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Internet Pranks in Schools
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Feb 25, 2008 10:14 AM
from the like-putting-electromagnets-on-your-teachers-dell dept.
from the like-putting-electromagnets-on-your-teachers-dell dept.
Ferante125 writes "An interesting article about online pranks by students and teachers' responses to them. There are some interesting stats that sounded a little hard to believe. My immature side finds it funny and my more mature side is interested in the legal aspects." For the most part it seems like this article thinks pranks are basically just name calling and flaming on websites.
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Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lame (Score:5, Funny)
There were no rickrolls, and not even a single Longcat reference.
Parent
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, the article contains this:
"Last month, Charlotte became the second North Carolina school district to criminally charge a student for creating a website that accused a teacher of criminal behavior including pedophilia."
This sets you on the bad side of the law, and if you don't have any proof, a judge won't be amused.
Parent
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Your post says a lot about personal entitlement (Score:4, Insightful)
And? Why do you think the fact that someone gives a teacher money entitles students to be disrespectful toward them? I can't think of a single situation where being an asshole toward someone is justified because the other person is getting paid.
And part of being a good person is not intentionally making other people's lives more difficult. Also, your reply doesn't address the point, which is, if you don't like how your class is taught, why aren't you doing more than just disrupting it?
Ultimately, your argument boils down to "we're paying you so put up with it" to which I would reply, no. No one should have to forgo their dignity to teach.
You are making the same arguments so many other students tried in school, the difference being the rest of us grew up and learned why they were ridiculous.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:4, Funny)
"Hard drive error detected...reformat C:\?"
The only response option it gave was "OK". Then he put the program in the autoexec.bat file on my dad's computer. It only took my dad about two or three seconds to figure out that it was only a prank, but for those two or three seconds, he was white as a ghost. It was priceless to watch.
Parent
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now...I understand that the students can be arrested for threats...but, racial slurs?
While such things are despicable....I don't think at this time, that they are illegal, and are indeed protected speech.
While you may not agree with people...they still can say what they like or dislike about a person's race, sexual preference, etc without govt. intrusion. There is a difference in arresting someone for threats, and yet a WHOLE other thing if trying to arrest for 'thoughts' and opinons expressed. That latter one gets scary.
Parent
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:4, Informative)
There is a difference in arresting someone for threats, and yet a WHOLE other thing if trying to arrest for 'thoughts' and opinons expressed. That latter one gets scary.
You have to put it in a historical context. Yes, in a perfect world, people should be allowed to express thoughts and opinions with out fear of the consequences. Unfortunately, NC and other places have quite a bit of experience telling us that it is a short quick hop from threatening someone based on their race to actually harming them b/c of their race. You can criticize someone's race (the KKK is perfectly legal), but you can not threaten them. You can't threaten anyone, legally, but so called "hate crimes" add an extra penalty in an effort to head off things like lynching and gang-raping someone simply b/c they are the wrong color. After 50 years or so of *winkwinknodnod* b/c the victim was black, swinging a bit too far the other way doesn't strike me as that bad of an idea.
Parent
Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank? (Score:4, Interesting)
I gotta disagree. I live in the deep south myself. The days of intimidation of a community, say the black one...is a thing of the past. You simply aren't going to get away with it, and the community itself won't stand for, nor be cowered for it.
And lynching anyone or raping them for whatever reason...be it the lunar cycle, or due to race or sexuality...is still a crime. The reason it was done does NOT make it any worse!! If you associate race or sexual preference with a crime...say murder, you're saying it is more wrong to kill them because of their color, than for any other reason? Killing a black man is worse than the killing of a hispanic man? That sounds to me like giving one profile greater worth under the law than the other. Murder is murder...someone ends up dead, and it is horrible and needs to be punished...the same.
We've come a long way in 50 years....I don't see that making a crime (already against the law) worse by making it a 'hate' crime is justified in this day in age. Nobody gets away with the *wink*wink* crap anymore, it is immediately on tv...and you have outrage about it broadcast nationally.
Parent
I guess I dodged a bullet (Score:5, Funny)
10 ? "Bwahahaha! I am the Michaelangelo virus!";
20 GOTO 10
This caused a bit of a stir in our class for half a day before we fessed up. I suppose I'm fortunate to have escaped without prosecution.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I thought it was pretty damn funny, even when I got 25 hours of detention for malicious use of the computer system
Re:I guess I dodged a bullet (Score:5, Funny)
It would start a few minutes before the hour: over there in the corner of the room you'd hear a little "squeee." The poor CS student working on his midterm would look around, embarrassed. A few seconds later, another student's machine would respond with, "brrrt." As the hour approached, the farts got closer to each other until the entire lab was abuzz with flatus. And as the hour receded into the past, the farts would peter out slowly.
It took several days before the staff finally caught on to what was happening.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My 8th-grade pranks involved exploiting a weakness in the regional school board's network and gaining admin access to the entire system, allowing me to make changes to things on a whim, and have access to every teacher's and administrator's e-mail accounts. My father, who was working as a programmer at the time, was simultaneously proud and miffed.
Re:I guess I dodged a bullet (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:And did you have to fix it? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought the prime rule of pranking was to only execute them on days who's number of the month can only be divided by itself and one.
-dZ.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Once that was figured out, the teacher was getting mad so I made it erase itself once they pressed a key, so when they tried to tattle... Nothing.
I had so much fun with that little prank.
