30 ms·

Sh1mmer – An exploit capable of unenrolling enterprise-managed Chromebooks

223 points by XionXIV 4y ago

XionXIV 4y ago
And it just takes two minutes.
bell-cot 4y ago
Anyone else suddenly imagining that you hear Pink Floyd lyrics?
Overtonwindow 4y ago
I hope I don't sound like a Luddite, but I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school...
- lynx23 4y ago
  What do you suggest instead? Write on stone tablets?
  - 1317 4y ago
    paper, perhaps?
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      To what end? In a professional environment, the last time I wrote on paper is when my computer was in for maintenance. That's like having students use hand-slates in the era of paper.
      - asda_ 4y ago
        What an exaggeration. I use a pen and paper to take notes all the time at work as a dev. Let's face it most kids are just distracting themselves with a chromebook if they're using it in class.
      - citizenkeen 4y ago
        Writing notes by hand has been proven to increase understanding and retention. Unless we’re giving kids OCR tablets, they’re learning less taking notes on a keyboard.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        I believe this train of thought jumped to a conclusion not supported by the evidence: does taking notes on computer not increase understanding and retention? Because anecdotally: I retain more when I take notes on laptop than if I took no notes. I also retain more when I take notes on laptop than if I took notes on paper because my typing speed can keep up with the topic and my writing speed cannot.
        troupe 4y ago
        To support your claim see Mueller & Oppenheimer's research from 2014. The big issue is that while the laptop lets people capture MORE of the words said, the process of filtering is how the mind consolidates information. Taking notes require you to decide what to leave out and that is what helps you remember.
      - jksk61 4y ago
        There are different reason to favour handwriting: 1. Development coordiantion eye-hand; 2. Computers can go to maintenance as you said; 3. Creativity, how many times did you doodle on a white word file? 4. They'll have plenty of times in uni/job to stare blankly at a LCD screen 5. Paper is less tiresome on eyes.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - kzrdude 4y ago
        I work as an engineer in an office and use a paper notebook every day. The paper is a great help for thinking out loud and for taking notes.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      Reeking purple worksheets fresh off the mimeograph machine, just like God intended. And make the little brats write in cursive. We also have a golden opportunity to teach them where "cut" and "paste" on their parents' computers come from, using real scissors and actual nasty, lumpy paste.
      - blitzar 4y ago
        > teach them where "cut" and "paste" on their parents' computers come from Apple invented it for iOS 3.0 in 2009.
  - 31337Logic 4y ago
    False dichotomy. Nice try.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      The introduction of the roller ball pen over the traditional quill almost certainly was met with the same "wont somebody think of the children"
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        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.
  - Bluecobra 4y ago
    When I was in high school the district bought 1,000s of PalmPilots and we had to learn Graffiti. :D (Thankfully it was just a short lived fad and they all gathered dust in storage fairly quickly.)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- icepat 4y ago
  Why? As a student, giving me access to a laptop improved my ability to get things done by orders of magnitude. I always struggled with messy writing, and being distracted easily. Having a laptop let me pay better attention, because I could work on something and passively listen to the class. My notes were also legible, meaning I could take meaningful notes for the first time ever. I could also combine photos of the chalkboard with captions on days I was particularly distracted, or record important sections of the class and review it later. If I had to sit with just a notebook, and listen to the class only, I'd rapidly become sidetracked and check completely out. Then when it came to writing things down that were important, I'd have to check back in, and quickly jot things down that were illegible. Massively improved my retention, and overall ability to function in class. The "no computers, computers bad" mentality in schools is a major limiting factor for people with different learning styles, and neurodivergent children.
  - dr-detroit 4y ago
    [dead]
  - logifail 4y ago
    > I could work on something and passively listen to the class (This is a genuine question) What were the benefits of being in class if you're basically doing something else and not actively listening? Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?
    - icepat 4y ago
      Active listening is something I'm completely incapable of doing in a traditional way. When I have an activity in front of me, for example code or an interesting task, I listen better and am more engaged. When I was younger, I had a specific teacher who'd assume I was not paying attention, and ask me to answer often. Much to his surprise, I was fully engaged and able to respond. It's just a different learning style. I'm actively listening, but in a more passive way than normal, if that makes any sense. > Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing? In University I'd often skip class specifically to do this. Worked far better for me than sitting in a lecture hall. Let me work at my own pace, take breaks, walk around, ect. Classes with mandatory attendance were the bane of my existence. Intentionally designing courses to require attendance by not providing complete notes, or incomplete textbooks, also caused me issues.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Why? I used a laptop full time in school from 16-18 (and then at university too) and found it much more productive. My notes were better and more usable. For younger children I think everyone agrees that it's important to be teaching computer skills, and that requires computers. Having rooms of desktop computers is arguably outdated, and a poor use of space, so many schools have switched to trolleys of shared laptops. Additionally there's a problem with computer access for homework. Many households don't have a computer suitable for homework, so by giving every child a laptop, schools can (theoretically) rely on everyone having a basic level of equipment available. Is this perfect? No, it takes some effort to do, but given modern remote management tools I'd expect not a lot more than traditional IT provisioning at schools. Should kids get one from day 1 in kindergarten? Probably not, but during primary school could be reasonable.
