If you actually look up the school it is really cool. They literally give students full root access to there local machines and encourage learning. That is a bright contrast to the world of locked down Chromebooks and high surveillance
This just reminded me of a thing from my high school (many years ago). They had windows machines that were somewhat locked down, but I discovered a trivial way to bypass the restrictions on changing the desktop wallpaper. So naturally I set the background image to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the actual icons.
On another timeline, the staff would have approached this with “Huh that’s clever. You fooled us and we thought the computer was broken. Please don’t do that, but also let’s channel your creativity somewhere useful.”
Instead I got a monologue about breaking things and was banned from the computer lab for a week. Soured me on school and such for a while.
You just got to be a bit more stealthy. When I was in middle school I figured out that I could completely bypass group policy if I unplugged the network cable at the right time.
When one of the school IT person questioned me I just said, I do not know why it looks like that. I also never shared my secret
Yep, but that’s not the lesson the school should be teaching, at least for it’s best interest. Fostering white hat attitudes would probably work out better. Instead I learned the authorities were idiots that can’t be reasoned with.
There once was a school that ran Linux
“Not so!” cried so many cynics
Robert Maynard put Linux in
it made the cynics heads spin
so fast they ended up at the clinics
If you actually look up the school it is really cool. They literally give students full root access to there local machines and encourage learning. That is a bright contrast to the world of locked down Chromebooks and high surveillance
Oh man, I would have learned so much so fast by breaking stuff and having to fix it. It’s how I learned what I know now, just later. This is fantastic
The one rule (from what I read) is that students need a usable system for class. So you can’t experiment too much outside of a virtual machine.
You still have root but they politely ask you not to let experimentation get in the way of class.
That’s pretty cool yeah.
This just reminded me of a thing from my high school (many years ago). They had windows machines that were somewhat locked down, but I discovered a trivial way to bypass the restrictions on changing the desktop wallpaper. So naturally I set the background image to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the actual icons.
On another timeline, the staff would have approached this with “Huh that’s clever. You fooled us and we thought the computer was broken. Please don’t do that, but also let’s channel your creativity somewhere useful.”
Instead I got a monologue about breaking things and was banned from the computer lab for a week. Soured me on school and such for a while.
You just got to be a bit more stealthy. When I was in middle school I figured out that I could completely bypass group policy if I unplugged the network cable at the right time.
When one of the school IT person questioned me I just said, I do not know why it looks like that. I also never shared my secret
That’s a nice find.
Yep, but that’s not the lesson the school should be teaching, at least for it’s best interest. Fostering white hat attitudes would probably work out better. Instead I learned the authorities were idiots that can’t be reasoned with.
That is a very important lesson to learn early, because the same applies when you’re grown up.