Slashdot Mirror
Alaskan Middle Schoolers Phish Their Teachers
lukej writes "In Ketchikan, Alaska a small group of unidentified students gained access to school owned computers by using phishing techniques on their teachers. The then used the elevated access to remotely control their peers computers. Fortunately the school administrators seem to have a taken a realistic and pragmatic viewpoint of the situation, although no official punishment has yet been determined. '"Kids are being kids," (Principal) Robinson said, adding that he was surprised something like this had not already occurred. "They're going to try to do what they try to do. This time we found out about it."'" And no one got arrested.
In related news, the students were found to have changed their grades and purchased airplane tickets.
In other news, the WOPR unit in NORAD is reported to be acting funny. It keeps asking to play games.
I didn't get headlines when I did the same thing in elementary school. Radical thought: This should be a part of standard curriculum.
They expel and charge kids with felonies for far less....
sig?
Sure, and the teachers should be able to fix the heater when it breaks.
While I support teaching anyone with access to computers the ins and outs of same, expecting your eighth grade teacher to be part security consultant is a bit of stretch.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Me and my friends were doing the same sort of thing on the computer network (BBC Micro) 25 years ago.
We got detention if I remember correctly. It certainly didn't make the news. The fact that it does in 2013 maybe reflects how much society has changed between then and now.
Children shouldn't face any serious punishments for minor "cyber-crimes".
Aside from the temperature...
Apparently in Alaska you can pull a prank and it doesn't get turned into a life-altering jail sentence and you being labeled a terrorist. Alaska may be the last refuge of what being in the United States really used to be all about. Too bad the terrorists won in the lower 48.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
A sudden outbreak of common sense.
Yes - that is why I live, work and play here!
But they should have better computer skills then the students they teach. The point of a teacher is to teach and when the students can out pace them in an area it means they can't.
It's sad because here we have a school administrator acting sensibly and not being all "no tolerance" and bullshit.
logic and reasoning in a schoolhouse, what ever is this nation coming to? this must be stopped!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So you're saying they're communists?
So, Maths teachers should also be tops in history, english, PE, biology, IT... etc, etc ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Yeah. I probably have nothing to add idea-wise to this story. Just had to chime in that I share this emotion.
What a relief to know that there are non-draconian administrators that can actually administer justice with grace instead of an iron fist.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
I remember doing this back in 1993. While I didn't use email phishing I chummed up to the network admin and came up for excuses for him to enter his password as I watched him type it in. Created my own administrator account to give myself access to all programs that were restricted to students. Mostly so I'd have free access to the few games they had on the network :) They never knew.
I still remember the password too: "ersm" - ever so secure.
When I was in high school (late 90s) the "Computer Teacher" was really nothing more than a word processing teacher. All of the classes focused on teaching typing and some very basic computer usage. i.e what is RAM, HD, keyboard, mouse. I phished his password on the regular and he never knew I had it. I did it by having him unlock the computer so I could fix something. I would then install a key logger and re-lock the security software. Once that was done I would tell him that I forgot to make one more change, have him unlock it once more and then recover the password for the key logger.
I mostly used it for good. (fixing network printer mappings, repairing broken OS or network settings) About as mischievous as I got was was installing a first person shooter on a number of the computers and starting an underground FPS club that played during lunch.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
since there are only 3 children on Ketchikan
Reading in between the lines I suspect it could have looked wildly different, but the teachers were trained to look for some specific text string which the students got to appear in the elevation dialog.
The UAC dialog is designed to look different if a executable is digitally signed to prevent just this sort of phishing attack. Either the school IT screwed up by not using signed tools, or the teachers were not trained on the differences between the dialogs for signed and unsigned elevations.
/clap /clap /clap
It's nice to learn that someone looked at curiosity in a common sense fashion rather than the typical spank-down people get for being smart enough to figure things our for themselves.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Good teachers can still learn some things from students though. If the students weren't much trouble otherwise, the most I'd do for "punishment" is make them write a full report on the vulnerabilities and all the things that can be done to improve security. Most kids don't like writing essays, but they already did half the work themselves and it's a subject they're knowlegable about, so it's not the worst thing.
But they should have better computer skills then the students they teach. The point of a teacher is to teach and when the students can out pace them in an area it means they can't.
If you remember what it was to be a child at all you'll remember that children have *lots* of time to get good at this sort of thing. A child who's into computers can spend much more time learning the ins and outs than a teacher who has a job and home life, etc. You can't expect a teacher to always know more than *every* child they teach.
If you're not using social engineering to get elevated privileges in your middle/high school's computer network, you're not really a computer geek. Of course, we never got caught (although I'm certain that my high school "computer class" teacher was perfectly aware and just didn't care or even approved as long as we didn't actually fuck up the network).
I'm sure they got detention or something. OP is just pointing out that they weren't arrested, charged with a felony, and tried as an adult as per the current norm.
