Network problem; help a young man from being falsely accused. 3

[rexburg]

I have a problem that I need an answer to before Tuesday the 14th. My nephew is in his first year of high school and has been accused of downloading inappropriate material on one of the computers in his Photoshop class. I realize that boys will be boys, but this kid is way to afraid of getting into trouble, I mean he is 15 and still his walls are covered with pokemon posters.
The proof that they have is Internet Explorer history file; as far as I know they its only one page, it was a search on a Japanese google image page. I have been to this page and there are only three nude images on it. My question is, could some other student access the Internet via the room network? And should all the information be on the server? I would really appreciate and theories on this matter, this is a really good kid and I don’t wont to see him pay for something he did not do. I am quite computer literate but networks and servers are not my forte. I have a meeting with his teachers and the computer tech that is accusing him; so any ammo I could get would be greatly appreciated. I am basically looking for defense material to keep him from being suspended.
One last question, should everything that was viewed on his machine via the internet be on the school server?

Thanks,
Rex
rex@ntldesign.com

 

[bi]

given the apparent level of expertise of the IT department in the school, they probably don't know how to lock folks out of a directory!

 

[GwydionM]

I keep an open mind on this particualr case. But I notice that every person who gets caught at anything always says that they were framed or an innocent victim of bad luck. Common sense says that most of them must be guilty as hell.

How many readers have done at least one or two things that would have been highly embarrassing if we'd been caught at it?

 

[Stumpy02000]

HeH, there really is no way to prevent a user from being able to clean out the cache, since there a4re so many different methods of arriving at the internet options selction.
For instance, I had to assist a user that had a blank desktop, (no icons allowed) and tools ==> internet options was administratively blocked.
This was a problem that I had to fix on their profile identity so what I did was opened IE ==> help ==> contents and index ==> options ==> finally internet options where I fixed the problem they were having.

 

[Sashanan]

Whole incident reminds me of back when I was a high school student and the local IT guy accused me of "hacking the network". I believe the actual damage done was a changed admin password and some dirty language inserted in sensitive spots. Back then, I didn't even have the knowledge to do something like that. But a fellow student did and he had the sense to do so while logged into my account. Not a hard thing to do with the passwords stored in an ASCII text file in C:\passwords.

With the evidence against me and the admin too naive to realize that with such a password system, it could literally have been anybody, I got the blame. It cost me my privileges to use the computers for the rest of the year, but the initially threatened suspension was suddenly lifted and since then the principle categorically denied ever making that threat. (What am I, stupid?)

There's just something with schools and accusations that is not right at all. Mix in computers and you get situations like this one. Good to hear he was not punished for somebody else's violation.


"Much that I bound, I could not free. Much that I freed returned to me."
(Lee Wilson Dodd)

 

[cian]

For my mind though I'd be asking for a formal apology

I would certainly be looking for a MAJOR apology, i'd then demand that the principal gets down on all fours while you issue a swift 'mae-geri' to the posterior region!





- É -

http://www.ssi-developer.net/

 

[lespaul]

I have two daughters (10 & 11) who like to play Barbies alot. They also like to play dress up. Recently I upgraded from a dial up to a cable modem and they have been looking for websites that let them create their own dolls online and dress them up (think paper dolls from a generation ago!) and we've had the same kinds of problems with inappropriate sites.

I think it says a lot about our culture and society when almost anything you search on can turn up sex related information.

Leslie

 

[sleipnir214]

lespaul:
Word to the wise about Barbie...

The inspiration for Barbie was a German doll called "Lilli", which was created as a pornographic gag gift for men. Lilli was based on a German comic strip and was portrayed as a ditzy gold-digging exhibitionist.


Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[skiflyer]

I dunno if it says so much about our culture & society as it says alot about the limitations of content searching and the lengths people who go to to get low percentage, high volume advertisments out there.

Fact is, a huge chunk of money flows down the pipes for online pornography (now this part talks about society/culture), and unfortunately tools like Google and Yahoo and the others can't "understand" the web pages they're indexing, hence with enough know how and money it's possible to make your web page be the result for just about any search.

Barbie however, is just a search I'd expect to turn up pornographic links.

-Rob

 

[sleipnir214]

When you're talking about sufficiently large statistical universe, even the lowest percentage comes out to high number. Like the (in)famous Drake Equation.

I've known for a while some of the people involved with the site golfballs.com. At one time, one of the participants registered the domain name "titliest.com" ("titleist" misspelled, incase some of you see prurience). An enormous amount of business went their way through that URL. Until Titleist took it over, of course.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[dwarfthrower]

>> Barbie however, is just a search I'd expect to turn up pornographic links.

;-) I helped a guy out the other day with his webcam issue. He'd been googling on 'webcams' and got sorta distracted.

