PA Laptop Spying Inspires FSF Crowdsourcing Effort

holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops."

Comments

Great idea

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Hopefully this situation will be a stepping stone to help the public understand the role that computers play in our personal lives.

I switched to GNU/Linux in 1998 because lights on my external modem flickered each time I used RealPlayer to play files that were on my own computer.

Meh.

[XPeter]

At the high school I attend, all the desktops and laptops allowed on school property have a form of remote monitoring installed (Web Sense, NetOps, along with Deep Freeze).

The problem is relatively easy to fix, though. I use my home computer as a proxy to get past Web Sense, and give myself admin rights to disable the NetOps and Deep Freeze. All students should know how to do this, and I teach as many how to as I can. Fuck the "monitoring" they do, this isn't China.

Opportunism

[Ralish]

Is it just me, or does this just reek of opportunism? What the school in question did was appalling, but it has nothing to do with the open-source vs. closed-source debate, or the proprietary vs. open debate, it's just raw and basic ethics. This is about people's basic right to privacy, as well as the ethical conduct of system administrators. Windows doesn't stop you installing open-source software, and Linux doesn't stop you installing proprietary software. Neither operating system will stop a system administrator from installing nasty software.

Presumably the FSF would feel a lot better about this if the students were being spied on from laptops running Linux with open-source spying software? We could mask the presence with an open-source rootkit, and upload the data to a FreeBSD server running Apache and a MySQL database. Then this would be just fine. Groups that hijack legitimate issues in order to advance their own agenda are sickening. Jack Thompson likes to do this to advocate video game restrictions, pro & anti gun control groups do this whenever the latest gun violence story hits the news, and now the FSF joins in. I knew they'd been progressively losing sanity over the years, but I thought even this was beneath them.

Re:Excuse me?

[lena_10326]

Spending millions of dollars and loaning out hardware doesn't give school officials the right to remotely activate and control the laptop webcam and spy on children in their own bedrooms--potentially while undressing. People are pissed not due to knee jerk reaction, but because what the school did was fucking creepy.