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Your High School Wants You To Install Snapchat
Five teenagers at Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Illinois were arrested in November in conjunction with a girl's topless photo being distributed throughout the school. Last Thursday, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, a prosecutor announced that contemplating filing child pornography charges against "dozens" of students for distributing explicit pictures to other students at Rochester Adams High School. In Portland, Oregon, police are investigating a group of Grant High School students for making videos of each other having sex at the school and off campus. (And, of course, these are just the incidents that police found out about.) Naturally, schools everywhere have been falling over themselves to institute strict anti-cyber-bullying and anti-sexting policies (not to mention that sending and forwarding sexually explicit pictures of children under 18 is a federal crime as well).
Schools have rules for reasons that are a mixture of cynical protection against lawsuits and sincere concern for the students. When education system teach students not to smoke cigarettes, they're presumably doing that out of genuine concern for students' welfare, since it would be hard to sue the school for not teaching about the dangers of smoking. When a school installs a railing by the side of a walkway to keep students safe from passing cars, they're probably motivated by a mixture of concern over being sued, and legitimate concern for students' safety. When the school installs software on their computers to block Facebook and Reddit (even outside of class time, when computers are sitting idle and students have nothing else to do), they're probably motivated entirely by liability concerns - because they know virtually all of those students can get on those websites at home, so they're not affecting the students' long-term welfare by keeping them off of those websites, but they just don't want to be liable for anything if the students access those sites at school.
In the case of anti-sexting policies, I'm not cynical enough to think that schools are motivated entirely by liability concerns. There are actual risks to sexting pictures of yourself, even if you're never charged with violating child pornography laws: the embarrassment of your picture being forwarded around the school, or ending up in the archive of a porn site. On the other hand, worse things happen to dozens of high school students every month, but only a handful of schools get dragged into the national spotlight as a result of a child porn investigation. So let's call it about 25% due to legitimate concern for students and 75% due to liability reasons and concern for adverse publicity.
But sexting students could vastly reduce schools' concerns about both issues, by sending pictures using an app like Snapchat, which automatically deletes photos after the recipient has viewed them -- in order to greatly reduce the chance of a picture being saved or forwarded after it's sent. Please note, I'm not saying the photos can't be saved anyway, or recovered by computer forensics. And take heed: I'm not saying you should do it either way! But if you greatly reduce the chances of an image being saved, you greatly reduce the chances of it leading to a scandal that engulfs the school, or leads to a federal child pornography charge.
Of course there are cases where teens were arrested for sending child pornography through Snapchat as well. But these high-profile stories don't address the relevant question, which is: Are you less likely to get arrested (or expelled, or humiliated) for sending these pictures if you do it through Snapchat, even if the likelihood doesn't drop to zero? Obviously, yes.
Now even someone with no phone-hacking knowledge can figure out that if they receive an image over Snapchat, they can "save" it by taking a photo of their screen with another phone or camera, and the sender won't know. (You can also take a normal screen shot with the phone, but that will notify the sender that you took a screen shot, unless you download a third-party app or try some other hack which may or may not even work by the time you read this.) However, this assumes that the trust relationship between the sender and the recipient is already broken at the time the message is being sent, if the recipient is saving the message without the knowledge or consent of the sender. Some of these sexts are presumably being sent in the context of a relationship in which some (sweet, naive, misguided) trust still exists, so that if the sender sends the message and the recipient doesn't use some sneaky workaround, the picture will get deleted on schedule. If trust only falls apart later, then the recipient won't have a copy of the image any more if it was sent by Snapchat, but they will if it was sent via text.
Actually, it may be possible for the recipient to recover a snapchat image after their smartphone Snapchat app has supposedly "deleted" it -- a company called Digital Forensics offers Snapchat image recovery as a service, but they charge $300-$500 per incident, and even they haven't figured out how to do it on an iPhone yet.
So, in terms of boolean logic, if you send an explicit photo via Snapchat, it might end up being saved permanently and forwarded if:
(
the recipient is already being dishonest with you (saving pics without your permission) at the time that you send the picture
AND
the recipient is smart enough to figure out how to save Snapchat pictures without notifying you -- not that hard, but eliminates
some people
)
OR
(
you later go through a nasty breakup with the recipient and they're determined to humiliate you or get you in trouble with the law
AND
they don't mind the fact that they could also get in trouble with the law, for saving or forwarding the picture
AND
they're willing to spend $300 to recover the image
AND
they don't have an iPhone
)
Whereas if you send a photo via regular text, all it takes to get in trouble is either (a) the recipient going through a nasty breakup with you, that puts them in a vindictive frame of mind, while they still have a copy on their phone, or (b) the recipient's family member snooping through their messages.