  - madoublet 4y ago
    I don't think everyone agrees.
    - joxel 4y ago
      The answer is to obviously use both. Anyone advocating for paper only or computer only are dumb ideologues at best.
    - fruit2020 4y ago
      My daughter is 8 and already has a chromebook at school. I freaked out when she started to search stuff on Google at home on the ipad. Need to look into parental controls.
      - madoublet 4y ago
        Learned that the hard way with my kids. Google Family Link is awesome. Apple Screen Time is adequate.
    - danaris 4y ago
      So, what, you think that children should have to figure out computers for themselves? That only the geeky ones (who are likely to poke at stuff and learn that way) should actually have a clue how to use computers? Or is it that you think parents should be teaching this—which guarantees it's only going to be taught to the children of the reasonably well-off? Welcome to the 21st century, where it's widely beneficial for everyone to know how to use computers at least at a basic level, and skills like "how to use simple Excel formulas" are often enough on their own to get people decent-paying office jobs. Because the people already working there were never taught how to use computers in any systematic way beyond, maybe, "keyboarding classes". Where many governments require forms of various types to be submitted online, and only put out many kinds of information on their websites. Where it's nearly a guarantee that people are going to be using social media, no matter how much you try to restrict them, so it's a damn good idea to teach them how to recognize misinformation and other kinds of manipulation (not strictly a computer skill, but definitely related).
- londons_explore 4y ago
  I agree with you if science agrees. It's easy enough to give some classes chromebooks, while others don't have chromebooks, and see who gets higher test scores. Then keep track of those people, and see who does better at university, and who ends up earning more, having a bigger house, or living longer - just to confirm that those people really end up doing better, rather than just doing well on the test.
- blackhaz 4y ago
  Getting Chromebooks to schools is the single most horrific act we could have done to our education system. This act undermines the very future of our nations. A big proportion of all the classwork and homework is now done on the screen. There is plenty of evidence that handwriting boosts cognitive processes - thinking on paper is something that the next generation will mostly lack. Rich and powerful are all aware of that, so they deliberately put their own kids into private schools where screen exposure is more limited. Not only that. We are promoting to our kids a fully proprietary system that increasingly becomes a walled garden, run by an aggressive imperialist company with abysmal technical support, with a complete failure in parental control practices. It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate. The school's solution - well, take the Chromebook away at home. Good luck with that. Chromebook pushes the agenda of Google cloud and Google apps on the user. Millions of people are grown into this world assuming the only option for them to perform functions or access their own data is to be online and use the cloud. This is as close to a digital dystopia as I can imagine. I don't like what Google has become and I would never buy a Google Chromebook. Forcing this in schools so early (11-years old here in the UK) is a crime we're all committing. We all are going to pay for it.
  - stuaxo 4y ago
    My 4 year old came back with a Windows laptop during Covid, but over the last year they have stopped using them, they only use the desktops they have in ICT.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate. Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for parents of my age, complete hypocrisy to boot. We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt (2002)/Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany. The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter games are not a part of it at all. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_Bildungseinrichtungen#21._Jahrhundert https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_B...
- logifail 4y ago
  > I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school Our eldest has had a school-issue iPad, along with the rest of his class, for a couple of years now. As a parent I'd suggest that, despite being basically issued "for free", they're a very mixed blessing, since they were given out I can count on one hand the number of pieces of work his class have done on the iPad where the device was of benefit. The number of times my son has reported one of his classmates getting into trouble due to messing about on iPad in class easily numbers in the hundreds... If the school decided to take all the iPads away tomorrow I wouldn't be bothered in the slightest.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  I concur. Nothing I learnt in high school required anything more than pen and paper.But my EE degree? I would lie if I said a laptop with Matlab did not help me immensely to learn concepts
  - watwut 4y ago
    Your first introduction to computers was at college level? Cause in my university, if you did not came with preexisting knowledge of computers, you had zero chance studying CS or anything programming related. The expectation was that you already know a lot about computer usage. And people who did not learned that before were treated like idiots.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      I never said that, I only said that high school level stuff does not need a computer. Unless of course you have a class about computers.
      - watwut 4y ago
        "Nothing I learnt in high school required anything more than pen and paper." does not make exception for class about computers. And to add to it, those who had access to computer only in class were super behind those who had free access to it.
        AstixAndBelix 4y ago
        You keep misinterpreting what I have said. Nowhere I have written that I didn't have access to a computer at home or that kids should not have a private computer. I really don't understand why you keep hammering this point.
        watwut 4y ago
        In that setup, learning about computers basics is limited to people whose parents are proactive with it. A kid whose parents think no screens or no screens except for school is out of luck. A kid whose parents allow computer but don't teach anything useful on it is out of luck too. Both elementary and high schools should and do teach those things. I don't know how they are supposed to teach that without school related access to computer.
- dehugger 4y ago
  Sorry to dash your hopes but you do, in fact, sound like a Luddite. Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20 years.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20 years. Typically, in a high school / college context, where study habits have already formed to some extent. My kids' middle school gave everyone a laptop, and it's been constant whack-a-mole for the teachers (YouTube, Fortnite, Reddit, etc.). I wish they'd get rid of them.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Yes, but have learning outcomes improved or gotten worse?
  - ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
    I work in the space -- the kind of computer use has changed dramatically. Probably as an accident because of the expense/availability/space required/etc., it used to be the case that to use a computer you'd have to have some sort of pre-existing justification for it. This has, for all intents and purposes, almost completely flipped. In a great many school/districts kids either have access to an individual computer or readily available shared carts, and more often than not teachers and kids will spring to it almost reflexively. And, while there are many positives this can bring, so too it brings a lot of negatives. I think it's less the fact that they are using them but rather that their use isn't being dictated by some sort of pedagogical justification but rather because it's become the default.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  To the contrary: Laptops and other forms of digital devices can be used for way better educational experience. Classes like maths, chemistry or physics can greatly benefit from interactive elements such as graphs or simulations. Besides, as our societies transform more and more into service sector economies based on IT services and media transforms as well (with the shift from traditional gatekeeper TV/radio/newspapers to Youtube/podcasts/a ton of services), it is imperative that children from a young age learn how to properly interact with computers and digital society. We're already seeing kids unable to judge the quality of online media sources, for example.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Yes, you do sound like a Luddite. Because computers is the integral part of the modern society, like it or not.
- 31337Logic 4y ago
  I'm with you, here. And I'm a seasoned IT Consultant of almost 3 decades. I've seen (and argued for) "both sides" of this argument and I now believe the net gains of giving each student a monetized ad-machine (aka Chromebook) are FAR outweighed by the net losses. I'm certainly not the first or only one advocating this, of course, and there is a large and ever-growing body of evidence to support the claim that Chromebooks specifically (i.e. not just a dumb laptop, disconnected from the Internet and social media) are hugely detrimental to students development, both academically and socially. Don't be lazy or in denial, a simple DuckDuckGo or Wikipedia search will provide many enlightening studies for you to read. Pick your favorite. For those in a rush, you can't go wrong by starting with the Your Undivided Attention podcast. Good luck, and here's to a balanced discussion that fairly represents BOTH sides of the story.
- exabrial 4y ago
  I was lucky enough to go to a school with uniforms. I thought it was stupid at the time. As an adult, I realize now what that did was level the playing field between the rich kids and poor kids. I can’t even imagine being a kid in school these days with an off brand smartphone or ipods, especially when Apple actively promotes bullying non users.
  - rlmineing_dead 4y ago
    Android user in sophomore year here, no one really cares
    - exabrial 4y ago
      That’s encouraging. Save your money and invest it. Trust me on this. Old people told me this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mcv 4y ago
  My son's programming classes would be pretty hard without his laptop. For primary school I might agree with you, but not for secondary school.
  - 31337Logic 4y ago
    Yes but not all students are in your son's programming class. :-/
- xenophonf 4y ago
  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 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.
e12e 4y ago
Seems the site is struggling - archive cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130125805/https://sh1mmer.me/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230130125805/https://sh1mmer.m... Github: https://github.com/CoolElectronics/sh1mmer https://github.com/CoolElectronics/sh1mmer
- mlatu 4y ago
  thank you kind person, my network operator seems to have blocked this site
mindondrugs 4y ago
Is there a source for `bored kids`? I dont see any evidence of kids creating this exploit?
- mikelovenotwar 4y ago
  We're all someones kid
  - frebord 4y ago
    Lol
  - kuroguro 4y ago
    And we do get bored sometimes
    - aliqot 4y ago
      Hell im bored right now
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        Yeah but were you a kid? You could be a GPT3 bot
        aliqot 4y ago
        I'm a bot, and only you and I know. How does that change this conversation?
  - short_sells_poo 4y ago
    Life of Brian moment: "I'm not"
- amself 4y ago
  https://sh1mmer.me/credits.html https://sh1mmer.me/credits.html
lol768 4y ago
This is hilarious, and quite impressive given the presumed age of the kids that'd be interested in doing this. I'm sure some K-12 tech staff are stressing over the exploit right now.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  They're K-12 IT staff... they've got 900 other things to worry about. If someone is smart enough to find this and unenroll their device, they're probably smart enough to be left to their own devices. (Literally)
  - kotaKat 4y ago
    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!)
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      So was I, but that's the point of instilling a culture of "you break it, you deal with the consequences." Getting a zero on your next hw/quiz/lab/test, because your machine was non-compliant and you didn't know how to switch it back, is fair. Then reimage the machine on IT's timeline. And if mom and dad want to bitch, they deserve to be told that little Timmy screwed up his own laptop.
