Slashdot Mirror
AU Government To Build "Unhackable" Netbooks
bennyboy64 writes "In what may be one of the largest roll-outs yet of Microsoft's new Windows 7 Operating System, Australia's Federal Government decided to give 240,000 Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbooks to Year 9-12 students. Officials are calling them 'unhackable.' iTnews reports that the laptops come armed with an enterprise version of the Windows 7 OS, Microsoft Office, the Adobe CS4 creative suite, Apple iTunes, and content geared specifically to students. New South Wales Department of Education CIO Stephen Wilson said that schools were 'the most hostile environment you can roll computers into.' While the netbooks are loaded with many hundreds of dollars worth of software, 2GB of RAM, and a 6-hour battery, the cost to the NSW Department of Education is under $435 (US) a unit. Wilson praised Windows' new OS: 'There was no way we could do any of this on XP,' he said. 'Windows 7 nailed it for us.' At the physical layer, each netbook is password-protected and embedded with tracking software that is embedded at the BIOS level of the machine. If a netbook were to be stolen or sold, the Department of Education is able to remotely disable the device over the network. Each netbook is also fitted with a passive RFID chip which will enable the netbooks to be identified 'even if they were dropped in a bathtub.' The Department of Education also uses the AppLocker functionality within Windows 7 to dictate which applications can be installed."
Not really. It only further secured that dubious distinction. Right now, Obama and the (D)s are making GWB look like a freaking genius, which if you asked me 12 months ago I would have said "inconceivable!".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Hackable or unhackable might end up being the least of their concerns. Did they stop to think about the kind of radiation exposure of filling a classroom with wireless notebooks. The NSW Department of Education has launched into a brave new world of medical experimentation, in four years time we all will be able to tell if exposing children to the concentrated sustained levels of wireless radiation, from say 30 netbooks per class say 1.5m apart, times that by the number of classrooms, for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 40 odd weeks per year, now add mobile phones to that and they are turning every high school into extreme radiation hot spots.
I really, really, don't think those idiots stopped to think about the kind of risk they are taking with future generations, you can imagine the kind of satire that will arise from that, the glow in the dark cancer time bomb generation. I would have to say that there is no way I would have taken that medical risk with children, infra red networks inside the classroom with detectors in the four corners of the class room and disabling ionising wireless radiation would have made a hell of a lot more sense in terms of safety.
In would be interesting to do the numbers for the level of radio wave radiation exposure to be created within each school and to monitor that statistical data over the long term especially picking up peak loads and points of extreme concentration, just so we will have real numbers to go with 'tumour time teens and teachers' ;). Man, what were they thinking, you just know certain fringe parental groups are going to pick up on this and go nuts, hmm, wireless safe faraday classes for the non-consenting and, I really would pause at those sustained, concentrated levels, I don't think anybody anywhere really ever considered this level radiation exposure.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen