23 ms·

Tangentially related, but his leads to an issue I try to stress this to my students all the damn time, but they just don't care. Like, they all try to download

Tangentially related, but his leads to an issue I try to stress this to my students all the damn time, but they just don't care. Like, they all try to download any free VPN that'll connect so they can play Fortnite during school, without ever looking to see what they give away. Hell, I'm not convinced they wouldn't consent even if it was told, as long as they get their fix while at school. There's a huge problem nobody wants to try to fix.

snazz 8y ago
From the students’ perspective, the reward is greater than the obscure potential consequence. I have certainly noticed this with adults, as well, so it seems like fairly basic human behavior.
roguecoder 8y ago
The arms race between school administrators and people who wanted to connect to things they shouldn't has been going on for decades and is one of the major sources of sys admins. The problem here is that installing a VPN is far too easy and doesn't teach children where /etc/host is located.
- morpheuskafka 8y ago
  At my school, they have default "teacher" for external events that use school facilities, usernames and passwords based on each school code that bypass all filters, but somehow no one has found it leading to insane workarounds. Sadly, people used to use web.archive.org as a workaround (like dude, just go home and look stuff up?) so they blocked it, which breaks a lot of research and sources on Wikipedia.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
True, but as long as they don't install a trusted root as well damage is still far more limited. Still a major privacy issue (and huge shout out to you for passing this knowledge on to my generation, sadly many of us really don't care) though. With this, however, the possibilities are really limitless. For example, the simple act of filling out a job application online, common for students to do, gives FB your SSN and enough info to open a line of credit. How was this data stored? Who at Facebook had access to the SSNs and nude photos and the like that was certainly collected with a program like this of any scale? Were the procedures to delete it? How were the systems secured? And while I doubt even FB would do this, a truly lawless bad actor could use those logins without tripping security alerts because you would have used one of their IPs to sign in before. Or an external actor, having access the data dumps, could sign up as a user and then make use of the VPN to easily pawn everyone's account. The more I think about this, the more outrageous it is. They may as well put cameras in your house and photocopy all your papers.

snazz 8y ago

From the students’ perspective, the reward is greater than the obscure potential consequence. I have certainly noticed this with adults, as well, so it seems like fairly basic human behavior.

roguecoder 8y ago

The arms race between school administrators and people who wanted to connect to things they shouldn't has been going on for decades and is one of the major sources of sys admins. The problem here is that installing a VPN is far too easy and doesn't teach children where /etc/host is located.

morpheuskafka 8y ago
At my school, they have default "teacher" for external events that use school facilities, usernames and passwords based on each school code that bypass all filters, but somehow no one has found it leading to insane workarounds. Sadly, people used to use web.archive.org as a workaround (like dude, just go home and look stuff up?) so they blocked it, which breaks a lot of research and sources on Wikipedia.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

True, but as long as they don't install a trusted root as well damage is still far more limited. Still a major privacy issue (and huge shout out to you for passing this knowledge on to my generation, sadly many of us really don't care) though. With this, however, the possibilities are really limitless. For example, the simple act of filling out a job application online, common for students to do, gives FB your SSN and enough info to open a line of credit. How was this data stored? Who at Facebook had access to the SSNs and nude photos and the like that was certainly collected with a program like this of any scale? Were the procedures to delete it? How were the systems secured? And while I doubt even FB would do this, a truly lawless bad actor could use those logins without tripping security alerts because you would have used one of their IPs to sign in before. Or an external actor, having access the data dumps, could sign up as a user and then make use of the VPN to easily pawn everyone's account. The more I think about this, the more outrageous it is. They may as well put cameras in your house and photocopy all your papers.