I can't agree with that. School is like jail in some ways, kids get bored and figure out how the "routines" work and take advantage of them when its fun or beneficial. In reality I'd wager a bunch of regulars here got started in their careers breaking stuff like this even if by accident. For that reason I think the initial reaction from administration is on par with what it should be. I think this is a great opportunity to demonstrate that tinkering/learning is great but should not be done to the detriment of others and continue on as normal.
Teachers are forced to use more modern tools like interactive whiteboards and computers and most have adapted well to the task but you can't expect them to be experts in everything. Most will simply learn the portions that are relevant to their normal tasks as they should.
I don't think anyone can be faulted for falling for a well executed phishing scam. If anything why are teachers responsible for updating their computers?
I was on good terms with my high school's computer person back in the seventies, when the entire school district shared a timesharing computer. He told me the password to the teachers' account (yes, just one) for our school. It was "SECRET".
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
the only surprise is that it doesn't happen more often.
No, the surprise is that you think it doesn't happen all the time. I worked at a school for a while, and I saw at least a dozen attempts at the fake login hack, and I only saw those that screwed up somehow. I found several by typing CTRL-C before entering my login/password. But if they were smart enough to set up a handler for SIGINT, they would have got me. I found a few more by running "find /users -name '*.c' -print | xargs grep 'Login:'", but that only caught those dumb enough to leave the source code on a school computer.
I never had anyone expelled or even suspended, but none of them actually did anything malicious. Usually I arranged for them to do a week of after school janitorial duties. I figured that was sufficient punishment for not knowing how to write a proper signal handler.
Here is the first rule of security for schools: Any computers which contain important confidential information (grades, health records, etc.) should be completely disconnected from any network accessible to students. Otherwise, they will figure out how to hack it.
Yes, If your a grade school teacher, teaching a class of students and they can top you in ANY SUBJECT then you need to bulk up.
Middle school in the US is where you start to see teachers specialize (In elementary school you tend to have a single teacher for the majority of the day and only switch for things like music/gym/etc)
Middle school was when I first took apart my parent's computer, ran up the phone bill connecting to BBSs (as a kid not realizing that same area code didn't mean local), and started learning the ropes about computers by struggling to get the sound working at the same time as other components. (config.sys autoexec.bat, etc)
To expect a teacher, who may have no real interest in computers, to keep pace with the insatiable curiosity of a student 'looking under the hood' is simply not reasonable.
Would you expect the English teacher to be able to outpace a student who picks up an interest in Geology?
When I was 12, I also got really into airplanes, and studied hard to get my pilot's license asap. Would you expect any non-pilot teachers to have more knowledge about FAA regulations than a budding hobbyist?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
"Teacher should of been" ? Sounds like you don't know much about teachers or schooling in general.
Should have or should've. Should of makes no sense.
I suppose everyone who should know better sometimes makes mistakes.
Lol, we did this too in high school. Mostly so we could set up doom2 and lan play. With Novell netware, there was a peek utility where I could spy/control any students session. Had a lot of fun with that. Funny story: We had a final project in programming class to draw a picture with qbasic graphics commands. I wrote a program to just draw with the mouse, and it generated the circle, point, line, etc code. I gave it to my friend that struggled in the class. He made the most beautiful detailed picture for his end project. The teacher didn't believe that he made it. So he said "ok adam, go write a program right now to draw a simple circle". So I logged in on a machine and made the program and saved it to adam's directory. I forget how I signaled for him to load it, but he did and the teacher got off his back. Adam passed the class. Good times.
Yes, you're completely clueless.
The reason why few teachers can handle more than one subject is primarily an issue of training. If you don't train the teachers to teach multiple subjects, and permit them time to learn the ins and outs of teaching it, then you're not going to get many teachers that go to the trouble.
When all is said and done, if you want higher standards, then you're going to have to pay better, do a better job of managing the schools and generally stop treating teachers like crap. There's a reason why the average career as a teacher in the US is only 5 years. By the time they've gotten the hang of it, they're being pushed out the door.
I'm not arguing that, the first time anything happens it's an opportunity for learning to take place, the second time it's inexcusable.
A chum in my science seminar class hacked into the principal's office phone, so we could listen to him from the classroom whenever we wanted. When it was close to graduation, he got bored and patched the phone line into the school public address speakers, so all day his calls were broadcast in every classroom (they figured it out and he stopped using his phone after an hour or so).
After lunch, the principal called our buddy up to the office. He asked him "Do you by any chance know something about this?" Our buddy said "Yep." Principal said, "Just go fix it and we won't ask any more questions, ok?" He did, and that was that, no call to his parents or anything.
Now in the early 1950s, when my DAD was in high school, they just led a cow upstairs and locked it in the bathroom (Cows can walk up stairs better than they walk down). It's pretty easy to imagine the same kids pulling the same kind of pranks with the technology of the day.