Your high school would never tell you so out loud, but between Snapchat and texting, you can guess which they would prefer you to use.
Of course, this advice wouldn't have done much good for the Portland students who made and distributed their own sex videos, since creating the illegal permanent recording was their entire goal. Snapchat can help protect people from mild levels of stupid, but it's a barrier you can overcome if you aim high and truly believe in yourself.
Got something to say about privacy, technology, or other topics of interest? Long-form submissions are welcome.
BENNETT!
Secure Messaging Scorecard - Which apps and tools actually keep your messages safe?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
OMG IT'S BENNETT HASSLETON!!!!!!!!
Excuse me while I jack off reading about Bennett Hassleton weighing in on a subject.
I don't care if it is pseudo boolean logic, tab your fucking code
Please let it be. Seriously.
BlameBillCosby.com
Schools have installed secure holding areas where students can store their pot so they can cut costs on locker air fresheners.
when i read the waffling "i don't have any evidence, but it's a good bet that i know everything anyway!" bullshit in the lede.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
So if Bennett gets arrested with underage porn can be just say it was research for this article?
and keepsnap is so much easier than "forensically recovering" images...
besides, it keeps videos, too.
3 copies of the same autoplay video ad on the main page, that's even more stupid than ______________.
...that Bennett Haselton has an account on Slashdot called Nerval's Lobster.
No.
Someone should write a userscript to do that, maybe put it on kickstarter, I know I'd help fund it...
Are these Bennett Haselton posts just trolling by Slashdot editors?
Our benevolent ruler
And I want Bennett to stop using slashdot as a roll of shit tickets start using blogger, but ya know what? it doesnt look like anyones willing to change. Maybe we can put up a kickstarter to set up hosting and a registration for the poor guy. Or at least get together and have an intervention. Bennett, please, help us help you.
Good people go to bed earlier.
UK opinion here:
Liability is not the only concern.
We have child protection to take into account (in the UK, if you're under 18, you're a child even if the age of consent is 16 - so it's possible a photo of yourself performing a legal sex act with a consenting adult is actually illegal in itself!) and, no, we can't force you or your parents to take similar actions at home. However, we don't run child protection and eSafety workshops for the sake of it, nor are we required to do so in many cases.
It's not about liability. It's about protection. I can no more stop you from jumping railings or smoking outside of school that I can stop you getting on Facebook or Snapchat outside of school. But while you're in our property, under our "duty of care", and we have the ability to limit your behaviour and put in safeguards, we will.
I don't block Facebook / Snapchat for the fun of it. I block it because you're in school. You're not SUPPOSED to be on it. In some cases, you're not ALLOWED to be on it (e.g. if under 13, etc.). You're in school to learn, not to post selfies. If you want to just talk to your mates there are a million and one ways to do so, and each one I discover I will block. Because you're not supposed to be chatting to your mates in school for the majority of the time and we're under no obligation to provide the resources for you to do so at the expense of, say, lessons going on and staff getting to online resources.
In the same way I block game websites, violent or not, cartoons and funny websites, offensive or not, and other time-wasting crap. I have no legal obligation to *block* some of the above. But I do. Because a) it's safer for the younger kids, b) you're supposed to be using my (limited) resources for working towards an education and not distracting others, and c) because the parents would go ape-shit if they found out you were on Facebook / Snapchat (by whatever access) all day while you were at school.
Now, in the UK, school has a different meaning, but I've worked in primary (3-11), secondary (11-16/18) and sixth form (17/18 when it existed separately) schools, both state and private. And I can see no reason why even a college /university (18+) would be obliged - under liability or not - to actually block most such websites. They are worried about misuse of their resources as well as what you go on, but we don't want you going on that crap and we CERTAINLY don't want you bypassing our systems to go on that crap. Hell, it's all logged and monitored whether we block it or not.
This is possibly the worst article ever. No, I do not, would not, and never would - even under anonymity - suggest that you should be doing this stuff on your phone so that I'm not liable. Fuck that. This is about child protection, and getting your school work done. Neither of those factors are aided by your doing it on some other device or illicitly. But whether it's banned or not... that sends a message.
Fucking Americans. Everything is about not getting sued. Protect the damn kids, not by suggesting they can avoid child pornography charges by doing things on ephemeral systems but by NOT TAKING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES.
Surely something could be done with GreaseMonkey, but /. should just fix their site so we don't have to install extra crap to make it usable.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
This is a new low when it comes to speculation and overall horseshittiness, even for you Bennett.