gibspaulding 4y ago
I thought this was fairly doable for some time. Surprised it hasn't been an issue before. I used to do tech support for a school district with some ~5000 Chromebooks in circulation and we did all of our repairs in house. This meant I spent the first few weeks of COVID bringing home boxes of damaged devices and spare parts and getting them back into working order. Occasionally I would have to do a board swap for a bad power jack or something which meant you would have to overwrite the serial number on the new board to match the old one so that it would join Google admin as one of our devices. If I remember right the process would have worked the other way around too, to change the serial number to one we didn't control.
DharmaPolice 4y ago
I wouldn't have a career in IT if I hadn't spent many hours at ages 11 to 15 trying to get round my schools network security. My logon was frequently disabled for misuse and I was even suspended for a couple of days once but I learnt more that way than in any class I've ever taken.
- kab0b 4y ago
  I was really lucky that our Computer Teacher/IT guy (this was back in the early 2000s) was really cool and allowed us a bit of leeway to break things. After the first time we got caught (there was three of us) he sat down with us, and essentially gave us some rules of engagement, anything we got around, or defeated we had to write up a short report and turn it into him, explaining what we were able to accomplish, the level of access we were able to get and the steps to reproduce. So we did so, and he actually gave us class credits for it. (Our school system had some "special projects" class credits that could be earned to give students and teachers some leeway on allowing students to learn things that weren't part of the curriculum) We managed to figure out how to override our typing program to give certificates saying we typed 200wpm at 100% accuracy. By passed the internet filter to access gmail (back in it's early days, we held onto that ability for a while) and a few other things I forget about now. He was one of my favorite teachers.
  - philipphutterer 4y ago
    That sounds like this teacher understood what teaching means other than presenting the curriculum. Love it.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    > he sat down with us, and essentially gave us some rules of engagement, anything we got around, or defeated we had to write up a short report and turn it into him This is really wholesome. Like that guy. Be like that guy.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago
bertil 4y ago
I stand with everyone on Hacker News in admiration for young’uns sticking it to the man and learning about command-line secret power. _However_, I’m a little more ambivalent knowing that most of them do that to look at naked ladies, presumably. Maybe create pictures of naked ladies (again: very impressed by Generative AI, with the caveat that it’s widely used for pr0n) That doesn’t feel ideal for the emotional maturation of middle-schooler. In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Nowadays, it also means risking ending on a psyops from Russian secret service, whatever Andrew Tate is (and please, don’t tell me: that’s one shred of innocence I want to keep) or, inexplicable, worse. I remember ridiculing music producers who were saying that if you didn’t pay for CDs, you would end up empowering “pedonazis”. That felt ridiculous at the time. It feels less so now, both not paying for music and enabling actual pedophiles and actual nazis by sticking blindly to open-web principles. I am very happy that the kids stick it to the man. I feel like we grey manes need to put our heads together and think about how we talk to them about emotional maturation, bad people, and safely exploring. It will sound ridiculous coming from the generation that cared about Facebook, but I feel like we can’t just stand in the bleachers and clap every time the JV red team scores a point.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  The kids will figure it out like you did. Maybe the terrain has changed, but there was noone to tell you whats what back in the day anyway, so why worry? Or rather, emotional maturity can go both ways here: jumping to a paternalistic mindset will rob you the wisdom the kids themselves can give. I think its natural and probably right to feel concern, but don't overcorrect it into presumption or into a false idea that you can just give to kids what you had to learn/discover yourself.
- npteljes 4y ago
  >hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer Not really, porn and gore were integral parts of the internet even "back then". Rotten.com launched in 1996 for example, Ogrish at 2000. Eating disorders are also fluorishing in the current era, on TikTok for one, but I remember the pro-ana websites from my youth as well, distributed on private websites, because creating a website or blog was easy. It was also very easy to find porn, even if specific websites were banned on your network, because it was just everywhere. Peer to peer networks also happily distrubuted whatever, let that be gore, hardcore porn, or any illegal thing you can think of, including abuse material. I do agree about your conclusion though. Emotional maturation, strong connection to people matter a lot, and a lot of the horrors are created specifically when these are missing from one's life.
XionXIV 4y ago
The silliest thing about it is probably this. Google seemed to have just kind of forgotten to add code that would verify the rootfs on shims, even though they had everything they needed to do it already set up. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platform/initramfs/+/4180190/3/factory_shim/bootstrap.sh https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platfo...
- andromeduck 4y ago
  That patch seems to be just checking more devices/partitions for images?
  - XionXIV 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to explain what is going on in there, but that is the patch for shimmer.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    The patch causes a different root filesystem to be used. Specifically, if the kernel command line specifies a root filesystem that must be used, then that one will always be mounted, even if other devices are available.
offlinehacker 4y ago
I like the attitude these kinds have. No one should have control over my laptop, but me. Being locked in corporate silos is way too normal these days.
- XionXIV 4y ago
  :]

