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Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

philly.com

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Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#21

Post by Qz »

cperciva wrote: post #17
s-phi-nl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: Who will guard the guards? The people.

Translation: It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools. The people For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).

I didn't take Latin and I still understood it. I don't think the translation was really necessary, more a statement 'I know Latin'.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#23

Post by marr »

sketerpot wrote: post #18
cperciva wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools. The people For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.

Ideas are expressed differently in different languages and there are often important nuances, where the real message is to be found, which are lost. For instance, it might have more of the intended effect to translate it as: "Who is watching the watchers?". A little paranoia here or there... today, the idea of 'guards' is pretty benign.

That Latin is a foundational language for most of the West is also an important consideration. It enables people to understand written or verbal communications which use words they haven't encountered before... Something like being able to understand a programming language you've never written in by virtue of its apparent syntax and flow control. A good illustration might be the use of "for".. you have for each, for x in y, or for(;;). Knowing the "root", "for", pretty much explains how to decode the ()'s contents in the lesser English-like C style.

Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#24

Post by redrobot5050 »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #6

I'm glad that somebody is still tracking this story, and it hasn't just dropped on the ground. Too often, it seems, a news story outrages us, but the furor quickly dies down. In the end, nobody even notices the ritual scapegoat. A little while back, somebody proposed here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183587 ) a web app that would allow us to follow a news story entire life. This reminds of that, and why it…

One reason the furor over this died down so quickly is that different stories reported the facts differently. My friends and I all debated what had really happened. The student believed the webcam had taken pictures of him acting inappropriate without his knowledge or consent (and no parents were notified of this 'feature' of school-provided laptops).

However, it was not clear in initial reports if the student had actually done something and was spied on, or if he had taken pictures and shared them in school. Some schools have policies where students can be disciplined for violations off school grounds in instances of bullying or disseminating "ssext messages" from their peers. It was not clear, from the reporting, if this was the case.

The fact that the media is now reporting the facts, and the schools thought it was actually a good idea to spy on high school students in their own homes, shows a kind of unparalleled stupidity in both a legal standpoint and technological one.

Also, considering the statistic on how many children of the ages 14-18 "sext" one another, this software, the school's servers, the IT staff and the administrators could all be considered to be part of a child pornography network, if in fact any of those kids decided to "privately model" for another student using their laptop. Aside from the civil aspect of it, I would be contacting my state's AG to investigate whether or not any of those laws were broken.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#25

Post by billybob »

DanielStraight wrote: post #19
influx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so there should be jail-time involved for the person administering this system.

The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime. The administrators of this system intentionally photographed minors in their bedrooms without their knowledge and without any consent. What the photos show is irrelevant. The obsession about the act over the intent is why we have highschool kids getting booked on child pornography charges for receiving na…

"The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime."

Absolutely. The intent was to photograph kids in their own homes and without their knowledge. That is absolutely criminal. If there were no nude photos taken, it's just by chance. They should be prosecuted just as if there were.

If you put a gun to somebody's head and pull the trigger, whether the gun jams or fires shouldn't matter, legally. You acted with murderous intent.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#26

Post by billybob »

Freebytes wrote: post #13
cubicle67 wrote: post #2

how do you get a society where something like this is uncovered, and half of the comments are abusing the family that uncovered it? oh, and the past tense of shine is shone :)

There is a tendency in society for people to blame the victim. You hear about rape crimes, and people ask what the girl was wearing with the idea that somehow she was 'asking for it.' I try to view the situation from both sides as much as possible, but I do not advocate blaming the vicitim in most circumstances. In this particular case, it is stupid for the school system to even implement this policy in the first pla…

Besides all this, why the heck do they need pictures to track a device? A picture of a bedroom doesn't even tell you where the laptop is. A GPS reading does, and is far less invasive (though I would still insist on the students being notified about GPS tracking).

Their 'solution' is incompetent AND malicious.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#27

Post by hga »

cperciva wrote: post #20
sketerpot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought. Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding. Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language. Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much…

For that matter, I've read that the original English translators of Japanese primary sources translated the "dirty bits" into Latin.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#28

Post by jplewicke »

sketerpot wrote: post #18
cperciva wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools. The people For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

So that the world will have more Perl hackers: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... .

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#29

Post by CWuestefeld »

DanielStraight wrote: post #19
influx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so there should be jail-time involved for the person administering this system.

The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime. The administrators of this system intentionally photographed minors in their bedrooms without their knowledge and without any consent. What the photos show is irrelevant. The obsession about the act over the intent is why we have highschool kids getting booked on child pornography charges for receiving na…

The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter.

This is incorrect, because incentives are important. If we don't hold people responsible for their actions, even when their actions are due to negligence or incompetence, then we build a society that is intentionally negligent and incompetent.

When (hypothetically) some teenage girl's nude photos wind up on the web, I don't think that a "sorry, that was an accident" is going to make her feel much better. When people are injured due to the actions of others, the injured parties are owed some redress.

We don't want incompetents running things, so we need to make sure that they are weeded out. Now, it may be that "oops" is a mitigating factor, but it is in no way an excuse.

A friend of mine was doing a tax protest many years ago, handing out fliers in front of the post office. He was arrested for this. He later sued the town and the police officers for violating his civil rights. He won several thousand dollars from the town, but the police officers got off. The explanation was that it wasn't their fault because they hadn't been trained for this scenario. Now, knowing that this is a viable excuse, our police officers have every incentive to avoid training. If they get trained, they're liable for their behavior, but staying ignorant is a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily happen.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#30

Post by pyre »

blantonl wrote: post #3

where there is smoke, there is fire. Sounds to me like what initially was an ability to view students working in school quickly digressed into illegal abuse of the deployment. That district's insurance company must be terrified at this point, because lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork to jump on this one.

> where there is smoke, there is fire.

I will always hate that phrase, because it's one of the phrases my dad used to 'prove' that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

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