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Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

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Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

#251

Post by toast0 »

i_am_jl wrote: post #40
car_analogy wrote: post #3

> I bought him a Chromebook for schoolwork, but also for other private things. When we logged in, the system installed GoGuardian monitoring software on the Chromebook without notice or permission. Can you give more details? Logged in to what? I don't know how Chromebooks work, but I take your description to mean logged into a webpage, which allowed it to install arbitrary software on your computer - this sounds like…

>Edit: On rereading the post, I suppose you mean logged in to Google Classroom. Oh, if only. They mean logged into ChromeOS with a Google account. There is an option to log in as a Guest, but the machine is so unbelievably gimped in Guest mode I can't imagine anyone actually using it like that permanently.

> There is an option to log in as a Guest, but the machine is so unbelievably gimped in Guest mode I can't imagine anyone actually using it like that permanently.

My mother in law was using her Chromebook in guest mode for a while [1], and the only things that didn't work were saving passwords (including wifi passwords, but her home wifi is open). But she only use Chrome OS to use Chrome. I'd guess the play store doesn't work in guest mode, and wifi passwords might get annoying, but what else is missing?

[1] trouble with passwords, with a side of chrome os owner account was @ymail.com, but also an alias for @gmail.com and chrome os/google changed at some point so that logging in with either would login as the @gmail that wasn't the device owner... but fixing that didn't fix the underlying problem that someone likes to change her password rather than find her password book, and then her password book is out of date.

Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

#252

Post by toast0 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #204
wildzzz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its been a few years since Chromebooks have had swappable disks. There used to be some high priced models that supported user upgrades but then the OEMs figured out that no one wants to spend a fortune on a Chromebook so everything is soldered in now. Since what is being installed isn't actually malware but just some enterprise spyware, the easiest solution is to just wipe it, log in as a user unassociated with the s…

> There used to be some high priced models that supported user upgrades but then the OEMs figured out that no one wants to spend a fortune on a Chromebook so everything is soldered in now. It can't be that simple because I had a pretty cheap model a few years ago that had a replaceable sata m.2 drive.

I think it's mostly that emmc is now supported and cheaper than having m.2 storage. Soldered storage may be more reliable than connectorized storage (at least that's what Apple claims), although it's harder to replace when it breaks. OTOH, it may not be economical to debug a Chromebook storage issue, if powerwash fails, and USB rescue fails, you've spent too much technician time, so just replace the device.

Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

#253

Post by girvo »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #116

> I bought him a Chromebook for schoolwork, but also for other private things. When we logged in... This is why you need to pay attention to the technology choices that you make, and that your schools make. Chromebooks are designed from the ground up to be locked-down dystopian spyware once you "log in" to them with a specific Google account. For heaven's sake stop buying any more Chromebooks. The correct solution he…

Sadly, my cousins' school forces them to have Chromebooks. Its required. So I ensured they know to never use it for their personal stuff, it's purely a school work device. Such a waste, but oh well. I gave them both Pi 400s for them to use for personal things instead

Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

#254

Post by ikiris »

magicalist wrote: post #158
mfreydavis wrote: post #86

I work for a school district (not CPS) with about 2000 deployed Chromebooks and you're likely running into one of two things. 1) You somehow 'enrolled' the device into the Chromebook management. This is hard to do by mistake but if you do, essentially puts the device under the control of the school district. It also uses up a license on their end. We only allow particular IT only accounts to enroll devices. 2) You're…

This response should be higher instead of the useless armchair lawyering :) With GoGuardian, though, I think device level management is common? It's BYOD but it essentially becomes the district's device (and all the other accounts disabled) until you remove the managed account. It can't happen by accident, though, it tells you very clearly you're making it a managed device. It sucks that schools are using enterprise…

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Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

#257

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #222
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One solution could be to setup the laptop with a personal email account and configure the school email address to forward everything.

Not really applicable with the Chromebook, but in general I guess the safest thing is to log in to the school stuff only from a VM? (At least that way the damage is limited.)

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: My kid's school installed spyware and I can't remove it

#259

Post by mise_en_place »

I have bypassed many similar spywares in my youth, typically anticheats when I wanted to poke memory addresses with certain values. Have you tried rooting the chrome book?

You'll need some way to observe the network activity of the spyware agent, and then reverse engineer the agent to see how it phones home (probably valgrind or gdb will suffice, assuming they didnt pack the agent). From there you can either inject your custom code with LD_PRELOAD or write a simple shared library injector.

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