223 points by XionXIV 4y ago

XionXIV 4y ago

And it just takes two minutes.

bell-cot 4y ago

Anyone else suddenly imagining that you hear Pink Floyd lyrics?

Overtonwindow 4y ago

I hope I don't sound like a Luddite, but I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school...

lynx23 4y ago
What do you suggest instead? Write on stone tablets?
- 1317 4y ago
  paper, perhaps?
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    To what end? In a professional environment, the last time I wrote on paper is when my computer was in for maintenance. That's like having students use hand-slates in the era of paper.
    - asda_ 4y ago
      What an exaggeration. I use a pen and paper to take notes all the time at work as a dev. Let's face it most kids are just distracting themselves with a chromebook if they're using it in class.
    - citizenkeen 4y ago
      Writing notes by hand has been proven to increase understanding and retention. Unless we’re giving kids OCR tablets, they’re learning less taking notes on a keyboard.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        I believe this train of thought jumped to a conclusion not supported by the evidence: does taking notes on computer not increase understanding and retention? Because anecdotally: I retain more when I take notes on laptop than if I took no notes. I also retain more when I take notes on laptop than if I took notes on paper because my typing speed can keep up with the topic and my writing speed cannot.
      - troupe 4y ago
        To support your claim see Mueller & Oppenheimer's research from 2014. The big issue is that while the laptop lets people capture MORE of the words said, the process of filtering is how the mind consolidates information. Taking notes require you to decide what to leave out and that is what helps you remember.
    - jksk61 4y ago
      There are different reason to favour handwriting: 1. Development coordiantion eye-hand; 2. Computers can go to maintenance as you said; 3. Creativity, how many times did you doodle on a white word file? 4. They'll have plenty of times in uni/job to stare blankly at a LCD screen 5. Paper is less tiresome on eyes.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kzrdude 4y ago
      I work as an engineer in an office and use a paper notebook every day. The paper is a great help for thinking out loud and for taking notes.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Reeking purple worksheets fresh off the mimeograph machine, just like God intended. And make the little brats write in cursive. We also have a golden opportunity to teach them where "cut" and "paste" on their parents' computers come from, using real scissors and actual nasty, lumpy paste.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      > teach them where "cut" and "paste" on their parents' computers come from Apple invented it for iOS 3.0 in 2009.
- 31337Logic 4y ago
  False dichotomy. Nice try.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    The introduction of the roller ball pen over the traditional quill almost certainly was met with the same "wont somebody think of the children"
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      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.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  When I was in high school the district bought 1,000s of PalmPilots and we had to learn Graffiti. :D (Thankfully it was just a short lived fad and they all gathered dust in storage fairly quickly.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
icepat 4y ago
Why? As a student, giving me access to a laptop improved my ability to get things done by orders of magnitude. I always struggled with messy writing, and being distracted easily. Having a laptop let me pay better attention, because I could work on something and passively listen to the class. My notes were also legible, meaning I could take meaningful notes for the first time ever. I could also combine photos of the chalkboard with captions on days I was particularly distracted, or record important sections of the class and review it later. If I had to sit with just a notebook, and listen to the class only, I'd rapidly become sidetracked and check completely out. Then when it came to writing things down that were important, I'd have to check back in, and quickly jot things down that were illegible. Massively improved my retention, and overall ability to function in class. The "no computers, computers bad" mentality in schools is a major limiting factor for people with different learning styles, and neurodivergent children.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
  [dead]
- logifail 4y ago
  > I could work on something and passively listen to the class (This is a genuine question) What were the benefits of being in class if you're basically doing something else and not actively listening? Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?
  - icepat 4y ago
    Active listening is something I'm completely incapable of doing in a traditional way. When I have an activity in front of me, for example code or an interesting task, I listen better and am more engaged. When I was younger, I had a specific teacher who'd assume I was not paying attention, and ask me to answer often. Much to his surprise, I was fully engaged and able to respond. It's just a different learning style. I'm actively listening, but in a more passive way than normal, if that makes any sense. > Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing? In University I'd often skip class specifically to do this. Worked far better for me than sitting in a lecture hall. Let me work at my own pace, take breaks, walk around, ect. Classes with mandatory attendance were the bane of my existence. Intentionally designing courses to require attendance by not providing complete notes, or incomplete textbooks, also caused me issues.
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danpalmer 4y ago
Why? I used a laptop full time in school from 16-18 (and then at university too) and found it much more productive. My notes were better and more usable. For younger children I think everyone agrees that it's important to be teaching computer skills, and that requires computers. Having rooms of desktop computers is arguably outdated, and a poor use of space, so many schools have switched to trolleys of shared laptops. Additionally there's a problem with computer access for homework. Many households don't have a computer suitable for homework, so by giving every child a laptop, schools can (theoretically) rely on everyone having a basic level of equipment available. Is this perfect? No, it takes some effort to do, but given modern remote management tools I'd expect not a lot more than traditional IT provisioning at schools. Should kids get one from day 1 in kindergarten? Probably not, but during primary school could be reasonable.
- madoublet 4y ago
  I don't think everyone agrees.
  - joxel 4y ago
    The answer is to obviously use both. Anyone advocating for paper only or computer only are dumb ideologues at best.
  - fruit2020 4y ago
    My daughter is 8 and already has a chromebook at school. I freaked out when she started to search stuff on Google at home on the ipad. Need to look into parental controls.
    - madoublet 4y ago
      Learned that the hard way with my kids. Google Family Link is awesome. Apple Screen Time is adequate.
  - danaris 4y ago
    So, what, you think that children should have to figure out computers for themselves? That only the geeky ones (who are likely to poke at stuff and learn that way) should actually have a clue how to use computers? Or is it that you think parents should be teaching this—which guarantees it's only going to be taught to the children of the reasonably well-off? Welcome to the 21st century, where it's widely beneficial for everyone to know how to use computers at least at a basic level, and skills like "how to use simple Excel formulas" are often enough on their own to get people decent-paying office jobs. Because the people already working there were never taught how to use computers in any systematic way beyond, maybe, "keyboarding classes". Where many governments require forms of various types to be submitted online, and only put out many kinds of information on their websites. Where it's nearly a guarantee that people are going to be using social media, no matter how much you try to restrict them, so it's a damn good idea to teach them how to recognize misinformation and other kinds of manipulation (not strictly a computer skill, but definitely related).
londons_explore 4y ago
I agree with you if science agrees. It's easy enough to give some classes chromebooks, while others don't have chromebooks, and see who gets higher test scores. Then keep track of those people, and see who does better at university, and who ends up earning more, having a bigger house, or living longer - just to confirm that those people really end up doing better, rather than just doing well on the test.