Gently reply
It's impossible for every teacher to always have better computer skills than their students..
None of my teachers ever came close.
I'm sorry, but that's utter bullshit.
Seriously, I'm a teacher and even though I already know the content, it doesn't let me off the hook for figuring out how to convey that content to a new group of students. For every 5 minutes of homework I assign to the students, that's easily an hour of my time that I have to spend designing the assignment and assessing the results. And that's just if I'm doing a check off that they did it. If I have to actually check the quality in any meaningful way it can take a lot more time than that.
As for knowing less than the student, perhaps if the tax payers would shoulder some of the expense of training and certification that would be more reasonable. As it is, teachers work long hours and have to keep up with their certifications on their own. Expecting them to have time to also keep on top of the subject in areas where students might have interested, is rather unreasonable.
Regular here. Hacked my teacher's computer in high school. I will have a PhD in Computer Engineering next month.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but an interest in "computers" leading to "using computers" and "degree in computers" isn't much or a stretch.
Well, some can see communists from their house.
rewriting history since 2109
logic and reasoning in a schoolhouse, what ever is this nation coming to? this must be stopped!
Unfortunately, in a mad rush to show "we are serious about ..." school boards and administrators pass zero tolerance policies. As a result the stupid as well as they criminal get punished equally. Schools cannot apply common sense, as much as they may want to, because of the rules. Everyone gets all bothered by draconian punishment for a minor infraction but are unwilling to change rules because they don't want to be held accountable for making a decision that someone will second guess. That is not limited to schools, many lawmakers seem to share the same viewpoint (and then get all upset when something h clearly ridiculous happens as a result of a zero tolerence law THEY PASSED.)
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
One time I was sent to the Principal's office and while waiting outside, his secretary left the room. I pull out one of her drawers and sure enough the password to the school's grading computer "PENCIL" was right there. I used it to change some of my grades...
;)
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, er uh, can't get fooled again.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Mentioned they haven't thought of how they will take action against the students? Article mentioned that the school had to collect the 300+ computers to be cleaned (and I'm guessing reimaged). I'd really love it if the school shows they were REALLY wise, and made the response action back an apology to both the teachers they phished along with the IT crew who are now goign to have to scan/clean the rigs. Further, make these kiddos come in on the weekend/after school to help on that scan/clean effort (BUT with a choice---N hours working with the IT dept to clean up the mess, or N*4 hours in standard "sit on your backside and do nothing detention). This way they see there is a tangible impact ("cripes...now I have to spend this time cleaning this mess up, when I'd rather be doing something else on a weekend/after school"), but at the same time in a way that they may actually learn something (working with IT), and in some cases perhaps spin their activities towards something more positive?
*shrug* back then it would've taken 10 years to crack that anyways.
*if you're
Never stopped slashdotters from posting idiotic ideas before though. How about approaching it from the "need only access" approach, and auditing systems periodically for rogue access approach. Probably would cost less too, than training teachers in anti-phishing concepts who only want to teach social studies and math.
You must have gotten a computer. I got a car.
Nope...
You mean... they remember some of there schooling from back in the day and impart it on their students in non-subject matter as part of typical human conversation?
Man... why do people find the education system so difficult to understand, you're responsible for the kids these institutions are turning out today through your ignorance and unreasonable expectations.
My best teachers specialized in one subject and... ready for this... WERE PASSIONATE ABOUT IT , that's the way to go, not cross-training.
If you teach a math teacher history, which that teacher doesn't care for you're setting them up to fail and in turn the school is brought down with them.
HEY!!! Why did YOUR school have computers in the seventies, and all MY school had was electric typewriters?
I am curious though - where did you go to school? My school system was considered pretty wealthy, but we had zero computer access. I mean, zero. The most computer-like device on school grounds were Texas Instruments scientific calculators!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Ah, now I *know* you're talking out of your arse. Your impressions of what teachers do is like a child's understanding of the job.
Teachers are doing a performance all day long. Those performances need preparing, for each and every class. The resultant work of the class needs marking (times 30 pupils). These things don't just happen magically, it's a fairly work-intensive profession.
(Teachers also often seem to have a god-complex and a need to be appreciated by the whole world. I don't get appreciated by the world, I have to find my own satisfaction in my job. But that's another issue)
If a teacher isn't evolving faster then the student then I have no reason to keep them, I can buy some hundred dollar textbooks and do the same job. So again I have no soft heart for a teacher, they need to learn and learn all the time.
In the US and in the state I reside you are certified to teach for a range of grade levels. The higher up the grades you are certified in the more you are expected to be an expert in one discipline. So for grade schools you have a broad certification in Math, English, Social Science because you will teach all these disciplines to your group or students or maybe share with another teacher in the same grade if a more advanced Math class is needed or something. Once you get to the secondary schooling / high school, I believe you are certified for 8th grade as well, you teach Math or you teach English not both. You will have advanced classes in that discipline and normal classes. Where do advanced computer skills fit into that? Several students in high school may know C or Python so you expect that English teacher to know them as well?
