don't make the rules. I just follow and implement them.
Maybe some day when your network is something more then your mom's cable connection, you will understand that people take jobs at places and have bosses. And these places with bosses have certain requirements and you cannot just change the stuff on your own.
Viruses infest systems because of security holes. Students do not access proxies because of security holes, students access proxies because of information censorship which they disapprove of. The proxies are external information portals, and are not under your control. They simply route information from one place to another, providing a different means of accessing information. Therefore an attempt to block access to proxies is NOT a security issue and is ONLY a censorship issue.
We need to be more judicious in the language we use to discuss these issues so that it is more clear what we're really talking about.
In relation to this article, students should not be punished as if they committed a security violation, because they did not. They at worst violated a censorship policy by viewing information that violates school policy.
Should the school system have harmed my education to stop me doing those things?
Now pretend my education didn't matter, and all that matters is that the school maintains order and security. Even by those standarsd, it is counterproductive to mete out disproportionate punishments. Teachers and school officials shouldn't try to pretend that they have more control than they do. Whether they like it or not, they are dependent on the judgment and good will of the students. Those are the fundamental elements that ensure the security of the school. Teachers and school officials are responsible, as leaders and educators, for fostering those elements.
Making punishment proportional to the real damage or danger incurred helps maintain trust and good will. It lets the kids know that the teachers aren't just arbitrary fascists, and it funnels them towards mostly harmless mischief. There were a handful of teachers at my school who could issue serious rules that we would obey even if we didn't agree with them. Those were the teachers who weren't really threatened by our harmless mischief. We knew they would punish us if they caught us, but we also knew they were concerned for our well-being, our education, and the well-being of the school, not their own authority. Mostly they just rolled their eyes and expressed mock exasperation when they found out about one of our pranks but couldn't pin it on us. When those teachers spoke seriously, we listened and obeyed, even if we felt they were being harsh or unreasonable. They had real authority over us, which we freely granted. (We also liked those teachers enough that we never risked getting them in trouble, unless they were in on it.)
The teachers who wanted to control us by establishing authority, who felt
That's a trick question. Of course they should secure their computers. Failing to do so, however, does not diminish his culpability. I don't think that failing to put a BIOS password on the computers constitutes an creating an attractive nuisance.
It's very simple. The only thing the article accuses them of doing (and by article I am using it in the same context that you yourself did) is the use of proxies. As the use of proxies is sufficient to bypass most filters (which websense is), and as the use of proxies often requires nothing more than a functioning web browser, there is nothing about using a proxy which implies any security violation.
And I, despite feeling alone in the belief, still support the principle of presuming innocence in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
I know it's in vogue to claim that schools just want to control kids and stick them in little boxes. I'll admit that sometimes colossally bad decisions are made at a school or some seemingly arbitrary new school rule is added. But the truth is that there may be more behind what is done than you realize. Still, it's a fact that school and district admins are just people and sometimes people make mistakes even with the best intentions.
To be perfectly honest I would love to do away with filtering. I have things to deal with besides whether Johnny has the ability to see a nipple on images.google.com or if Cindy is sending emails to her new Lesbian girlfriend she met online who lives in another state. There are four things that stop me from yanking the filters and giving everyone unrestricted access:
Since I've been asked this offline I'll assume someone is going to ask here... "What's wrong with #4? Their parent's taxes pay for the computers, Internet access and even your salary!"
True, but so do the parents of all of the kids who can't get time on a computer to work on actual homework. I bet the parents of the kid chatting away every one of his study periods expects that their tax money is going to educate their children... not to let them search for Britney Spears look-alikes naked.
Nobody is shutting down web sites. Nobody is telling you that you can't watch videos of some chick getting it on with a horse. Nobody is censoring anything. You are free to view/read what you want online in your own home with your own computer using Internet access that you or your parents pay for. We're just saying, "No, not here, not with things funded by the public for the purpose of education." Schools aren't (and shouldn't be) your private ISP.
A great altruistic ideal and goal. But the truth is that a fair amount of time is spent educating students in our district about not only what they should and shouldn't do online but why. Things are taught like how it might affect their future career if they view porn at work, etc.. I believe that with a large percentage of students that is enough and they won't intentionally go to sites they shouldn't.
But if you take 1200 kids in one school and just say "shame on you. It's naughty for you to do that and here is why..." then there will still be enough wasting computer time to keep those who want to learn and do their homework off of the PCs.