blackhaz 4y ago
Getting Chromebooks to schools is the single most horrific act we could have done to our education system. This act undermines the very future of our nations. A big proportion of all the classwork and homework is now done on the screen. There is plenty of evidence that handwriting boosts cognitive processes - thinking on paper is something that the next generation will mostly lack. Rich and powerful are all aware of that, so they deliberately put their own kids into private schools where screen exposure is more limited. Not only that. We are promoting to our kids a fully proprietary system that increasingly becomes a walled garden, run by an aggressive imperialist company with abysmal technical support, with a complete failure in parental control practices. It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate. The school's solution - well, take the Chromebook away at home. Good luck with that. Chromebook pushes the agenda of Google cloud and Google apps on the user. Millions of people are grown into this world assuming the only option for them to perform functions or access their own data is to be online and use the cloud. This is as close to a digital dystopia as I can imagine. I don't like what Google has become and I would never buy a Google Chromebook. Forcing this in schools so early (11-years old here in the UK) is a crime we're all committing. We all are going to pay for it.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  My 4 year old came back with a Windows laptop during Covid, but over the last year they have stopped using them, they only use the desktops they have in ICT.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate. Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for parents of my age, complete hypocrisy to boot. We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt (2002)/Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany. The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter games are not a part of it at all. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_Bildungseinrichtungen#21._Jahrhundert https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_B...
logifail 4y ago
> I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school Our eldest has had a school-issue iPad, along with the rest of his class, for a couple of years now. As a parent I'd suggest that, despite being basically issued "for free", they're a very mixed blessing, since they were given out I can count on one hand the number of pieces of work his class have done on the iPad where the device was of benefit. The number of times my son has reported one of his classmates getting into trouble due to messing about on iPad in class easily numbers in the hundreds... If the school decided to take all the iPads away tomorrow I wouldn't be bothered in the slightest.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I concur. Nothing I learnt in high school required anything more than pen and paper.But my EE degree? I would lie if I said a laptop with Matlab did not help me immensely to learn concepts
- watwut 4y ago
  Your first introduction to computers was at college level? Cause in my university, if you did not came with preexisting knowledge of computers, you had zero chance studying CS or anything programming related. The expectation was that you already know a lot about computer usage. And people who did not learned that before were treated like idiots.
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    I never said that, I only said that high school level stuff does not need a computer. Unless of course you have a class about computers.
    - watwut 4y ago
      "Nothing I learnt in high school required anything more than pen and paper." does not make exception for class about computers. And to add to it, those who had access to computer only in class were super behind those who had free access to it.
      - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
        You keep misinterpreting what I have said. Nowhere I have written that I didn't have access to a computer at home or that kids should not have a private computer. I really don't understand why you keep hammering this point.
        watwut 4y ago
        In that setup, learning about computers basics is limited to people whose parents are proactive with it. A kid whose parents think no screens or no screens except for school is out of luck. A kid whose parents allow computer but don't teach anything useful on it is out of luck too. Both elementary and high schools should and do teach those things. I don't know how they are supposed to teach that without school related access to computer.
dehugger 4y ago
Sorry to dash your hopes but you do, in fact, sound like a Luddite. Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20 years.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20 years. Typically, in a high school / college context, where study habits have already formed to some extent. My kids' middle school gave everyone a laptop, and it's been constant whack-a-mole for the teachers (YouTube, Fortnite, Reddit, etc.). I wish they'd get rid of them.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Yes, but have learning outcomes improved or gotten worse?
- ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
  I work in the space -- the kind of computer use has changed dramatically. Probably as an accident because of the expense/availability/space required/etc., it used to be the case that to use a computer you'd have to have some sort of pre-existing justification for it. This has, for all intents and purposes, almost completely flipped. In a great many school/districts kids either have access to an individual computer or readily available shared carts, and more often than not teachers and kids will spring to it almost reflexively. And, while there are many positives this can bring, so too it brings a lot of negatives. I think it's less the fact that they are using them but rather that their use isn't being dictated by some sort of pedagogical justification but rather because it's become the default.
mschuster91 4y ago
To the contrary: Laptops and other forms of digital devices can be used for way better educational experience. Classes like maths, chemistry or physics can greatly benefit from interactive elements such as graphs or simulations. Besides, as our societies transform more and more into service sector economies based on IT services and media transforms as well (with the shift from traditional gatekeeper TV/radio/newspapers to Youtube/podcasts/a ton of services), it is imperative that children from a young age learn how to properly interact with computers and digital society. We're already seeing kids unable to judge the quality of online media sources, for example.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
justsomehnguy 4y ago
Yes, you do sound like a Luddite. Because computers is the integral part of the modern society, like it or not.
31337Logic 4y ago
I'm with you, here. And I'm a seasoned IT Consultant of almost 3 decades. I've seen (and argued for) "both sides" of this argument and I now believe the net gains of giving each student a monetized ad-machine (aka Chromebook) are FAR outweighed by the net losses. I'm certainly not the first or only one advocating this, of course, and there is a large and ever-growing body of evidence to support the claim that Chromebooks specifically (i.e. not just a dumb laptop, disconnected from the Internet and social media) are hugely detrimental to students development, both academically and socially. Don't be lazy or in denial, a simple DuckDuckGo or Wikipedia search will provide many enlightening studies for you to read. Pick your favorite. For those in a rush, you can't go wrong by starting with the Your Undivided Attention podcast. Good luck, and here's to a balanced discussion that fairly represents BOTH sides of the story.
exabrial 4y ago
I was lucky enough to go to a school with uniforms. I thought it was stupid at the time. As an adult, I realize now what that did was level the playing field between the rich kids and poor kids. I can’t even imagine being a kid in school these days with an off brand smartphone or ipods, especially when Apple actively promotes bullying non users.
- rlmineing_dead 4y ago
  Android user in sophomore year here, no one really cares
  - exabrial 4y ago
    That’s encouraging. Save your money and invest it. Trust me on this. Old people told me this.
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mcv 4y ago
My son's programming classes would be pretty hard without his laptop. For primary school I might agree with you, but not for secondary school.
- 31337Logic 4y ago
  Yes but not all students are in your son's programming class. :-/
xenophonf 4y ago
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 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.