If that is what you expect then they should be making more than 90K (which they only make after moving up through their steps or like 15 years down the road) when a masters degree is required which would often allow you a better paying job if you did not enter the teaching profession. My district tops out at 110K after longevity is factored in. Many in the IT field make 100K but no one seems to give a shit that they don't know every nuance about accounting that the accounting department knows.
I remember doing this back in 1993. While I didn't use email phishing I chummed up to the network admin and came up for excuses for him to enter his password as I watched him type it in. Created my own administrator account to give myself access to all programs that were restricted to students. Mostly so I'd have free access to the few games they had on the network :) They never knew.
I still remember the password too: "ersm" - ever so secure.
Ah, good times. Back in my day we did it by bootdisking one machine, swiping the password file and then running l0pthcrack against it; and lo and behold the local admin password on every machine was the same, and it matched the domain admin password too. We used it for everything from installing games to snooping on other user's work files. The password was only 6 chars, easy work for even a slow computer from 15 years ago. Its funny how those memories stand out, eh?
Send them home for a day to consider that they cost the school some money to fix the computer. Detention for a week... but thank you for not giving them a criminal record.
If you teach a math teacher history, which that teacher doesn't care for you're setting them up to fail and in turn the school is brought down with them.
If the teacher cares about "math" and not about, oh, *teaching*, then they have already failed. Get rid of them.
I thought of doing that but then I thought that was a sure fire way of getting caught - no one would believe I got good grades.
Sure, and the teachers should be able to fix the heater when it breaks.
While I support teaching anyone with access to computers the ins and outs of same, expecting your eighth grade teacher to be part security consultant is a bit of stretch.
True, but figuring out phishing isn't being a security consultant... it's applying critical thinking, which every teacher should be expected to model. Figuring out what happened and preventing future events should be left up to the security consultant, but identifying that someone's phishing you should be up to the individual (although anti-phishing structures should, in a world with no friction, be built-in by the aforementioned security consultant).
Phishing doesn't require technology of any great advancement; I've had people try to phish me by asking for money on the street (which then escalates if you engage them in conversation). Phishing is just one part of the confidence game, and turns out to be really easy via computer networks.
The first defense against phishing is realizing that you aren't too smart to fall for a phish -- properly targeted phishes can con anyone.
When I was 12, I also got really into airplanes, and studied hard to get my pilot's license asap. Would you expect any non-pilot teachers to have more knowledge about FAA regulations than a budding hobbyist?
No but I would expect teachers to have basic operational skills for equipment used for teaching. In the past a 16mm projector was a pretty standard piece of classroom equipment (yes I am old) - teachers were expected to understand how to plug the thing in, load the film, and overall use the tool to project a movie. Now computers are part of a basic classroom - teachers need to have basic operational knowledge of them. They need to understand how to use the educational or presentation software being used. I argue that basic operational knowledge also includes a security component - not complex security, but basic things like "use a password" and "lock the screen". Things like learning how to lock a screen are no more complex then learning how to only use erasable markers on a whiteboard (when in the past with blackboards you only had a chalk option).
No, its good that it is. So when people talk about it, they realize this is how they SHOULD act. Not suspend the kids, and call in the feds because they phished a teachers password. Although, the teacher should be sent to some basic network security training. Because if the toolbar says http://lame.angelfire.com/ They shouldnt be stupid enough to enter their password.
Okay but once you finish a grade you already know the information so for someone to go back and teach grade 8 level math they need only to have finished grade 8, then they know ( or should know ) the information. So hence when someone is done university they should be more then capable of going back and teaching grade school.
I'm going to leave high school out of this because all my teachers in high school had Masters degree's in there respective fields. A high school teacher, usually only teachers one or two classes and they are literally masters in those fields.
I've been to both private and public school and private out paced public 3 billion times over, so really I'm talking about public school. When I went to high school / private school I could ask a question and get an answer. If I wanted to learn C I could go ask the computer teacher and learn C, If I wanted to learn Web Development I could go to the same teacher. If I wanted to learn physics ( In grade 8 I did ) I could go ask the science teacher. When I went back to public school if I wanted to learn C I was told to sit down because the teacher had no clue. If I wanted an explanation on how light travels around black holes I was told to sit down because the teacher had no clue, if I asked that same question at my private school the teacher would go home, learn the concept and the next day explain it to me.
I can absolutely hold the public school system to the same standard as my private school. The teachers exist, I know they exist, I've had them teach me, so why then has any public school experience only included teachers who are brain dead? Private schools ( at least the one I was in ), require teachers to be always cutting edge of education / knowledge, my high school required the same thing, yet my public grade school didn't so why not!
They are already being punished...that's why they are in Alaska.
