Sh1mmer – An exploit capable of unenrolling enterprise-managed Chromebooks

Except then they're going to spread the exploit. Kids don't keep their mouths shut. Then word goes around Jimmy knows how to kill the lock and get Roblox again on his Chromebook and suddenly there's a problem because now the flash drives and instructions are pared down and now half your class's Chromebooks just went unmanaged. They won't think or understand the repercussions (like not being able to suddenly start a managed test), just that they got their games back, and now it becomes the teacher's problem to troubleshoot again...

Trust me, I know. I was one of those kids. Except back in my time I was running my own RDP server to get around the proxy servers while also hosting a Web server that had Ultrasurf on it for the others.

The one thing I didn't share or open my mouth about? My exploit to kill Faronics Insight. Sure, my machine would suddenly show 'offline', but the lab monitors inherently trusted me in general ;)

(And to Mrs. Remington, if you're out there on HN somehow, I'm sorry I was your little IT nightmare!)

Quill pens were replaced in the early to mid 19th century by dip pens with a manufactured metal nib. The much reduced cost compared to quills gave a huge boost to literacy.

Fountain pens were an older invention, but poor reliability and cost kept them out of common use before the early 20th century.

I doubt either progression was controversial. Basic penmanship is similar with all of these.

Ballpoint pens gained popularity around the 1960s. That was (and is) controversial -- ballpoint pens require much more pressure, so they are less comfortable for lengthy writing, and it's more difficult to write neatly.

Children in some countries are therefore still required to use fountain pens at school.

I think an important addendum here is that the environment of a lab, and the environment of an uncontrolled classroom are different. So it's entirely possible that the actual real-world effects might be even more different than what we see here. While I agree that the effect of writing is well documented, I still find that the external factors around the act of writing get in the way of properly tapping into that added benefit.

Where I went to college, certain math and science classes were taught on NeXT workstations. I'll admit that staying focused on class was a challenge for my 17-year-old self, but having in-class access to tools like Mathematica and being able to manipulate equations and simulations with the teacher really made understanding how the math/physics worked so much easier.

I started taking meeting notes on a succession of Palm and then Compaq handhelds before I bought my first Tablet PC with OneNote in 2005. It was a tremendously valuable tool both professionally and academically. For example, this is a page of notes from a Tandberg certification class I took in 2006:

https://imgur.com/a/1XgNOoi

Sharing my notes was trivial. I could print to PDF and email to the rest of my team in a minute. Organizing my notes was equally simple. It's been nearly two decades, and I was able to locate these notes in seconds. Even though they're handwritten, OneNote can index my notes. It's pretty amazing.

Around the same time, I took an ITIL certification class. The teacher was someone like you, and he demanded we put away our computers for class. I'd love to share with you the detailed notes I took, but they're buried somewhere in a drawer full of paper notebooks. It'd probably take me an hour or two to locate those notes, scan them, and upload them somewhere. My employer spent thousands on that class, but if I have ITIL questions in my various IT operations roles, I have to google reference material instead of using what I created for myself. It's such a ridiculous waste of time and effort that it still frustrates me, ~15 years later.

Chromebooks don't even have a Terminal for the kids. Vim's great, but VScode with Jupyter Notebook support would make the computers we bought for them into great offline calculators, too.

VSCode on a Chromebook requires VMs and Containers which require "Developer Tools" and "Powerwash"; or the APK repack of VSCodium that you can't even sideload and manually update sometimes (because it's not on the 15-30% cut, and must use their payment solution, app store with static analysis and code signing at upload).

AFAIU, Chromebooks with Family Link and Chromebooks for Education do not have a Terminal, bash, git, VMs (KVM), Containers (Docker/Podman/LXC/LXD/gvisor), third-party repos with regular security updates, or even Python; which isn't really Linux (and Windows, Mac, and Linux do already at present support such STEM for Education use cases).

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168491 :

> Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-packages.html#lo...

There's also MambaLite, which is part of the emscripten-forge project; along with BinderLite. https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes (Edit: Micropip or Mambalite or picomamba or Zig. : "A 116kb WASM of Blink that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376094 )

It looks like there are now tests for VScode in the default Power washable 'penguin' Debian VM that you get with Chromebook Developer Tools; but still the kids are denied VMs and Containers or local accounts (with kid-safe DoH/DoT at lesat) and so they can't run VScode locally on the Chromebooks that we bought for them.

Why do I need "Developer Tools" access to run VScode and containers on a Chromebook; but not on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer? If containers are good enough for our workloads hosted in the cloud, they should be good enough for local coding and calculating in e.g. Python. https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...