Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 204 posts

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#181

Post by alex_lav »

sirspacey wrote: post #174
JenrHywy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be more sympathetic to this line of thinking if I didn't have a 16yo who's going to be lucky to get through high school because he can't focus in class. I would have been the same at his age, if someone had plopped an internet connected device on my desk and told me to focus on school work.

At this age boys go through a profound neurological change. Check out “The Male Brain” I’ve advised a lot of parents at this stage, the prescription is always the same: Let go of extrinsic motivation (their brains are severely muted against it) Focus on cultivating empty time & space to find intrinsic motivation As a dad myself, even with this knowledge, it was scary to take off expectations and let my boys flounder…

> Let go of extrinsic motivation (their brains are severely muted against it). Focus on cultivating empty time & space to find intrinsic motivation

It's funny. My school had block scheduling, so four coursers per day at 80 minutes a piece, and a really insanely large catalogue of electives. We were the only school in the area and some kids' bus ride was 30 minutes or more, so it was very very well funded and had a lot of trade programs. I did a lot of dabbling. I always did horribly in my actual required classes, but on the flipside, found a lot of passion and fulfillment in the classes where, for the entirety of the semester, you kind of just had a single project that you were working on by yourself. You showed up to the room to check in and then just used the facilities to kind of do your own thing.

I did all kinds of stuff. An electronics class, photography, jewelry making, metalcrafting, shop, programming. I actually believe it's a huge part of why I was able to even finish school in the first place.

> But for both of them, as well as for the many other young men whose parents went this path, their son found their “thing”

I started programming when I was 11, so even high school felt like kind of a joke, as I knew what I was going to do and also knew that high school for the most part wasn't teaching me it. Generally kind of a distraction.

> but that just delays this process to their 20s

I would say I still haven't really had this process. For better or worse, I guess.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#183

Post by marssaxman »

Dalewyn wrote: post #74
marssaxman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Easy, no devices in their hands after bedtime. This is no longer so easy after your kid realizes they can simply wait until you fall asleep, then sneak into your room and filch the machine from wherever you've stashed it.

Assuming the parents are competent, that only happens once .

Well, thank you very much for that helpful bit of advice.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#184

Post by kbelder »

gnicholas wrote: post #75

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked beca…

Don't worry about blocking it via firewall; just log traffic, make it against the rules, and punish kids when they're caught?

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#185

Post by GoblinSlayer »

gnicholas wrote: post #75

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked beca…

To do it the lazy way: 1) change your password to hunter2, 2) use hunter2 on byod laptop, 3) revert your password.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#186

Post by gnicholas »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #185
gnicholas wrote: post #75

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked beca…

To do it the lazy way: 1) change your password to hunter2, 2) use hunter2 on byod laptop, 3) revert your password.

That doesn't sound like the lazy way to me!

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#187

Post by faeriechangling »

paxys wrote: post #110

Trying to get through hardware/software locks, content filters, firewalls, spyware etc. at school is usually the first experience kids have with "hacker" culture. For a lot of them (myself included) this eventually leads up to a real career in the tech industry. So godspeed, all you young rebels.

This made me nostalgic for my skiddie days where I broke Faronics Deepfreeze with some exploit somebody on the internet made.

I had my own laptop. Absolutely refused to ask for a replacement for it even when the hinge died because the exploit was patched in the new version of deepfreeze the school was using.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#189

Post by faeriechangling »

prepend wrote: post #149
notRobot wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you know this, but trouble focusing could stem from many issues, the vast majority of which can be treated. ADHD is a big one, but there's others too, some behavioural. If you haven't already seen one, I'd book an appointment with a psychiatrist and/or a psychologist. I wish my parents had done so when I was the student with trouble focusing so I could have received the help I desperately needed but never go…

Trouble could also stem from having an attention sucking device in front of them at all times. Suggesting ADHD to parents any time kids struggle is such a comical cliche. Of course it could be that, but when you hear hooves outside the door think horses not zebras. It’s like if there was a tv playing in every classroom. Imagine how distracting that is. I remember reading Ender’s Game and how the kids used tablets and…

My experience with ADHD in school was getting diagnosed with it. Being told to take my medicine because it really works.

So I spent a week not taking the medication and then saying I did. Got positive feedback and praise. Spent a week taking the medication and saying I didn't, got criticism and a disappointed condescending tone. The medication cost was high and a burden my family could not really afford, and since the teacher couldn't seem to tell the difference, I stopped taking the medication and received much criticism.

Directly before my ADHD diagnosis I was transferred out of a class due to extreme neglect and abuse, and the schools just chalked up my subsequent struggles to my brain being fucked up due to bad genes. When I did present an actual chronic health issue and several symptoms around the same time, given the school had the hypothesis "this child is doing badly in school because they have a health condition" you might think they would pay attention to this new evidence, but they already had their excuse so they just accused me of malingering.

I've been VERY cynical about the paediatric mental health system for a long time because there's strong conflicts of interest, I don't think the system is open to the idea of falsifying its own theories, and people aren't meaningfully measuring student outcomes after they experiment with their theories. I specifically detest how amphetamine and methylphenidate access is gate-kept until a doctor calls you "disordered", and it's treated as common ethical sense to force people to adopt an insulting label if they want access to certain medications.

Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

#190

Post by faeriechangling »

gnicholas wrote: post #75

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked beca…

There's actually many solutions to this.

>You can use certificate based authentication instead of password based. Certificate based authentication COMPLETELY prevents this attack because the student's computer never sees the private key which actually authenticates the teacher to bypass

>You can use time based one-time passwords/HMAC instead of using certificates, with a teacher pulling up an app

>You can have the computer have its password managed by a centralised store which has the ability to rotate said password. When the teacher needs to unlock a computer, they request that computers password from the centralised store, and after it's used, the password is then rotated.

>What I would recommend the most, is just giving each teacher their own credentials and sending the teacher an alert when their credentials were used.

You could easily lock this down, but I honestly don't think it's a good idea. I think using weak security measures actually has a merit, as it grants the teacher some degree of flexibility in how to deal with things, and it grants the kids a greater degree of freedom and education in both what weak security looks like and how cracking security just because it's weak might not be the best idea.

Post reply on HN