We are saving Siberia for when they kill their teachers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Yes, that story sounds real and totally not made up at all...
"I would of fired each one of them."
If they taught you grammar like that, I would have too.
Nooooo. The biggest problem we have now is that teachers care about teaching but don't have strong subject proficiency. If you know your subject in an out, and love thinking about, reading, and discussing it, then the teaching will come easily. That has been the philosophy in upper education for... well, always, and it has worked out pretty well.
Spoken like somebody who has never taught. Summer is the time we have to keep up with our certifications and many of us have to have a second job during the summer because the pay sucks, compared with other jobs that require a similar level of education.
What's more, you never know how your classes are going to react to content until you actually meet with them a few times which could lead to you having to make adjustments to the materials.
I realise that it's easy to make fun of teachers, but the bottom line here is that the job is hard enough without having the peanut gallery knocking us down over perceived incompetence.
Sigh, this sort of ignorance is rather astonishing. The average EE makes more than double what the average teacher makes.
What's more, you're only including class time there, schools don't make the lessons for their teacher nor do they do any of the grading. When you have 150 students, even just 5 minutes per student per day adds up quite quickly. It's not unusual for teachers to be at it late into the evening during the year to keep up with the demands of the job.
And we still have to deal with folks like you that have this astonishingly low opinion of us, because clearly we only work when we're at school with students, it's not like we have to prepare new lesson plans each year and grade papers.
To be fair, his critical reasoning skills are shit as well.
Would you like to play a game?
Well you might be the exception to the rule then, my teachers were dumb as dog shit.
That is made quite apparent by your mastery of of the English language.
If I have to work 12+ hours a day when I factor in office time and certifications then I can 100% expect teachers to put the same effort in.
Can you expect that if they are making half or one third of the salary you make, with equivalent levels of education?
I'm not joking when I say that my grade school teachers maybe put in a 8 - 3:30 day, class started at 9 so most of them put in a 8:45 ; 3:15 day including a hour lunch and two 15 minute recess brakes so take another hour and 1/2 off.
Either your teachers were uniformly horrible or your estimation of their work was significantly skewed. In my county, teachers are required to complete a master's degree while they are teaching, in addition to continuing education credits throughout their career. Those things are mandated and if they don't meet the requirements they are fired. What about student meetings, grading, faculty meetings, classroom preparation, etc? Besides that, they lead clubs and coach sports teams after school and on weekends at less than minimum wage.
I really think you're only describing the poor teachers. Good teachers are always working to find new ways to reach the students to actually, you know, teach rather than just read textbooks at the students. Each class is different, and has a different mix of learning styles to consider. In addition, the best teachers are keeping up to date with new discoveries or updates to their fields. Even subjects like history have new and exciting things being added to our understanding all the time. So even while their only "at work" from something like 8-4 (depending on the school district and a few other factors), it's reductive to say all they do is spew information.
Okay but once you finish a grade you already know the information so for someone to go back and teach grade 8 level math they need only to have finished grade 8, then they know ( or should know ) the information.
There is a significant gap between knowing the information, and knowing it well enough to teach it. As you have pointed out yourself, if you know the specific content of the class you can spit it back out by rote; but if a student has an interesting or advanced question, you will not be able to answer it. That is supposed to be the point of specializing, you should have a graduate level knowledge of your area so that you will be passionate about your subject and be able to answer any question that at student might have.
Sure! How about "Global Thermonuclear War?"
I don't currently make 180k a year, I make more then 90k but not twice as much, I also work more then twice as hard and have to apply active thinking + hands on skill constantly.
I don't know where you live but at least in Waterloo Region, Ontario Canada teachers are NOT required to get a Master degree, in fact I'm amazed most of them have ever a Bachelors degree. As for
Either your teachers were uniformly horrible
I'll glady admit that could be true, I can only talk about my localized experience with my public school system. I had a total of 8 teachers at the school I went to grades k-6 and 8. Grade 7 is an exception because I actually got moved to a private school because of the lack of capability of my teacher from grade 6. It is completely possible I had a number of bad teachers out of those 8.
I've admitted several times I don't mean to bash the good teachers, I just haven't had the experience of these good teachers, I certainly don't want to make it seem like 100% of all teachers are horrible.
Don't kid yourself, it wouldn't just be Fox news....it would be all of them.
If these kids did this in FL, they'd be on trial for felony hacking.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not at all...he even got into the good graces of a really cute girl in his class when he changed her grades too.
I think later on tho....he moved, and changed his name to Ferris.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
imagine the uproar if a Math teacher was not functionally proficient in English.
Do you see the problem now?
Do you mean english (proficiency in the spoken english language) or English (historical and rhetorical knowledge of english literature)?
There would be justified criticism (though not, necessarily, uproar) about the former, but none about the latter in any region I've ever lived in.