Vonal Declosion
( post_is_by_bennett OR content_involves_use_of_pseudo_code_where_english_would_do_fine ) THEN IGNORE
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
So helping people break the law is a good thing now? I think we'd be much better off if, instead of helping them not get caught, we spent time helping them not break the law in the first fucking place!
Y'all are the same assholes who complain about a child being killed by a drunk driver after posting the locations of road blocks all over the internet too I assume. Fucking morons!
...that Bennett Haselton would devote so much thought to naked selfies of teenagers?
“How would a Beowulf Cluster of Bennet handle this”
OK, you made me snort. This is really quite funny.
Signed,
Everyone
It's probably a bad law if you find yourself arresting and charging half of a high school with a federal crime for disseminating nude pictures of themselves. At this point it seems like they have criminalized common behavior for high school students of this generation. I'm sure other generations did this too it's just that now the internet and cellphones have not only made the information in question easier to disseminate but also to track so now we are criminalizing large swaths of our youth over what is essentially natural behavior.
We need to just get him banned from Slashdot.
As a system administrator in a high school with about 1,000 students, I can say in short: No way and this post totally misses the mark.
First and foremost, anything that is going to distract a student in class and is not educationally related will be blocked in school. Simple as that. Teachers have enough to manage in class or outside of class during normal school hours without having to deal with social media intruding into their work.
In regard to sexting and using Snapchat over traditional communication, I have not seen an observable difference in the frequency of issues pre and post Snapchat sexting. There are plenty of ways to save Snapchats that students know know to do, including such low-tech ways as taking photos of the phone displaying the message. OP doesn't consider that these images are sometimes sent to many individuals initially by the person who took the images. By that point, one of the students would most likely alert a school administrator. I'd say a larger indicator of when this would be a school issue is how many individuals it was sent to initially.
30 characters are fine for a s
thanks DICE. Spyware in Sourceforge and Bennett on Slashdot.
1) Most actual offenses are committed by kids being kids.
2) Most arrested for sex crimes do NOT re-offend (while people arrested for theft, drug related or violent crimes DO re-offend).
3) Most places have huge double standards punishing men more than women, boys more than girls.
4) States do their best to ensure that anyone that committed one sex crime gets screwed over entirely - no job, no place to live, no friends, all under the banner of "protect the children", when in reality they endanger the children by encouraging the offenders to break ridiculous laws instead of getting involved in normal social activity like attending church.
5) The rules are set up to the worst first time offenders - family and close friends - while making everyone else paranoid about strangers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"When a school installs a railing by the side of a walkway to keep students safe from passing cars, they're probably motivated by a mixture of concern over being sued, and legitimate concern for students' safety...."
'Schools', as such, have no concern of any kind. Individuals have concerns. Schools are a human social and commercial enterprise - much the same as a company.
Railings are put up because the school has to employ a safety officer by law. The safety officer has a job to do - he does a risk analysis and produces a set of recommendations - if he doesn't he won't be paid.
The recommendations go before a school board with costings - someone from finance draws a line and says 'Just do these ones'. Because they've been told to keep the budget to $X, otherwise THEY lose their jobs.
And finally a contract is set and a workman installs the railings - so that he can get paid.
Same with every aspect of the school. Like everything else in the adult world. Everyone does what will get them the most money...
JUST GO AWAY.
Shut up, Bennett.
I agree but unfortunately /. (or more specifically Dice) doesn't care about usability (have you seen Beta?), they only care about page views/eyes on ads. If users never viewed a BH posts then they'd quickly stop him posting.
Personally I saw the abbreviated version of this post without taking in the fact it was yet another BH diatribe, I'd already loaded the page before I realised what it was so Dice's stats will register a hit on the page despite the fact I didn't want to read 90% of the rubbish contained in the OPs post.
IMHO a Greasemonkey userscript would be one way* to allow users to more easily avoid BH posts completely and help get the message to Dice that we don't want these steaming piles of elephant shit.
* I'd be happy to consider other methods such as native plugins or whatever...
Currently in alpha for iPhone only,
https://sly.cr/
Have fun!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I can't get the post to compile.
So many words... so little content.
I'd happily sign but it says:
Petition Not Available
The content of this petition is under review.
I remember an episode of 'Boston Public' where a teacher advises students to get a drug-testing kit. When the administration complained, the teacher argued, that a school had a responsibility to teach safety for real world. In the real world however, schools must avoid blame for the actions of their students. Yet just like banning sexual education, ignorance doesn't stop indulging in bad behaviours.
