Dell and other Windows based OEM laptop manufactures have built in camera covers now-a-days. Just saying.
I am absolutely not terribly invested here. But I wanted to kick something around (I opened the wiki and just decided I don’t care that much to invest time into this but it is a thought kicking around my brain so I figured I’ll express it here) - I am wondering if the school that did this is relatively wealthy. As Macbooks aren’t cheap, and I think most schools were tossing around chromebooks instead right? So perhaps the reason why nobody ultimately got in the appropriate amount of trouble for this crime is because they themselves were people of a certain status. Or knew how to grease the right palms.
Yeah Lower Merion is rich. It’s where Kobe came from.
The beef?
No, the rapist.
It’s a suburb just outside Philadelphia and has some very wealthy parts. Kobe Bryant grew up there.
Yeah, see. I’ve seen some schools in my travels that make me want to slap someone. Because I am astonished at how far the haves and the have nots are apart. But also, I’d say in general whenever the sentence never seems to align with the punishment you can bet there’s some classist mechanisms in the works.
That sounds unlikely to me. If the school is wealthy, then so are their students’ families.
The program began in the 2009 school year. The first Cr-48 was released in December 2010.
So… Someone is going to jail for that, right?
Right?
Settled for $610,000…so no. I feel like, given that minors were involved, the settlement should have been on top of criminal charges.
Usually when you hear about a settlement (and not a plea deal) that means this was a civil case and not a criminal one. A civil case doesn’t weigh in on whether or not criminal charges will be brought.
If enough people push the Attorney General of that state to pursue charges they still could. But there is a higher standard for evidence in criminal trials. Not to mention the defense’s argument would likely be that schools have the right to wiretap students’ issuesdlaptops, so the AG probably doesn’t want this to go to court and end up enshrining such a right when it currently holds civil liability due to the civil case succeeding.
wiretapping which I think is the highest possible charge
Wouldn’t the highest charge be all that child pornography they intentionally created?
Is there any evidence of it? The Wikipedia page says “which may include unclothed or partially clothed photos” but doesn’t necessarily mean there is any.
If you run always-on cameras in thousands of teenage bedrooms, you will get child porn.
Well if they recorded and student jerking it then the school made cp and. I doubt theor is a limitation on that.
deleted by creator
Always.
And also didn’t go to any of the victims
Says at the bottom, 175k to the first victim to open a case, 10k to the second case and… 475k to the lawyers.
Well, I stand corrected… But Jesus those lawyer fees…
I hate this country.
dont hate your country, hate lawyers.
here’s a quick one: Q: what do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of a river? A: A good start.
and one more for fun
Q: How do you keep a lawyer from drowning? A: Take your foot off their throat
Am I the only person that immediately covers their webcam with Scotch’s Magic Tape? It frosts the image so that it doesn’t look like it has been covered but rather that it is extremely smudged and thus only silhouettes can be somewhat discerned.
Nah, all the nerds I know do it. Not that you’re a nerd Jo, you’re cool af. But nerds can be cool, too! But Jo…ain’t no nerd!
Thankfully most laptops I see now come with a built in physical cover for the webcam.
And in context of this post…Mac laptops do not. So the scotch tape (or black tape) idea is sound.
The issue with those is that you might get told to uncover your camera. With Magic Tape you can always say that it is uncovered. Light goes through, so you can pretend that maybe the camera is busted.
We put pimple patches on everything, they just fit right on. The acid might be affecting something, but stuff still seems to be okay. Patch on the mic, patch on the camera.
*Patches pop right off and are translucent. So yeah, same idea here. But also magic tape is the tits and idk why the hell people are downvoting Jo. Ya ding-dongs!
Cut that reddit bullshit out.
Don’t forget the mic
DELL laptops are neat in that they let you disable all these in the firmware.
Maybe if it was something like this where it’s not my laptop but I’m not worried about people hacking my personal computer
It’s worth reading the entire article, it just gets worse and worse.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Montgomery County District Attorney all initiated criminal investigations of the matter, which they combined and then closed because they did not find evidence “that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent”.
That’s not even close to the worst thing in the article, but GG justice system. I’ll remember this one day when I’m in court. “Well I didn’t have criminal intent.”