And while we're at it: if you think teachers should be competent a significant portion of your job requirements, why are there 'computer professionals in a school district'? Would you, with your 'knowing a little about most things' be held responsible if you had incorporated incorrect chemical formulae on a school website provided by the chemistry teacher, or be sought after to serve as a replacement for him?
It's most absolutely desirable for every person to have general (or tangential) knowledge relevant to their field, but it is not their core proficiency. I certainly don't value my children's teacher's primarily for their computer skills.
"They were discovered when one teacher became suspicious during one phishing chat session.
Jose: Come on, show us your boobs, Mrs. Winklemeyer. I mean, WandaX. Crap."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
At my college they had Intel GMA graphics so we hit ctrl-alt-arrow key to flip all the displays upside down. He thought it was pretty funny.
The English teacher obviously gets a pass.
we did that 20 years ago. Spoofed a Novell login prompt. The first catch was the teacher with the admin rights :-)
But it wasn't that much fun anymore when we were officially granted access to the server a year later.
bickerdyke
A little early to determine whether or not sanity will prevail in the aftermath. The principal's statement indicates that the consequences are TBD.
Also, I thought that most of these computer "crimes" were based on federal laws. Would it be up to the school to decide whether or not to pursue criminal charges?
Your problem is you see it as a job, not a calling. It only works well when it's the latter. I've had plenty of teachers that just show up to do their jobs, and guess what I don't remember the name of a single of them.
You can be a math genius and not have one shred of aptitude when it comes to imparting knowledge on others. To be a good teacher, you need to be good at/interested in *teaching*, which is a discipline all its own. It's not 100% transferable between say math and English, but the better one is at teaching the better one can pick up an unfamiliar subject and teach it.
This is normal. School network admins assume kids are hacking the network.
You pulled out the secretary's drawers? So was that your first time with an older woman?
Nobody cares what you (or anybody else) did in elementary school. I'm sure the teachers work hard, but K-12 is more about making sure someone can be a productive member of society rather than teaching anything in particular. K-12 is a test, just like passing the GED is a test. If you pass it, for the rest of your life you can say with some confidence that you are not a complete failure, no matter how much of a failure you might become.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The last high school I supported, they had the brilliant (BRILLIANT!) idea of teaching programming using Turbo Pascal. And they included the network libraries in it.
Using Novell, the school suffered an escalating fight with the kids. First they faked a login screen. then they hacked the GINA and got it installed on all the machines in the lab. Then they ran a password sniffer at boot.
Then I convinced the administration to let me use the same techniques. Installed some boot time code to catch these nasties, searched and found the source code, and identified the miscreants. We applauded their efforts, hired one on as a part-time assistant, and warned the others that future incidents would result in escalating punishments. One did get back into school, but the others were banned from the lab for their junior year.
Next semester we deployed ZenWorks, images, and a lot of policies. No matter how they tried, if a station was logged in with a staff ID, the screen bakcground was red. Easy to spot.
Pretty talented kids. Their escapades getting browser access kept me busy for a few weeks. Fun times.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm in year 10 of being a teacher, I have a math degree, a music education degree, a masters in instructional technology with certifications in math, music, physics and technology in multiple states. I've had fellowships at Intel, and WestEd. I make 58k per year on 186 work days officially. I have no clue where you got 90k as teacher's salary because my district, and most in the area do not even top out at 90k.
I think you're delusional in other ways as well. It's not uncommon for people to both cling to a single example of knowing better than a teacher to talk about how much smarter they are, ignoring another 12 years of times they didn't know better as well as blaming their own misconceptions on teachers giving incorect information. After I left my PhD math program (admittetly, I wasn't good enough, so if you want to crush me for not being very smart, you can do it there) I went to teach high school and promptly completely botched order of operations in Algebra class since it had been something like 10 years since I had to even think about working with numbers. I'm sure some of those kids are out there today saying "Remember that STUPID teacher we had who couldn't even do order of operations?", while others certainly remember better our use of trebuchets and catapults to measure and learn about projectile motion as an application of quadratics. The point being, you sometimes remember things how you want to remember them, and I'd venture it's more about how much you liked the teacher personally than how good or bad the quality of instruction was.
I always heard phishing was best in Alaska...
My first Algebra teacher was uninterested, and my work showed it. My second one was very interested, and my work showed that.
Not one single English teacher I had in high school was the least bit interesting, so I muddled through. But my Geometry teacher was fabulous, my American History teacher even more so, and my Drafting teacher par excellence. My Earth Science teacher similarly. My French teacher was also. these subjects I did well in.
World History was taught by an old teacher who was as engaging as a cowpie. Biology taught by an energetic but scatterbrained teacher that left me behind in the first quarter and I never caught up. Chemistry was taught to me at the level of repeating steps in the textbook, and other than our legendary team experiment that evacuated the entire school, I was bored and uninvolved. Making chlorine gas seems to be a dangerous proposition for some reason...