e12e 4y ago

Seems the site is struggling - archive cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130125805/https://sh1mmer.me/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230130125805/https://sh1mmer.m... Github: https://github.com/CoolElectronics/sh1mmer https://github.com/CoolElectronics/sh1mmer

mlatu 4y ago
thank you kind person, my network operator seems to have blocked this site

mindondrugs 4y ago

Is there a source for `bored kids`? I dont see any evidence of kids creating this exploit?

mikelovenotwar 4y ago
We're all someones kid
- frebord 4y ago
  Lol
- kuroguro 4y ago
  And we do get bored sometimes
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Hell im bored right now
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Yeah but were you a kid? You could be a GPT3 bot
      - aliqot 4y ago
        I'm a bot, and only you and I know. How does that change this conversation?
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  Life of Brian moment: "I'm not"
amself 4y ago
https://sh1mmer.me/credits.html https://sh1mmer.me/credits.html

lol768 4y ago

This is hilarious, and quite impressive given the presumed age of the kids that'd be interested in doing this. I'm sure some K-12 tech staff are stressing over the exploit right now.

ethbr0 4y ago
They're K-12 IT staff... they've got 900 other things to worry about. If someone is smart enough to find this and unenroll their device, they're probably smart enough to be left to their own devices. (Literally)
- kotaKat 4y ago
  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!)
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    So was I, but that's the point of instilling a culture of "you break it, you deal with the consequences." Getting a zero on your next hw/quiz/lab/test, because your machine was non-compliant and you didn't know how to switch it back, is fair. Then reimage the machine on IT's timeline. And if mom and dad want to bitch, they deserve to be told that little Timmy screwed up his own laptop.

gibspaulding 4y ago

I thought this was fairly doable for some time. Surprised it hasn't been an issue before. I used to do tech support for a school district with some ~5000 Chromebooks in circulation and we did all of our repairs in house. This meant I spent the first few weeks of COVID bringing home boxes of damaged devices and spare parts and getting them back into working order. Occasionally I would have to do a board swap for a bad power jack or something which meant you would have to overwrite the serial number on the new board to match the old one so that it would join Google admin as one of our devices. If I remember right the process would have worked the other way around too, to change the serial number to one we didn't control.