That’s a defense now?? One that removes the need to even have a trial at all??
I fully understand your point.
But on the other hand, we’re in a period where the people doing this haven’t experienced it themselves. Nor have they learned about this in school. It’s all so new and so many people are ignorant and stupid when it comes to technology.
We need cases like these to set precedents so we can define something as criminal intent. People should be allowed to make a mistake at least once, and the government actually recognizes this.
In a much more polite way than I usually say it, we can agree to disagree here. I can also see your point.
But, I think any rational adult in the room should have said, “So we’re going to deploy software on computers that kids use in their bedrooms that will randomly or on demand take pictures of whatever is happening in that room? No fucking way, it’s not worth gestures around compared to the possibility that a couple laptops get stolen along the way. We can find another approach.”
No one should need an understanding of technology to understand why that is bad, and the WIkipedia entry makes it very plain that key figures in the decision knew that was precisely what was being done.
I’m sorry, this is the George Costanza defense.
You’re actually quite right.
Hang them!
Its been a defence for several hundred years, in fact! Showing intent is one of the three things you need to establish in every criminal case for it to be considered valid. Fuck the cops for dropping this case though, how in hell was there no intent to commit a crime here wtf.
Not every criminal case. There’s strict liability crimes, the most well-known being statutory rape.
Weird, I’ve literally always heard “ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law”, which seems to imply criminal intent doesn’t matter. Only that the action that was take was illegal.
Well…you see…here’s the thing…
Fuck you!
~Sincerely, the rich and elite, which control the legal system which is not meant to ever be in YOUR favor. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
System working as intended.
“Strict liability” crimes are the exception to that rule. A lot of relatively minor crimes, like code violations or letting minors into a bar, are in that category.
Its always been intent. If you pay with counterfeit bills but didn’t realize because you got them from the shop that gave you change, you didn’t intend to do fraud. Intent matters, always has.
But they did mean to take pictures of minors in the privacy of their bedrooms in the name of stopping petty theft which I’m doubtful would have occurred on any meaningful scale in the first place. Whether they meant it “criminally” seems immaterial here. I think they got off exceptionally light, and it’s a travesty of justice. You won’t convince me otherwise.
I feel very sure we have prisons full of people who didn’t mean to do whatever they did to be there.
Chrome book my kid had was sending regular traffic out to some address that belonged to a scholastic vendor. Even when the device was idle. I blocked that site at the router. Thanks pfBlockerng. A few days later he had another chrome book needing our WiFI password. That is when the chrome book got its own VLAN and SSID. The SSID name was compromised. I also tightened the screws on google workspace. They tried one more time with a another chrome book before they gave up on whatever they were after. I have no doubt they wasted some time trying to overcome it. I still treated it like a wiretap. None of my precautions stopped me from putting tape over the mic and camera.
I was a little disappointed they never inquired about it. The fact they didn’t pretty much guarantees what ever they were doing wasn’t required.
Ahh i remember the days of the school shitbook pros. That kids is why when 2020 rolled around and all my classes went to online and they wanted me to use there laptops provided. I made a disk image of the ssd and ran it all in a VM with usb passthrough. Cant acess my webcam if there is none!
You know, a piece of black tape would’ve been a lot easier.
Or if computer manufacturers just put in a hardware disconnect for the camera and mic. Like Lenovo used to do with the wifi switch.
That wont help with recording the audio from the mic
The worst part about this IMO is the school system teaching digital dependency on proprietary software vendors.
Big tech salivates at the thought of being a child’s “first”… much like other kinds of child groomers.
They’ve gotta use something. There are only 3 choices, and one of those has less than 3% market share. Of the two choices left, Mac is the better choice.
Real question - WTF does market share have to do with this?
No one running a program like this is gonna care about “market share”.
Most are gonna be 'give me cheapest you got" even if that means buying HS students baby’s 1st computer from ‘Fissure Nice’ (because they aint gonna spend money that can go in their pocket for name brand shit)
Schools exist to prepare students for their adult life, and the working world. They’re going to choose an operating system that the students are likely to encounter at their jobs, and elsewhere in their lives.