[sub]Never be afraid to share your dreams with the world.
There's nothing the world loves more than the taste of really sweet dreams.[/sub]

 

[Sashanan]

I've run into similar problems trying to find sites about the sitcom Friends. The less said about "18 yr old Amanda and her friends!", the better.



"Much that I bound, I could not free. Much that I freed returned to me."
(Lee Wilson Dodd)

 

[rosieb]

Searching for an ocx control brought up some very nasty-sounding sites. Must be something in the metadata, someone thinks that people interested in that kind of thing....

On a lighter note, a very senior colleague - searching for our own website - searched on our internal designation, and (somehow, metadata again) got hits on loads of questionable italian sites, opened them, then panicked about our internet usage policy. Much amusement in IT.

All of this (including the above posts) does raise the question of the ethics of metadata tagging. I know of content filtering, but not much about it. I am, however, sure that my nephews and nieces are more PC literate than their parents, and are (almost certainly) capable of circumventing any such filtering. Worrying.

 

[willir]

rexburg

I am glad things worked out for you.

Chance1234 made an interesting comment, and I wonder if you followed up on it.

My son was researching "hockey", and mispelt the site as "hocky" -- yep, a nasty pron site where a zillion windows open up making it just about impossible to close.

He was threatened with expulsion.

I was not quite so agressive as suggested by Chance1234, but I clearly indicated the school boarded needed to improve their security...
- NO generic login accounts
- Students are responsible for their logins accounts - if they "share", they become responsible for actions of others using their account
- A better firewall
- Purchase an ISP service to restrict sites
etc.
- Students are shown that the "system" tracks their Internet activity
- With the understanding that the budget for school boards is pretty meager.

I was successful...
- My son was not expelled -- it was an honest mistake
- Internet access for the entire school board was withdrawn for over a month until my security concerns were addressed.

This was a collaberative approach with the realization that the problem was not really that my son had accessed an inappropriate site, but if the school board was to use the Internet as a tool, they needed to do so in a more responsible manner.

The system still has holes -- but the holes are much smaller.

And @#$@#$^%^$^ to all those adult sites that don't properly categorize their sites as adult sites so appropriate filtering software can be used with more reliability. (Another thread I am sure)

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

No one's addressed this yet and -- as a former 15-year-old -- I think it needs to be. He's your nephew, so you probably want to confer and coordinate with papa/mama on this, if not outright suggest they do it themselves.

At the age of 15, curiosity can outweigh common sense and in this society where schools would overreact as much as parents (pretty much once the words "lawsuit", "suspension", etc. start getting sprayed around, people are nudging into "overreaction&quot, it might help you all breathe a strange sigh of relief to set the little rascal up with his own computer at home, with only one browser (something a little more secure than IE) and tell him it's about time he had his own privacy and the right to fill it with what he wishes, rather than risking his valuable school time. If he's particularly mature, offer his an inside lock on his door.

Y'all would have to figure out how to implement it, but between the grown-ups in the family (the ones who used to be 15-year old boys), I'm sure you can figure out a way to encourage Junior to find what he'll probably be looking for (if he isn't already) in such a way that it doesn't endanger him vis-a-vis school or shatter his eyeballs out of his brain. This does not have to be unlimited access to all the nasty farmyard biz (save that for gramps, I guess?), but it would not hurt anyone to realize that a 15-year old is gonna find out what he wants to find out.

Historically, pop's always started sneakin' the boy naughty magazines around that age. Or, er, leavin' 'em where the boy could "find" them.

Just a different perspective here...

Cheers,


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[BeckahC]

"My son was researching "hockey", and mispelt the site as "hocky" -- yep, a nasty pron site where a zillion windows open up making it just about impossible to close."
A friend whom I used to work with once misspelled Babiesrus - she forgot the "i".... need I say more? She was so upset she needed help to close all the pop-ups and then she went and explained what happened to our boss... Fortunately, rather than being ticked, he got a good laugh and said not to worry

BeckahC

 

[SantaMufasa]

There was a big flap here in Utah within the last few years: Mormon.com was a porn site until a chagrined church member paid US$10,000 extortion to buy the domain and turn it back into a site that pointed to something religious for those of us that believe that "Heck is where people go that don't believe in Gosh!"

Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA @ 21:15 (06Dec03) GMT, 14:15 (06Dec03) Mountain Time)

 

[Murgle]

About a year ago I decided to look up some furniture on Ikea's uk website - I typed in the url but put .com instead of .co.uk at the end, and up popped (excuse the pun) a gay 'interest' site - lo and behold a couple of weeks later they had changed the address. And no, I'm not telling you what it was..........

Ahhhhh, I see you have a machine that goes Bing!