So the school is responsible for skills like crossing the road, dancing, and in some countries, driving but no-one wants to teach the most important social skills; those of drinking and fucking. By failing to provide a list of good and bad behaviours, adults are really saying teenagers need permission to be individuals. Adults are happy to provide a list of bad behaviours, but that is just enforcing the authority of adults over all those teenage vaginas. Despite this common abuse of school-girls, some schools do respect their schoolgirls enough to offer condoms. See here. That raises another issue: Condom use has been the traditional duty of the male; firstly, because he is responsible for pregnancy; secondly, so the female can deny that she is ready to fuck. Nice schoolgirls don't think about sex, is a lie that has to be removed from the communal mindset.
The next problem is a combination of rose-coloured glasses and "what goes on the internet, stays on the internet". For the most part, this is already handled by child pornography laws. But as the article shows, once the mistake is made, other teen-agers will rush to perv on the victim, thus joining the criminal conspiracy. This is a failure of schools to educate students on what is bad behaviour and illegal; which schools tend to do happily, since they want to avoid all blame.
I agree but unfortunately /. (or more specifically Dice) doesn't care about usability (have you seen Beta?), they only care about page views/eyes on ads.
Yes, Beta looks like ass. However, I serendipitously discovered recently that Beta is the only way to view slashdot on my mobile and for some reason it browses comments at 0 or below. The "happy" consequence of that is that I got to see more of the trolls than I'm accustomed to on the classic site through my computer, and I didn't know the goatse and gnaa trolls were still around. That fondly reminded me of the good-old days of shitdot.
IMHO a Greasemonkey userscript would be one way* to allow users to more easily avoid BH posts completely and help get the message to Dice that we don't want these steaming piles of elephant shit. * I'd be happy to consider other methods such as native plugins or whatever...
This guy looks like they're on to something.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
You know those stories about an algorithm that combines random jargon as Scientific Papers to see if they get published? I wonder if Bennett is just an advanced version... Most of his posts are asanine word salads.
the 64k square...
cell phones...
digital cameras...
web cams...
unrestricted internet access...
ding. category is:
stupid things to give teenagers.
... or it's just a hoax.
... it's the same as condoms for minors and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I don't read them, but I love reading the comments.
I mean seriously Slashdot, if you're going to go full mediocre then go full mediocre.
"the recipient is already being dishonest with you (saving pics without your permission) at the time that you send the picture
AND
the recipient is smart enough to figure out how to save Snapchat pictures without notifying you -- not that hard, but eliminates some people"
How small of set is that? It would be the intersection of people smart enough to use a smartphone and can not use Google
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
May as well, since the schools teach them to use condoms but doesn't tell them to have sex. May as well show them how SnapChat works and be done with the hassles.
Your High School Wants You To Install Snapchat
TL;BH
You missed out the words "It's my completely uninformed guess that..." from the front of your stupid clickbait headline.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Has anyone out there done any magical mystical text-processing statistical analysis to determine how many unique users slashdot actually has? Sometimes I feel like I'm lost in a sock drawer, but I don't actually know that's the case, and I wonder if I'm just being paranoid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think activism is called for. Remember when we all didn't go to /. for a week when they were trying to cram Beta down our throats? Well, we should not go to /. for 1 day each time a bennett post comes up. This may be the only way dice will understand we mean business.
Doesn't make any sense.
Have you managed to find the search functionality on the mobile version of /. 'cause I haven't. You'd assume it's there somewhere but it must be well hidden.
/. classic. Then again that's on a Nexus 7 so the classic version is quite usable, not sure if it would work so well on a <6'' mobile
Personally, using FF Mobile on Android, I just "Request Desktop Site" and get
PLEASE make the bad man stop! /whimpers
When I was going to high school, the message was,
"You shouldn't drink until you're 21, but if you do, have a sober driver for when you go home. Don't drink and drive, you'll kill somebody."
Of course, I went to HS back in the 90's.
This is a Feminist Cuntry.
In men's countries men can have young female children as brides.
Erate requires that we do so or else give up massive federal network subsidies. Among other requirements we must moderate all forums. Obviously impossible, so blame the feds that you can't use facebook.
Bennett, who did you interview or consult with when writing this article? If you can't name names, can you tell us the number of persons currently employed in the relevant areas you interviewed before writing this article?
And given the overwhelming evidence of how bad Police are in interacting with Students in a school environment, this is just a bad idea. Police dont belong in school and their spyware should be banned.
Fuck you gubment.
Well thats great now you can play games while in school without having any fear of teachers. :3
http://myandroidphone.in