Most are gonna be 'give me cheapest you got" even if that means buying HS students baby’s 1st computer from ‘Fissure Nice’ (because they aint gonna spend money that can go in their pocket for name brand shit)
They gave them MacBooks, so I’m not sure how you are arriving at this conclusion. School administrators don’t get to pocket any school budget money that they don’t spend on students.
If you issue laptops, market share should not be your consideration except for availability of programs and tech support.
Linux has plenty of both, and the obvious advantage of being open source and transparent.
Btw, many governments are currently transitioning to Linux for that very reason.
Schools are going to train kids on systems that they may encounter in the business world, and their chances of encountering a Linux DE are vanishingly small. Idk how many governments are transitioning to Linux, but the United States government wasn’t doing so when this US school issued laptops. I love Linux and use it on all my computers, but I’m realistic enough to understand why the school issued Mac or Windows.
I see your point, thanks.
On the other hand, who if not state could help Linux adoption? If such programs would become universal, students would train on Linux, and businesses would be compelled to adapt.
This is such a bad take. You’re seriously comparing the purchase of a tool brand for students to child grooming? Jesus dude. A computer is simply a tool, and Apple made one for an education market and price that was complete and convenient for that purpose. This is just as “bad” as them relying on all Pearson branded materials. Are there problems there? Yes, obviously. Pearson has market-based motives to keep schools on their materials and so they have tests that lean in on their text books and it’s all kinda gross. But it’s not like the answer is “let’s all just read Wikipedia in class” or “let’s compare all the different source books and find the real truth” as great as that would be, it’s just not realistic and the one reference isn’t particularly bad, it’s just not the best possible. I guess all that to say chill he fuck out, the solution to everything isn’t open source.
Hit a nerve? I stand by my assertion that “tech in education” initiatives by predatory vendors is akin to grooming children. Get them to speak the language of your product early, so that they’ll be a customer for life. IIRC the term is called “Cradle to grave marketing”[1] [2]. Leverage imprinting along the way for good measure. I get why the Googles and the Microsofts of the world are so eager to get their products into schools. That doesn’t mean that I agree with it.
I’m not saying marketing to children isn’t predatory. But this is a tool they need in school. It’s not practical at all to suggest they should be building computers and compiling their own OSes for school. Selling a product for use as a tool to children isn’t grooming. It’s definitely a marketing tactic, but so is everything?
and kids need stress relief, so why not let joe camel give it to them?
So in this argument, Macs are tabaco and Linux would be… vaping? I’m not exactly sure what the absolutely necessary stress relief product would be in which a certain brand and an open source alternative would make sense to be comparable to cigarettes.
Maybe more like Jansport. Is jansport grooming kids to like a specific brand of backpacks? Or Nike for specific shoe brands? Or Kellogg and Tony the Tiger? All of these things pray on social expectations and the impressionable nature of children. Just because the school is providing fucking Lucern milk doesn’t mean they’re grooming kids to have a fondness and expectation for that milk brand. I understand this isn’t’ a popular opinion on the fedi, and I’m not fond of the big tech brands shitty tactics. But you’re all unrealistic dipshits.
you’re saying we should give kids cigarettes? or something like cigarettes? maybe kids don’t need to be addicted to things?
if you really need to keep this metaphor going, linux is, like, meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy or having friends, because its generally good for you, and doesn’t lock you into a bullshit proprietary ecosystem like tobacco or macs do.
see, the thing about lucerne milk is, if im making a milkshake, and I run out of lucerne milk but have an unopened bag of canadian milk, I can pour in the weird-ass canadian milk (spilling half of it because what kind of freaks put milk in a bag?) and it will work and be fine. because its just a company selling milk. all the milk is just milk. milk, in fact, is interoperable, and open if not free. hell, I can make milk if I really desperately want to.
if I have an apple product, and want to make it work with a non-apple-approved product, im going to have to fight their engineers at every step. fuck, getting them to start using FUCKING TCP/IP was like pulling teeth.
comparison to pedophiles? maybe unfair. comparison to big tobacco? on fucking point.
a computer is a tool, sure, and the hardware is largely opaque at the high school level, excepting massive nerds
but every single one of these big tech companies runs all their shit on proprietary ecosystem lock-in, and keeping customers infantilized.
anything that isn’t open source should be fucking banned from schools.
