I found this article of students charged of a felony in the US for accessing administrator privileges on school given apple laptops. If you read the article the password was taped to the back of the laptops.

Do you think they should have gotten the police involved or just taken the laptops away from the students instead? IMHO it is just another case of people over reacting and suppressing the minds of our youth. Viva La Revolution :P

Oh and does it not make iChat sound cool calling it "Forbidden" h34r:

It definitely shows a lack of understanding, and does nothing for student-teacher relations in that school. I know if I were given an iBook in high school I would have done the exact same thing.

The fact is, the computers were not secured effectively and the only people to blame would be whoever set them up - not the kids.

Go 2005! Wars, and lawsuits against kids! Something to be proud of, I'm sure.

Better be careful, after starting with iChat they'll move on to the hard stuff like the iPod updater.... WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!

Although criminally charging them is a bit extreme. The kids still deserve a good kick up the arse, what they did was illegal and there are consequences of such actions. The system admins also need to get there arse kicked for being so stupid with security.

And yes at the age of 15 they should be able to tell the difference between right and wrong.

At least they are accepting that what they did is wrong and that there should be consequences, but a charge is too far.

what about a suspension!? dear god... police! dam americans

Read the articles, they were suspended and given detention and so forth. The only thing the school refused to do, which was really stupid, was confiscate the machines. Two students even tried to return them to resist temptation but the school refused.

This really is a big cock up and both sides, the school should of done more to prevent this from happening, but likewise the students and parents should of respected the rules. Some of them actually downloaded password cracking tools to crack encrypted files. If that aint wrong, what is?

All they would have to do is to insert the Mac OSX CD wouldn't they?? Surely there would have to be more security on a Mac to prevent them placing a cd in a drive and unlocked admin privileges!!

What kind of security is this?

Sounds like an everyday school with administrators that don't clearly have any idea. Believe me i have seen one too many dumb terminals crash in an hour.

And at your age you should be able to tell the difference between wright and right. :P

I can empathise with those kids. Internet filtering software is a total pain in the arse.

I worked at a company with a horrible filter that would block any URL with the word 'teen' in it. I found this out when reading an innocent article that had the words 'pagethirteen', 'pagefourteen', etc in the URL. I set up a proxy server on my home server running on port 21 (the company had that open for some reason) and started browsing without restrictions.

Life will find a way, as they say.

D'oh

well don't I feel like quite the fool. :blink:

My thoughts exactly - the Tech staff didn't know this? Makes sense - I know from experience of having Macs in primary school (about 8 years ago now....) and I knew more than the teacher, considering I've grown up on a Mac and my dad sold some of them to the school! It's almost scary how far the yanks will go!

Most techs trained in OS X know that the Open Firmware Password utility is included both on the set-up disc and on Apple's own web-site for free to lock that functionality out.

No, these students knew and circulated the password. My guess is the admin password was something stupid and easily guessable. In which case, the accounts being cracked should fall squarely in the responsibility of the admin who set the password.
Using the admin account to look at porn is just stupid.


iChat is often neglected as a functional tool. Rendezvous chat is a great way of distributing information amongst peers.

Sorry, "Bonjour". Urgh, I hate that new name.

It was a shortened version of the street address.

I have noticed a trend as of late, the great fear of technology and our youth. And yes I know this trend is neither subtle or new but I have a strong feeling it may be linked to the aging baby boomer population (stay with me here). A lot of people from this generation are starting to seriously look at retirement in an age that was quite different from the one they started with and I can only guess that this is a scary prospect. Hence the return to the values that were installed upon them in their youth (Howard, Bush etc). This is only a personal opinion and I welcome debate on this topic (I admit I could be entirely wrong) but this would make sense to see the morals and ways of thinking falling quickly back into the mindset of the 1950s. Technology and the youth of today can be scary, but I am a firm believer in looking three generations ahead and three back. The differences we can make and have made are scary in itself.