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You can’t make this stuff up:
A retired veteran and candidate for Oklahoma State School Superintendent says he wants to make schools safer by creating bulletproof textbooks.
Bill Crozier says the books could give students and teachers a fighting chance if there’s a shooting at their school.
Can you just imagine the movie-plot scenarios going through his head? Does he really think this is a smart way to spend security dollars?
I just shake my head in wonder….
According to CNN:
Besides the contact restrictions, all users—not just those 14 and 15—will have the option to make only partial profiles available to those not already on their friends list.
All users also will get an option to prevent contact from people outside their age group. Currently, they may only choose to require that a person know their e-mail or last name first; that will remain an option to those 16 and over, even as it becomes mandatory for those younger.
MySpace also will beef up its ad-targeting technology, so that it can avoid displaying gambling and other adult-themed ads on minors’ profile pages and target special public-service announcements to them.
Honestly, this all sounds a lot more like cover-your-ass security than real security: MySpace securing itself from lawsuits.
“Safety experts” seem to agree that it won’t improve security much.
I’ve already written about merchants using classical music to discourage loitering. Young people don’t like the music, so they don’t stick around.
Here’s a new twist: high-frequency noise that children and teenagers can hear but adults can’t:
The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.
At first, members of the usual crowd tried to gather as normal, repeatedly going inside the store with their fingers in their ears and “begging me to turn it off,” Gough said. But he held firm and neatly avoided possible aggressive confrontations: “I told them it was to keep birds away because of the bird flu epidemic.”
At least he didn’t claim it was an anti-terrorism security measure.
Thirteen Pennsylvania high-school kids—Kutztown 13—are being charged with felonies:
They’re being called the Kutztown 13—a group of high schoolers charged with felonies for bypassing security with school-issued laptops, downloading forbidden internet goodies and using monitoring software to spy on district administrators.
The students, their families and outraged supporters say authorities are overreacting, punishing the kids not for any heinous behavior—no malicious acts are alleged—but rather because they outsmarted the district’s technology workers….
The trouble began last fall after the district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The computers were loaded with a filtering program that limited Internet access. They also had software that let administrators see what students were viewing on their screens.
But those barriers proved easily surmountable: The administrative password that allowed students to reconfigure computers and obtain unrestricted Internet access was easy to obtain. A shortened version of the school’s street address, the password was taped to the backs of the computers.
The password got passed around and students began downloading such forbidden programs as the popular iChat instant-messaging tool.
At least one student viewed pornography. Some students also turned off the remote monitoring function and turned the tables on their elders_ using it to view administrators’ own computer screens.
There’s more to the story, though. Here’s some good commentary on the issue:
What the parents don’t mention—but the school did in a press release—is that it wasn’t as if the school came down with the Hammer of God out of nowhere.
These kids were caught and punished for doing this stuff, and their parents informed.
Over and over.
Quoth the release:
“Unfortunately, after repeated warnings and disciplinary actions, a few students continued to misuse the school-issued laptops to varying degrees. The disciplinary actions included detentions, in-school suspensions, loss of Internet access, and loss of computer privileges. After each disciplinary action, parents received either written notification or telephone calls.”
What was the parents’ reaction those disciplinary actions? Some of them complained that—despite signing a document agreeing to the acceptable use policy—the kids should be able to do whatever they wanted to with the free machines.
“We signed it, but we didn’t mean it”?
Yes, the kids should be punished. No, a felony comviction is not the way to punish them.
The problem is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Breaking the rules is what kids do. Society needs to deal with that, yes, but it needs to deal with that in a way that doesn’t ruin lives. Deterrence is critical if we are to ever have a lawful society on the internet, but deterrence has to come from rational prosecution. This simply isn’t rational.
EDITED TO ADD (2 Sep): It seems that charges have been dropped.
Amazingly, this works:
To clear out undesirables, opera and classical music have been piped into Canadian parks, Australian railway stations, 7-Eleven parking lots and, most recently, London Underground stops.
According to most reports, it works. Figures from the British capital released in January showed robberies in the subway down by 33 percent, assaults on staff by 25 percent and vandalism of trains and stations by 37 percent. Sources in other locales have reported fewer muggings and drug deals. London authorities now plan to expand the playing of Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel and opera (sung by Pavarotti) from three tube stations to an additional 35.
It’s not new:
But as Kahle points out, “It’s well known within the industry that classical music discourages teen loitering. It was first used by 7-11 stores across the country over a decade ago.”
Note that this does not reduce loitering, but moves it around. But if you’re the owner of a 7-Eleven, you don’t care if kids are loitering at the store down the block. You just don’t want them loitering at your store.
Salon has an interesting article about parents turning to technology to monitor their children, instead of to other people in their community.
“What is happening is that parents now assume the worst possible outcome, rather than seeing other adults as their allies,” says Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at England’s University of Kent and the author of “Paranoid Parenting.” “You never hear stories about asking neighbors to care for kids or coming together as community. Instead we become insular, privatized communities, and look for
technological solutions to what are really social problems.” Indeed, while our parents’ generation was taught to “honor thy neighbor,” the mantra for today’s kids is “stranger danger,” and the message is clear—expect the worst of anyone unfamiliar—anywhere, and at any time.
This is security based on fear, not reason. And I think people who act this way make their families less safe.
EDITED TO ADD: Here’s a link to the book Paranoid Parenting.
In Beyond Fear I wrote: “Many children are taught never to talk to strangers, an extreme precaution with minimal security benefit.”
In talks, I’m even more direct. I think “don’t talk to strangers” is just about the worst possible advice you can give a child. Most people are friendly and helpful, and if a child is in distress, asking the help of a stranger is probably the best possible thing he can do.
This advice would have helped Brennan Hawkins, the 11-year-old boy who was lost in the Utah wilderness for four days.
The parents said Brennan had seen people searching for him on horse and ATV, but avoided them because of what he had been taught.
“He stayed on the trail, he avoided strangers,” Jody Hawkins said. “His biggest fear, he told me, was that someone would steal him.”
They said they hadn’t talked to Brennan and his four siblings about what they should do about strangers if they were lost. “This may have come to a faster conclusion had we discussed that,” Toby Hawkins said.
In a world where good guys are common and bad guys are rare, assuming a random person is a good guy is a smart security strategy. We need to help children develop their natural intuition about risk, and not give them overbroad rules.
Also in Beyond Fear, I wrote:
As both individuals and a society, we can make choices about our security. We can choose more security or less security. We can choose greater impositions on our lives and freedoms, or fewer impositions. We can choose the types of risks and security solutions we’re willing to tolerate and decide that others are unacceptable.
As individuals, we can decide to buy a home alarm system to make ourselves more secure, or we can save the money because we don’t consider the added security to be worth it. We can decide not to travel because we fear terrorism, or we can decide to see the world because the world is wonderful. We can fear strangers because they might be attackers, or we can talk to strangers because they might become friends.
A high-school student used a hardware keystroke logger—the undetectable kind that sits between the keyboard and the computer—to steal exams in order to sell them.
Officials said the 16-year-old boy hooked up a keystroke decoder to a teacher’s computer and downloaded exams in November.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.