Battleangel

Via Boing Boing … “Thirteen high school students in Pennsylvania are up against felony charges for having tinkered with school-issued laptops.”

Thirteen Kutztown Area High School students are facing felony charges for tampering with district-issued laptop computers.

According to parent testimony and confirmed by an otherwise vaguely-worded letter from the Kutztown Police Department, students got hold of the system’s secret administrative password and reconfigured their computers to achieve greater Internet and network access.

Some students used the newfound freedom to download music and inappropriate images from the Internet.

The more computer-savvy students began to disable the administrations’ ability to spy on the students’ computer use. For others, it became a game, trying to outsmart the administration and compete with fellow students who held the secret, Shrawder said.

“I don’t know why this is such a big deal,” he said. “At no time was the security of the server breached, and I don’t know that it has cost the taxpayers any money.”

Shrawder acknowledged that the students broke school rules, but he and the other parents protested what they believe is the heavy-handed approach to the problem.

Source: Berks-Mont Newspapers

I also find it interesting that the “iBook laptops were issued to all high school students last fall in an experimental program with Apple computers” and that the “program will cost up to $900,000 over the next four years.” Almost as interesting as the crude discipline that this school is using. Corporate trickery, beware …

And about the discipline, what is next, Battle Royale? Why don’t we just ship these kids off to some god forsaken island somewhere and let them kill each other. Maybe the kid left standing in the end have “learned” something. No, really, this is how stupid this seems from my perspective.