Comment by csydas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csydas | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know if you'll know this, but are they implementing any other safeguards on the Macbook Airs? (MbA) Just from doing tons of work in a Mac-centric university where the students' idea of pirating was to search "[item] download mac", the search results are crawling with predator sites that promise anything from PDFs to interactive solutions manuals, only to actually download a dmg full of malware (usually Mackeeper and a few others). And of course students (and professors alike) would dutifully punch in their admin pass without thinking about it, and quick enough there'd be a nice and infected machine.

What I'm getting at is if I were the tech admin for that school, I'd be less concerned about what 0-days exist in flash or java and more concerned about what people are willingly installing on their computer, and though this is obviously anecdotal, seeing what my younger cousin would end up installing despite our warnings, I'm inclined to think kids aren't up to the task just yet of full on computer management. Even fairly savvy kids would fall the the sales pitch of the one kid who found a free download for a popular game, which of course was packed with malware.

No doubt it is going to be a bundle of surprises. Thanks for your input, I'm going to bring up your "[item] download mac" experience at our next technology committee meeting.

BTW the admin account wasn't my idea, and it freaks me out. However, I see what the educators have in mind, they are trying to stretch into new places and prepare children for the real world. I appreciate the bleeding edge ethic of crash and burn and find the solution. So I am trying to play the role of facilitating recovery from problems that will arise. We will have system images on thumb drives. Until someone downloads EFI-based malware, the consequence will typically be the kid loses access to their machine for a day or two while the tech re-images their system. And of course, even though docs are in Google Drive, there is the potential for data loss, which is also a great lesson IMO.

I think that's sort of the point of "teaching the children not just how to use their computer but how to take responsibility for keeping it running".

Show of hands: who here would want to be the admin for a network you know is going to be routinely infected with any number of malware or rootkits.

Networks in school are supposed to facilitate education. The standard approach of making everything impossible to use so that nobody can break anything may work in a corporation, but it does not work for education.

But that is what they do anyway. I learned a lot from using school computers - like how to access VPNs and routing proxies so that I could defeat Bess[1] and access the Sun Java docs to do my AP computer science homework.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Web_SmartFilter_EDU

I would, depending on the implementation. Basically, can I just have a "wipe-and-go" policy? or do I have to manage user-settings/profiles/etc.

Things are much easier if you "embrace" the idea that you'll be infected, and that machines aren't special snowflakes.

Docs in the cloud, combined with "Wipe and go" is our chosen disaster plan. I realize of course this is not perfect. When it breaks down however, I feel there are really good lessons to be learned. Like keep prized docs on that thumb drive like we've been telling the kids.

so disable admin access for students and give them free Time Machine access?

most Mac malware isn't worryingly harmful (it can't spread on its own, for instance).

and even if you mess up a machine, you can always restore it. even if you erase everything, you can always have the Mac redownload the OS from Apple's servers.

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