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Comment by nisegami | Hacker News Reader

>The initiative being rolled out by the NCA to over 2,000 primary and secondary schools in the UK, ahead of going live at further schools and colleges across the country, will see students who search for terms associated with cybercrime greeted with an access denied "block page."

Because telling adolescents that they aren't allowed to learn about something has an astounding success rate.

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> Because telling adolescents that they aren't allowed to learn about something has an astounding success rate.

It's got an amazing success rate; at motivating them to learn the exact thing you don't want them to.

Back in 2006 in high school I carried an external hard drive with a clean macOS install on it. I'd boot that and I had a SOCKS proxy setup (before I knew of VPNs or could pay for one). It was a joy to browse unimpeded and without any annoying management software running. I can only imagine what kids are doing nowadays.

I recently gave my enterprising son a Tails USB after learning about his school’s ridiculous blocking policies. The only condition was that he should sit with me for a few minutes each evening for me to teach him on a conceptual level how things like an OS, BIOS, Tor, etc work.

I would hope most school computers would be set to not allow non IT staff to boot from external devices.

Back in highschool I had an old USB drive with a Linux install, it worked fine. I also had a copy of tor browser, so I could watch YouTube. Good times. I learned quite a bit about networking and windows security.

Seriously. My corporation has made it impossible for us to use USB sticks, external hard drives, etc. on company computers. Well, if you go before a panel and prove why you need one, they will give you a hardened one that you can use. But you really have to have a good excuse.

mine does the same, but boot from USB still works fine. It's security theater for the bosses who don't know the difference. The more annoyed everyone is the more the bosses think we have 'good' security.

Ours is different. If you so much as plug in a USB stick you will be contacted by security with minutes and your boss and their boss will be involved.

lol

I would think most kids today do their circumventing by BYOD? Not that it would be bad for them learn about using VPNs and TOR on their phones...

I'm sure kids searching for DDoS tools have never heard about VPNs.

Knowing what little I do about the UK government, I expect "VPN" to be considered a term "associated with cybercrime" as well.

You're not too far off; this [0] is a UK government sponsored campaign right now

[0] https://noplacetohide.org.uk/

This has to be a joke.

Sadly no: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978952

I really wish it was, but no. It's a "grassroots" campaign, supported by the UK government, using statistics from the US. It's really pretty unbelievable

> We are not opposed to end-to-end encryption, as long as it is implemented in a way that does not put children at risk.

Holy moley.

Even if that were possible, do they think child groomers will have an issue using an "illegal" E2EE service?

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