But I would have recommended only the first Algebra teacher be fired, and she was actually, though not on my account.
And trust me, you do NOT see the time teachers put in off-hours, away from school. My wife teaches choir and spends a lot of time during the summer, at night, weekends working on curriculum and activities. While tests and such for choir are mostly selfedge and other concepts long since worked out entirely, and some subjects need similarly less updating yearly than others, being in the IT business is very very different than being in education. I try to explain to my wife that if choir was like IT, every three years she would be learning new scales, tossing out 90% of her music and learning new constructs, and learning new instruments as the old ones were obsoleted. She doesn't understand that either, but the principles of good teaching persist. Or they should.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I can't believe no one else caught the reference
-- Adam McCormick
Or not, just modded too low I guess
-- Adam McCormick
This happened in Sarah Palin land if it had happened in Obama's hood it would have involved busting a cap in the teacha's ass.
Was there a lot of "cap in the ass busting" on the Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu?
http://goo.gl/maps/fWB5a
At the middle school level? Every teacher should know more about every subject than their students. By high school that may not be a reasonable expectation. But yes, a math teacher should know more about English or history than a 12-year-old.
That said, computers are funny, because that may not properly be a subject taught at the school, and also because of generation gaps in understanding modern tech. It may be excusable now; in a generation it would be as shameful as getting shown up in any other subject.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I wouldn't call you stupid for attempting a PhD, that takes a pretty advanced level of applied knowledge to even attempt. You also mentioned being a math teacher as opposed to teaching every single class. I'm not talking about one class teachers ( or those that teach a few ). If you teach Math then your going to be extreme good at Math and hence if your asked a math question you should be able to answer it. Just like if you teach science you should be able to answer any science question thrown at you.
The teachers I'm talking about the kind that teach every class in for the year so the same teacher does Math, Science, History and etc... If a math teacher can answer any kind of math question (in theory) then a multi focus teacher should be able to also, they need to understand each subject as well as a single subject teacher and at the same time evolve to handle any question thrown at them by a student.
Just to be clear, messing up a solution is not the same as understanding how to answer a question about a subject. You can make a software bug but that doesn't mean you can't program, or you can forget to carry a 1 but that doesn't mean you don't have a PhD in math.
Oh and at least up here in Waterloo Region, Ontario Canada the elementary school teachers top at 90k after a few years.
If they taught you grammar like that, I would have too.
If they taught you punctuation like that, I would have, too.
:p
My name is Antoine. This article brings back my school delinquent memories. I grew up in Ketchikan and went to Schoenbar Jr High ( the school in the article) in 1986. It is a small town but not that small. there are around 10,000 people in a relatively small area. at the time there were about 400 kids in the middle school and around 800 in the high school. I like that the school didn't take legal action. I am sure the kids will have consequences but most likely it will be dealt with by the school. I remember that I had some training grenades from an army surplus store that I kept in my locker. They were just an empty metal case that looked like a grenade. One time I rolled one down the hall for fun. I think I got detention for that. Imagine what would of happened now.
There's hope for us yet!
It's amazing they weren't arrested and tagged for the rest of their lives with felony records. That seems to be the present day, "American Way", destroy as many lives as possible and make sure they never succeed at life.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
This is true. A better example than "Sure, and the teachers should be able to fix the heater when it breaks." would be that you expect the teacher to know how to turn the heater up when it gets too cold in the classroom.
Unfortunately, people seem to think that "I don't know computers." is a valid excuse. I could completely understand this back in the 80's, but it just isn't a valid excuse anymore. I don't know how good are bad the phishing was that these teacher fell for, so I don't know if it is legitimate that they fell for it, but "I don't know computers." is definitely not a valid reason.
If you've never tried it, you should.
I did some language teaching overseas in public schools. It's exhausting. There's a lot of prep before and after, and for the classes, it really is like you're performing. If you want to do a good job, your mental attitude has to be always on and positive
I did similar in 1990. We had a Novell network and I simulated the text based login screen in a programming language called unicomal, and left dozens of terminals with it running logged into my user account. The network admin was convinced to log in under the pretext that I'd lost my password, and hey presto, one admin password grabbed, written to my user directory and an appropriate 'wrong password' message printed before logging out of my user account, leaving the admin thinking he'd simply typed it incorrectly. Ha! Those were the days.
These career-criminals-in-the-making must be made to pay.
