Re: [Fsfe-uk] Linux for Kids Briefing

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 10:21 +0100, Ian Lynch wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 09:48, PFJ wrote:
> > If the lock was fundamentally broken so that if someone (say) turns the
> > handle the wrong way (which effectively is all that my son did), then a
> > parent would have the right to say "you brought in on yourself as it's
> > well known that that type of lock is rubbish and how is a 6 year to know
> > the problem".
> 
> Better to point it out though as a possible problem than actually
> trashing the office to prove it ;-)

We are talking about kids here, though :)

I have vivid memories of the "antics" of individuals - not even those
who you might think are "hackers" - during secondary school (I.T. at
primary school - for me - consisted of limited time on BBC Bs :), on
both DOS and Windows networks. Mostly, this would be stupid stuff, but
aided by poor security. For example, when teachers threatened to find
out which person was printing pornographic images on the laser printer,
the kid simply logged in using the account of another who had moved
school the year before: their account was still active, but unused that
year, so still had the default password. Teachers found the culprit
printing the porn, and found that he had left school the previous year
and was a couple of hundred miles away.

If kids find problems with PCs, or backdoors, you can bet that they will
exploit them. I saw it in secondary school right through to sixth form,
where these kids aren't necessarily terribly interested in computers at
all. They take the "Tomorrow's World" screensaver, remove the video of
the baby swimming in water and replace it with captures from the webcam
of someone doing something stupid. The truly destructive ones open the
shutters on floppy disks, put some staples through the platter, and pop
the disks in the "new floppies" pile. 

Computer hardware is expensive, and it's delicate in many ways. Software
is definitely delicate. In order not to have huge costs running school
IT, the school is either going to look for something that is disposable
or is robust (or, preferably, both). The cost will only go down so far;
they need something which is rock solid. They rarely have many staff
dedicated to IT, so you kind of have to assume that they're not going to
be able to maintain things.

Cheers,

Alex.