[devsquid]

Man................. You raise a good point. I read the headline and was pretty stoked to see my country reinvesting in itself. But this is US, fuck.

I think iPads are wonderful devices, but to think a school would buy them for their students just seems stupid and short sighted. I think Chromebooks offer the most compelling class room solution. They are hyper secure, come with a keyboard, and extremely easy to manage and share.

[sandworm101]

Computer equipment for schools is all about limiting how they can be used. iPad are given trackers. Desktops are locked behind content filters. The last thing anyone wants is some kid running unauthorized code.

[bobwaycott]

I think the last thing anyone wants in a school system is some kid accessing porn, or something judged to be equally offensive. I see school tech policies each year. They're never worried about, and rarely ever mention anything that could arguably be interpreted as, prohibiting running unauthorized code. That would require school administrators to know what unauthorized code is.

[ethbro]

My curriculum: give a student a laptop with a pornography filter compiled with debugging symbols, a compiler, and a book on reverse engineering and exploiting.

Never underestimate the power of hormone-driven learning.

[qb45]

And level 2: implement simple web crawler and combine it with the filter in creative way :)

[sandworm101]

Can I download a linux distro via a bittorrent client, then boot into that distro? Can run metasploit on a school machine attached to the school network?

There are plenty of things worse these days than kids downloading porn. Top of the list: kids creating porn. Terrorism, bomb threats, malware, cyberstalking, organizing flashmobs ... there are plenty of ways for kids to cause real trouble for a school far beyond them downloading adult content.

[qb45]

Guess what, I did run metasploit (and more) on school network. Nobody died.

And the fact is, if more people started exploiting things, things would get fixed. It's not 2000 anymore when neither vendors nor users gave any fuck about security. Nowadays metasploit doesn't turn you into as much of a god as it used to :)

And "creating porn, bomb threats, cyberstalking" - come on, anybody who wants that, can do that without school-provided computers. And yet few people actually do.

[bobwaycott]

I think you completely misunderstood what I was saying.

[qb45]

Or something like Raspberry Pi. Reimage the SD card from know good master and the machine is good to go.

Who cares if kids install new software or screw something. I'd argue that this is what they actually should be doing, instead of running some crap overpriced "educational software" on locked-down hardware.