Where is the freedom?
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Some students in Kutztown, Pennsylvania got arrested for "abusing" their school computers. They found the administrator's password and used it to iChat, an instant-messenger program. Their going to juvenile detention camps.
What the hell is wrong with the police, or should I say the police in the country of the free.
Lets say that you are an administrator of a web-hosting company, and you set your password to "password". One day, someone finds the password by trying out several default passwords (such as "password", "admin", "1234"). All accounts get deleted and you didn't backup. You are a bad administrator. Who's fault is it? Yours, and yours only.
Getting back to the students, they installed a chat software. Wow. A real hacker uses your computer and bandwidth to do things far worse. Setting up ftp servers for spreading pirated software, sending spam, etc.
Talk about downloading a chat software, if you even block the students from chatting in the first place, then you must be pretty stupid. Chatting is a nice way of developing English skills and also exchanging information, and maybe even helping each other do homework. If chatting was blocked, then a lot of other things must also have been blocked. The students revolted against a system they thought was unfair, should that be wrong? Isn't USA the place where everyone should be able to do what they want, what they believe in? (At least when their not hurting others)
I know what is wrong, ignorance and incompetance. To a daily computer user, or even a half-trained network administrator, the things the students did would just be a joke, laugh and it's over. When you don't know about stuff, you panick, you over-react. Maybe it's the reduced money to schools from the government that is forcing them to cut back on competent staff, but I don't know much about USA politics.
Check out http://www.cutusabreak.org/, it's a site the affected students, friends and families have made. Maybe you can help them put this insanity to an end?
Link
posted by Err0r @ 5:34 PM,
