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Comment by threwawasy1228 | Hacker News Reader

When I was in school they would monitor everything that you did on the computer and then when the students attempted to get around the blocks with simple proxies, they would have to get new proxies each day as they were banned.

I personally was one of the people who was supplying new proxies to students at the school, and they went after me taking away my ability to connect to the internet using my login for the remaining years of my high school experience. I eventually had to use other peoples logins (with their permission of course) to be able to continue using the computers at the school.

All this is to say, if you try to create a surveillance system at any given school, kids will find a way to not engage with it or fight back if they are able. People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to stand up for themselves.

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Yes but cameras and microphones are different than network monitoring. The monitoring of computers is individualized, whereas cameras monitor groups. It might seem minor to some, but the presence of cameras in british schools is really changing things for the good.

American schools use cameras to look into crimes. They are not generally accessible immediately by teachers, but many British schools now have very elaborate camera systems designed for immediate use. When two kids get into a fight there is little debate about who started it. Teachers can, within minutes, have the footage on a tablet at their desk. Having that unbiased video evidence immediately at hand radically changes bullying prevention. Some kids and most parents may not like cameras, but that kid who is afraid for his or her physical safety wants those cameras working.

Microphones are a more sensitive issue, but I could see them being equally effective in addressing harassment. They would need different protections, perhaps a 30min recording limit, but there is potential.

This will just train bullies to pick on their fellow students in the bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. where no cameras are present, not actually fix the problem.

Why assume that there will be no cameras in locker rooms or bathrooms? If they aren't literally in such places, they do monitor who goes in and out.

I have actually read about a camera system for locker rooms that would use image recognition to blur nakedness. Another system blurred everything other than faces and the static background. We are far from being OK with such things in schools, but they are out there for more secure areas.

The problem with bullying isn't in figuring out who was involved in incidents, it's that it's a he-said she-said issue as to who's the bully and who's the victim, or if it happened at all, barring some kind of physical evidence. Knowing that Bob and Charlie both go in to the locker room doesn't tell you the truth of the story when Bob says Charlie was bullying him.

When a system like that is hacked and the unblurred images of pre-teens undressing are published online, and one or more kill themselves over it, will it have been worth it?

You don't avoid doing something because a third party might kill themselves. That's on them. The answer is to not kill yourself.

One of the most obvious causes of suicide is newspaper reporting on other suicides. The reporting is allowed anyway.

Ignoring the probable outcomes of your actions is willful ignorance, and rather callous toward those around you.

I hope your never in a position of power over youth or vulnerable people, as your mindset could cause severe harm to people undeserving of such treatment.

Also, those leaked images can be used for bullying and blackmailing.

Even knowledge of the existence of such a system could be used to bully people. If the victim knows that such a system is in place, then the bully can claim to possess imagery from the system. The system's public existence bolsters the plausibility of the claim. Fear of the system leaking becomes a source of terror.

That sounds absolutely horrific. The distinction between individual and group monitoring is nothing but window dressing. You still monitor every kid all the time, its just currently not analyzed that way, at least publicly. And kids know that they are constantly monitored. Great Britain is becoming more and more the chilling example of a western style police state.

I'm glad I got bullied instead of going to a school like that.

Honest question: since you think absolute surveillance in schools is beneficial, what about society at large? Should we have cameras in every possible corner of the world as a crime deterrent? If not, what should be the cutoff? Schools only? All places with a high density of kids?

People want safety. There are multiple ways to achieve that, electronic surveillance is just a lazy/economical way of doing it with a not insignificant civil liberty cost. If you aren’t being hurt, you might think that cost is too great, if you are being hurt, you won’t.

So I guess as a society, we should try to provide safety, and if surveillance isn’t desirable, we have to be willing to pay higher costs for another solution (eg fewer students per class so teachers can pay attention to bullying).

Schools are not society as a whole, and they are subject to a great many rules and procedures that make cameras very different than those on the street. Schools are already heavily surveilled, by teachers if nobody else. Kids cannot leave, and they are subject to codes of behavior far more restrictive than in wider society. Those codes of behavior are not enforced with jail time. The cameras, in the british model, are also not used to catch behavior. They are used after an incident has been reported by other means. And they are administered very locally, by school staff who know everyone by name, not cops. It is an entirely different paradigm.