DharmaPolice 4y ago

I wouldn't have a career in IT if I hadn't spent many hours at ages 11 to 15 trying to get round my schools network security. My logon was frequently disabled for misuse and I was even suspended for a couple of days once but I learnt more that way than in any class I've ever taken.

kab0b 4y ago
I was really lucky that our Computer Teacher/IT guy (this was back in the early 2000s) was really cool and allowed us a bit of leeway to break things. After the first time we got caught (there was three of us) he sat down with us, and essentially gave us some rules of engagement, anything we got around, or defeated we had to write up a short report and turn it into him, explaining what we were able to accomplish, the level of access we were able to get and the steps to reproduce. So we did so, and he actually gave us class credits for it. (Our school system had some "special projects" class credits that could be earned to give students and teachers some leeway on allowing students to learn things that weren't part of the curriculum) We managed to figure out how to override our typing program to give certificates saying we typed 200wpm at 100% accuracy. By passed the internet filter to access gmail (back in it's early days, we held onto that ability for a while) and a few other things I forget about now. He was one of my favorite teachers.
- philipphutterer 4y ago
  That sounds like this teacher understood what teaching means other than presenting the curriculum. Love it.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > he sat down with us, and essentially gave us some rules of engagement, anything we got around, or defeated we had to write up a short report and turn it into him This is really wholesome. Like that guy. Be like that guy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
4y ago

bertil 4y ago

I stand with everyone on Hacker News in admiration for young’uns sticking it to the man and learning about command-line secret power. _However_, I’m a little more ambivalent knowing that most of them do that to look at naked ladies, presumably. Maybe create pictures of naked ladies (again: very impressed by Generative AI, with the caveat that it’s widely used for pr0n) That doesn’t feel ideal for the emotional maturation of middle-schooler. In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Nowadays, it also means risking ending on a psyops from Russian secret service, whatever Andrew Tate is (and please, don’t tell me: that’s one shred of innocence I want to keep) or, inexplicable, worse. I remember ridiculing music producers who were saying that if you didn’t pay for CDs, you would end up empowering “pedonazis”. That felt ridiculous at the time. It feels less so now, both not paying for music and enabling actual pedophiles and actual nazis by sticking blindly to open-web principles. I am very happy that the kids stick it to the man. I feel like we grey manes need to put our heads together and think about how we talk to them about emotional maturation, bad people, and safely exploring. It will sound ridiculous coming from the generation that cared about Facebook, but I feel like we can’t just stand in the bleachers and clap every time the JV red team scores a point.

beepbooptheory 4y ago
The kids will figure it out like you did. Maybe the terrain has changed, but there was noone to tell you whats what back in the day anyway, so why worry? Or rather, emotional maturity can go both ways here: jumping to a paternalistic mindset will rob you the wisdom the kids themselves can give. I think its natural and probably right to feel concern, but don't overcorrect it into presumption or into a false idea that you can just give to kids what you had to learn/discover yourself.
npteljes 4y ago
>hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer Not really, porn and gore were integral parts of the internet even "back then". Rotten.com launched in 1996 for example, Ogrish at 2000. Eating disorders are also fluorishing in the current era, on TikTok for one, but I remember the pro-ana websites from my youth as well, distributed on private websites, because creating a website or blog was easy. It was also very easy to find porn, even if specific websites were banned on your network, because it was just everywhere. Peer to peer networks also happily distrubuted whatever, let that be gore, hardcore porn, or any illegal thing you can think of, including abuse material. I do agree about your conclusion though. Emotional maturation, strong connection to people matter a lot, and a lot of the horrors are created specifically when these are missing from one's life.

XionXIV 4y ago

The silliest thing about it is probably this. Google seemed to have just kind of forgotten to add code that would verify the rootfs on shims, even though they had everything they needed to do it already set up. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platform/initramfs/+/4180190/3/factory_shim/bootstrap.sh https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platfo...

andromeduck 4y ago
That patch seems to be just checking more devices/partitions for images?
- XionXIV 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to explain what is going on in there, but that is the patch for shimmer.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  The patch causes a different root filesystem to be used. Specifically, if the kernel command line specifies a root filesystem that must be used, then that one will always be mounted, even if other devices are available.

offlinehacker 4y ago

I like the attitude these kinds have. No one should have control over my laptop, but me. Being locked in corporate silos is way too normal these days.

XionXIV 4y ago
:]