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Your (kids') schools are run by idiots, facsists, and maybe pedophiles.
Posts
From the district's statement:
So you can choose to believe them or not, but that's what they said.
Well yeah, that's why they say "The District has not used..." because it allows for unauthorized uses by administrators or other district personnel without official authorization. It's standard CYA.
And yet they managed to find a picture of a student engaged in nameless inappropriate behaviour which, it certainly appears, didn't involve stealing any laptops. Perhaps they would like to contend that it was sent to them by fairies. Or perhaps they define a "missing" laptop as one which is in the hands of a student who might be getting up to something juicy.
Any situation in which a camera in a teenager's bedroom can be remotely activated by adults is a bad situation.
pretty much.
What is this based on? Because according to the district, it did, and nobody else has provided any details.
You know what teens do with cameras on their pcs
If the kid had been stealing a laptop, he wouldn't have been disciplined for inappropriate behaviour. He would have been arrested. For theft.
If he had been disciplined instead, the first thing anybody would've said about the matter would have been "He stole a fucking laptop", not "We spied on him and caught him doing bad things. But nobody's going to tell you what bad things he was doing exactly. But we've never spied on anybody who didn't steal a laptop. You do the math."
Nope!
The lawsuit says only that the image in question was "a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff's personal laptop". It nowhere states that the image was taken by the security system.
As noted earlier in the thread, it's a very obvious possibility that the student took this picture himself, and it was later seized by the school, which is probably their right as the owners of the laptop and in accordance with their agreement.
The suit only alleges that the district had the ability to use the security system for purposes other than the purported one, never that they actually did.
I saw that, but there wasn't any reference, so I'm filing it with the rest of this stuff under "guesses".
Although my gut does tell me that "high school student takes incriminating picture with webcam, is later caught" ranks higher in probability than "school district uses security feature to spy on children at home, opening themselves to massive liability".
Does it say this was done without his knowledge.
Because if I click the button myself to take a picture of my junk with the webcam on the laptop, while at home, then I've done exactly what you just said right there.
I've yet to read anything confirming that the picture was taken remotely without the student's knowledge. I've read that this was possible, but not that it actually happened.
Feel free to link any details you might find.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, and I'm looking for a somewhat reputable source.
This is the post I was talking about. Posted today.
And specualtion tha the pic was taken by the student is mentioned and discounted in the post.
They also say they have disabled the feature and will be going over their routines.
That's... not what that post says. Or if it does, I don't know why.
I assume you're talking about
Which merely notes that the school immediately admitted that they did have the security software installed, and did have the capability to take pictures remotely. Nowhere in that post (or more importantly, in the letter it cites, which is its only source, and is by and large merely a reiteration of the district's immediate response which I referenced earlier) is there evidence that this specific picture was taken by the software.
The picture was taken by the camera on the laptop, it said so in the OP. Only the student and the school had the ability to take pictures from the laptop.
If the Student didn't take the picture, then who did?
Nowhere there does it say the student didn't take the picture.
Note the bolded ("only"). Some had speculated that the school was only able to get pictures from the hard drive taken by the student. This now seems to not be the case. See how those two sentences don't necessarily imply what did happen, but merely what could have happened?
The quote above states that either scenario is now plausible...it does not imply which is in fact the case.
This.
As I said before, I'd be very interested to know exactly what kind of recordkeeping prevents (or rather prevented) any IT staff that choose to from taking these pictures without the district's authorization. How do we know they weren't doing so? What safeguards were in place?
My guess is "we don't" and "none."
What about this part?
Which post? Can you quote it?
The actual boingboing article linked says no such thing.
Right. It's ambiguous.
You can read it either way.
Hard to tell which part the second bolded bit is referring to. Could be either, could be both.
Sloppy writing. And considering I have seen no other verification that the picture was taken remotely (feel free to come up with another source) I'm not taking this article as in any way authoritative...not only is it not sourced, but it's not even clear what the meaning is.
EDIT: The problem is that it's an "and" statement. So if A&B=C, and we know C', then that can mean A' or B'.
Now it's "relatively common" from half a dozen people on the entire internet? There are millions of Macbook owners out there who are just completely unfazed by the fact that their webcam indicator LED randomly turns on without any apparent reason? And, despite the fact that this is "relatively common", there's no explanation (from Apple or other sources) that makes sense other than malware which behaves similarly to this school's theft protection software?
The only other explanation even attempted is that it turns on when OSX polls USB devices; but according to USB Prober, the iSight camera polling rate is 250hz. If the LED were turning on every time the camera was polled by the OS, it would never be off.
Despite Wired's article being very accusatory and even misrepresenting what was in the filing, we are still at the same point. The filing just says 1) A boy was accused of wrongdoing because of an image taken by the webcam, 2) later it was verified that the school has the ability to take pictures remotely. It doesn't connect the two.
But is also focuses a lot on the issue of "the fact that you sent these things home with our kids and never mentioned anywhere that you had the ability to snap pictuers with them is fudd up!" which is true even if it was an innocent misunderstanding and they were never used other than in thefts.
"Look at him, he's popping dozens of pills out of that M&Ms bag!"
M&Ms... speak english, man, I can't keep up with every drug code-name the kids come up with these days!
I bet he was injecting weed and listening to that damn new-fangled jazz music.
How are you turning A and B = C into A or B = C? I think you are confused by the writing; the journalist is trying to say that they had at first believed the school was only able to get information off the students' hard drives. Then the "and" comes in that doesn't really add anything but is actually more of an aside. He is basically stating the same thing, saying that they believed the picture that the school obtained was saved onto the hard drive and that is how the school got a hold of it - because they believed that was the only way the school was able to surveil onto the laptops. Then at the end it says this now seems not to have been the case (meaning the school got the picture from some other form of surveillance), which is pretty clear cut to me.
I'm an education graduate student in Philly, and my tuesday night class is taught by the Principle of the Lower Merion School District.
I look forward to the current events portion of class this week.
Any gamers in the Danville, PA area? PM me if you're interested in some tabletop gaming.
i cant wait to hear what he has to say, though it will probably boil down to "Due to an ongoing legal dispute i will not be commenting on the matter at this time"
would be nice to get some direct commentary though
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It appears his commentary will be "BRB FBI"
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Yeah, that kid's on a one way trip to Scranton, PA - drug capital of the world.
Which is ludicrous, but it's the sort of ludicrousness we're regrettably used to from schools, and still fits into the scenario where the security software was not used for nefarious purposes.
Another article siad the cameras were turned on once to find missing laptops, only to find out they were mistakingly placed in the wrong room. They did get pics of students and teachers without them knowing about it while doing so.