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Living Room / Re: High School Student Laptop Policy
« Last post by mouser on August 20, 2014, 09:49 AM »+1 for what App's post.
Use this laptop as a lesson to teach your kids that "free gifts" are to be treated with a healthy dose of suspicion, and with your guard up.
And in all fairness, some credit has to be given to the school for finding a way to get a laptop in the hands of every kid to assist with school work -- though it would be much better if they let each parent decide whether they wanted the kids to be able to install what they want but take responsibility for maintenance, or leave it as is and have the school do it. And I'm guessing the signed legal stuff about no privacy rights may be as much about school officials wanting to protect their ass in worst-case scenario, rather than real expectations of spying on kids, but you never know.
Hopefully the school will have an option of providing just the 3rd party commercial software needed for schoolwork (assuming there is any) to kids who have their own laptops.
It does make you wonder how long until some clever kid at that school starts offering a service to:
1. Make a drive image backup of the laptop when it is newly delivered.
2. Wipe the OS clean and installs a new operating system free of any lockdown or monitoring software.
3. Install the original image as a virtual machine if there is any needed non-free software on it.
4. Restore image when it's time to hand it back
Use this laptop as a lesson to teach your kids that "free gifts" are to be treated with a healthy dose of suspicion, and with your guard up.
And in all fairness, some credit has to be given to the school for finding a way to get a laptop in the hands of every kid to assist with school work -- though it would be much better if they let each parent decide whether they wanted the kids to be able to install what they want but take responsibility for maintenance, or leave it as is and have the school do it. And I'm guessing the signed legal stuff about no privacy rights may be as much about school officials wanting to protect their ass in worst-case scenario, rather than real expectations of spying on kids, but you never know.
Hopefully the school will have an option of providing just the 3rd party commercial software needed for schoolwork (assuming there is any) to kids who have their own laptops.
It does make you wonder how long until some clever kid at that school starts offering a service to:
1. Make a drive image backup of the laptop when it is newly delivered.
2. Wipe the OS clean and installs a new operating system free of any lockdown or monitoring software.
3. Install the original image as a virtual machine if there is any needed non-free software on it.
4. Restore image when it's time to hand it back