Requiem for the American Dream
Back when, at university we all had timeshare accounts on an Amdahl 470V/8. Now if you needed more account time (to play SPACWR probably) you could beg some from the TA's, but the best way was to get another users password, and use their account and their computer $ to play. The came the Valentines day dance. There was a guest list circulating with everyone's name plus the name of their date (so we could make fancy place cards or something). We scammed a copy of the list and headed for the terminal room. We already knew the login ID's because they were based on the person's first initial and last name. We ran the list of Id's against the list of girlfriends names from the dance. Bingo! About 40% of the guys had their girlfriends name as a password. With 100+ cracked accounts, we had unlimited gameplay for the rest of the year.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Novell huh? If they had used USERLST and CHKNULL and they never would have gotten caught. Just find all the accounts that never had a password set and sign in to "set your password for the first time." I had a whole list of throw away accounts to use during my angsty teenage years. I got these instructions from the help menu. LOL, I thought I was so 1337 back then.... such a script kiddie, haha.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Is it not computer intrusion? I ask you - is this not the same as intruding into your home and rummaging through your valuables and doing as they please? They are not terribly bright kids and I fear their ultimate failure in life will be to misunderstand the ethics of good honest hard work. What if it were a system to control of some key aspect of infrastructure - like a dam? Even worse.. what if they were Chinese? Lock them up and brainwash some sense into them. Criminal scum.
Ketchican -- a quaint drinking village with a phishing problem.
(Apologies to Homer, Alaska, the "quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.")
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I argue that basic operational knowledge also includes a security component - not complex security, but basic things like "use a password" and "lock the screen".
I would agree that such things would fall into the 'basic operational knowledge' of the equipment, but that amount of knowledge is still far below what would be necessary to secure/monitor a system against even 'entry-level' hacking knowledge. So I think the point still stands, 'Teachers can not be expected to be more knowledgeable than all middle school students in the field of computer security'
It's not unreasonable to assume that 75% of middle school students would have that same level of basic operational knowledge of computers. Personal computers were in the majority of homes for literally their entire lives (That's only now becoming true for the youngest of teachers).
This doesn't mean I don't think that SOMEONE should be responsible for ensuring that the computer systems are secure, but I don't believe it is reasonable to assume that responsiblity should be assigned to the teachers.
With physical security, we expect the teachers approach strangers, and lock the doors when the leave. We don't expect them to audit the alarm system for motion sensor blind spots or video record archiving schedules.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I hope this was a long time ago... having worked in various SD's that tried to support Novell, things got ugly fairly quick.
That said, I remember students having fun with poorly-secured NN environments back in the day, mainly involving things like backdoors using right.exe to grant themselves permissions to others' files (and sometimes taking away others' permissions to their own files).
You're making 58k for 186 work days. Most people work ~260 work days.
As a maths person, you should be able to deduce fairly easily that you make 'wage equivalency' to someone making $80k or so a year. So OP was a little off but your flat rejection is a bit more off than his misstatement...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'll do you one better and compare it to "sure, and the teachers should notice when it's getting too hot in the classroom and call the janitor."
People tend to have issues with computer literacy... they don't want to admit to having issues until something negative affects them directly -- then it's the computer's fault. Nevermind that the issue usually has nothing to do with understanding how to use the tool, but was just compounded due to the effectiveness of the tool chosen.
As a maths person, I know that 260/5 is 52, which would mean working 5 day weeks, every week of the year. So, no, very few work ~260 day years. More likely is a full year worker is around 210-220 work days per year, which is around 68k adjusted. But everyone's context is different which is why I always feel it's important to indicate what your actual contract states if you're salaried. I also think it's important to note that teaching is an exempt position, meaning that those labor laws designed to demarcate the limits of what an employer can demand of you do not apply. It's also worth noting that, yes, my retirement benefits are very, very good, my health benefits are not good at all (HMO coverage for 1 person with relatively high copays), and my sick leave does travel with me on any teaching position in the state. The end result: it's not bad compensation. It's no where near what I could make with my math degree (and I have turned down offers from Citrix and Intel), but it's also not so bad as to not be able to afford to live. I only bristle when people back up their "grossly overpaid" charge with completely made up numbers.
I never expected my English Teacher to know Calculus, but I did expect them to know how to do fractions, you know, basic 4th Grade math material. Trust me, I know plenty of teachers who can't do rudimentary math.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There's a reason why the average career as a teacher in the US is only 5 years. By the time they've gotten the hang of it, they're being pushed out the door.
I thought it was 'cause they got married and had their own kids.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
You can be a math genius and not have one shred of aptitude when it comes to imparting knowledge on others.
Absolutely.
I find that, for myself, I'm a decent mentor, but a terrible teacher. I'm not much for stuffing info into heads that may or may not want to absorb it, but if said trainee wants to come and watch and learn, great. But the trainee has to want it...I can't make the person "excited" about a subject.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Wonder what was the exactbscam (or scams) to get past the teacher's guard.
A calling to teach, and a passion in the subject make the best teachers. If the teacher is passionate about both math and english, they will excel at teaching both using the same teaching skill, but bouncing between two different passions.
And yes... good teachers are very hard to find, most people see it as a job, it's unfortunate they don't understand / care about the social responsibility it entails.
You do realize... the history of math is a part of the math field... right?
Not quite sure what literature and geography have to do with each other either. The history of literature would be a little more relevant.