How can there be any protection from the psychological stress of knowing that everything you do is recorded and can be used against you and there are no safe places of refuge? Are we not training the youth to accept the insinuation of violence by authority figures when they graduate?

Talk to a kid who has been hospitalized by other students and still has to sit beside those persons every day because there wasn't enough evidence to punish them. Talk to the teachers who now wear body armor (not a joke) to protect themselves from violent students. Documentation of attacks is the first step in their eventual mitigation.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-educators-o...

I don't doubt that some kids are shitty and sneaky, but taking more aggressive measures should be in response to a complaint and time limited. Kids have human rights too.

When I was at school, the fights were either behind the school building or sometimes in front of it, but usually not inside. So installing microphones and cameras inside won't change anything. The bully will just say to a student: "Let's talk after school, if you are not a chicken".

I did the exact same thing! I somehow managed to combine PHProxy with Wordpress and a plugin that would let me charge users through PayPal. If my domain got blocked, I'd just buy a new .info domain and email it to all my users. I even had a teacher who paid me for an account. My proxy was especially popular because it worked for YouTube and MySpace, and it was hard to find web proxies that consistently supported the both of those.

I found it ridiculous that we had search keyword monitoring that prevented researching the Ku Klux Klan which we had to study in history.

That was by far the worst part, when your keyword search got you called to the deans office. Never happened to me, but this one kid I knew got grilled by the dean and a police officer because of his search history once. If I remember correctly he had googled "DeathBomb Arc" which is the name of a record label[0] in order to look up when a band he liked was touring. The dean and the police officer repeatedly refused to believe that he wasn't up to something.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathbomb_Arc

We used to have so much fun with this in school. Wrote scripts to disable the surveillance software, proxy our traffic over SSH, exploit permissions gaps to help students run games on school laptops, etc..

Even discovered that the "teacher" version of the software could be used for complete surveillance and control of every student computer on the network.

Despite doing nothing malicious, I was reprimanded heavily for describing to the principal the severity of the issue after other kids were caught doing less than savory things with it.

I learned something then. And it seems the "real world" isn't much different.

One of my schools was naive in believing that Windows Firewall would suffice to prevent kids from playing multiplayer games so long as student accounts had restricted rights preventing them from toggling the firewall. What they didn't know was that a simple Batch script I wrote could easily switch off the firewall, so I distributed it to all my friends so the games continued. We played Halo, Counter Strike, Doom, and Unreal Tournament all year.

I have another story related to yours. Myself and 3 friends were taking a programming class in high school, and one of them discovered that the screen casting software that teachers used(which also functioned as surveillance software) could be "reversed" without admin access. Not only did he figure out how to spy on everyone's screens, but during class he managed to cast his screen to everyone in the school, including teachers who were using their projectors to do lectures. It was pretty funny, and I don't remember how he did it. This was in New Zealand, so while the school officials were extremely pissed, he didn't get expelled since what he did was fairly harmless and it exposed a serious flaw in the system. I imagine if this was happened in the United States, he'd have at least been expelled and possibly charged with a crime.

Ahh fun times! My principal specifically said that it was a good thing I was a minor. Oof.

My high school didn't block https traffic. The work around, literally, was to append an 's' after http. (Of course, that only worked for sites that implemented SSL, but a good number did at the time).

Yep, and I think it's easier than ever right now. School IT systems will often whitelist browsers including Chromium and its derivatives for installation without admin privileges. That means any student can download Brave, access Tor, and get to any site they want. All GUI, no hassle.

not with recaptcha in the way

> People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to stand up for themselves.

People anywhere don't give children enough credit for how clever they can be at getting around stuffy rules.

I really hope parents take up this battle though. This is your job as a parent.

I remember I was in a small CS class in High School. It was a mix of hardware geeks and software geeks.

The teacher had a script which would turn off all our screens when she was giving lectures. One of my buddies (SW geek) developed this script which would get around the teachers script and turn our monitors back on, but it was buggy and didn't always work.

The Hardware geeks just unplugged their ethernet cables. Go figure.

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