Re: I guess I dodged a bullet (Score:5, Funny)
I unintentionally freaked out my poor mom when I got smarmy and edited the Win98 logoff screen in mspaint. I changted a W to a T so that it said "It is not safe to turn off your computer." She left it like that for 3 days until I let her in on the joke. Oopsie.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
schools, the net and the generation gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Schools haven't got a clue about the internet, how to use it and what it could bring them. Pupils are running circles around their supposed betters and are showing earlier in life a degree of independence that teachers wished they had had when they were young. Todays youth are so connected using cellphones, the net and social networking that they are as alien from the previous generation as any that has ever been.
Just wait until it's your turn (Score:5, Insightful)
But then, back in the 60's we thought that we were the misunderstood generation who were going to sweep away all the old farts and bring in the dawning of the age of Aquarius so some things don't change.
Parent
Re:schools, the net and the generation gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there are always a handful of individuals at the cutting edge, not only of technology but of culture. These people existed in previous generations, and they will always exist; in many ways, they operate very similarly across multiple generations, just with a change of medium.
But the vast majority of today's youth also have no clue about the Internet, how to use it, and what it could bring them. They show exceptionally limited independent action and little to no independent thought.
Today's youth may be connected- but there's no real information passing between them.
There will always be a... cutting edge, a group of individuals both as students and as adults, who will find ways to use everything they have available in the best ways possible. This has always been true, and as a rule, people have never really known what to do about them.
Unfortunately, as a student, I have far less confidence in my peers than you seem to.
Parent
Re:schools, the net and the generation gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Every generation had its stars, and every generation will have them. And the new generations have higher possibilities (mainly in access to information and possibilities of training), so they can do things the stars of the previous generations could only dream about. All the while, all this new technology makes it easier to work less for those inclined to do so, so the gap between the stars and the rest might even get wider.
Parent
Re:schools, the net and the generation gap (Score:5, Interesting)
But the maximum, the possibilities, have increased immensely- in 50 years, we've developed in every field, from metallurgy to medicine to computers in ways that would never have been dreamed possible seventy-five years ago.
And, as you posit, our transition to a knowledge-based economy has made it possible for those who aren't interested in self-development to essentially stagnate, comfortably, at an unusual lack of development, especially compared to those who DO focus on development and continue to advance.
The financial gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase; and yes, so does the knowledge gap.
Essentially, I think, you are starting to see a striation into class-like bands in our society- between those who want to develop and advance for advancement's sake and those who merely want to live their lives.
Parent
Re:schools, the net and the generation gap (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked at IBM in Connecticut I met a core of about 8 high school students who had set up their high school computer lab and entire network by establishing close tie with a local college and then riding on the colleges internet connection. Three of these kids worked support at a local ISP as tech support, at least one was an open source developer, and the rest were mostly dabblers. But still they set up the entire computer lab and were more up to date on security than the security response team in IBM. They were the first to demonstrate to me how you could teardrop attack a competitor during a Quake match to lag them so you could get an easy kill. This was long before I heard of teardrop on the CERT mailing list.
I had some great discussions with these kids and they helped me on rebuild my laptop (it needed some custom drivers for Linux as Linux distros for laptops were pretty rare back then.) Two went to work at priceline straight out of high school (with salaries higher than mine if I recall correctly.)
Yet another example. One of the best programmers I met at MIT came into college knowing more about assembly programming than I knew when I left. He was the head printer driver developer for an American branch of a Japanese firm while in highshcool! He supplied me with free printers all through college as he would hand me the test prototype after he finished coding the driver. He would just sit down for a a weekend with a new device and code up a driver from the specs I still have no idea how he did this while doing a full coarse load. So don't imagine that age or education determines 1337ness of programming skills. They are potentially just as smart and creative as any adult, they just have less experience to make them well rounded. But if they focus on a single domain they can have a lot more breadth than you or I and as they have been learning more recently they will know all the latest techniques that us old timers will not yet have absorbed.
Children are not dumb. They are the same as adults. Some kids are truly brilliant, others could kill a brick in a padded room. I know at least one teenager whom is fully self sufficient: working a job, paying rent, paying her own way through college, cooking meals, cleaning, etc.
The self sufficient kids are almost always the ones I found to be intelligent and articulate beyond their years as they had no choice but to grow up. But on the other hand if the parent treated the kid like dumb pet that is almost always what they get. Luckily most kids grow out of that once they get out on their own.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only generation gap I can see is a dynamic one. These barely literate retards with their social networking sites and mobile phone connectivity , which can hardly be classes as communication, leave school and realise that they "cnt wrt their CV n sms lang", then promptly grow up.
Fundamentally I don't think that technology changes the rules of engagement that much.
This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavior! (Score:5, Insightful)
Critics, however, contend that words like "annoy" and "embarrass" are too broad and may infringe upon First Amendment protections of parody.
Honestly, if she had fat legs and someone pointed it out to her in person would they have criminal/civil court documents filed over it? No, they would get detention/short-term suspension and move on with their lives. The recent rise in people being upset that a co-worker won't speak to them and is "threatening" because they dress in all black and wear sunglasses or that someone doesn't like them is created by this trend in secondary education that teaches people to behave like this.
I just can't understand why a grown adult would not be able to leave the house because some little fucking bastard said she had fat legs on the Internet. Both the adult and the student need to grow up -- fast.
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi (Score:5, Insightful)
Because things on the Internet have the potential to (a) be seen by a lot more people, and (b) last almost forever. There's a difference between calling someone a fatass in the classroom or schoolyard, and doing it on youtube.
Yes it will happen, but no, it shouldn't happen. There's a difference between descriptive and normative ethics. For example, I have never heard of teachers were the pupils posted posters all over town describing how much they disliked them. And if it happened, I'm sure it would involve a criminal case. Kids need to learn that with greater power (the Internet) comes greater responsibility. If they can't handle that responsibility, they shouldn't use the Internet. Lots of people probably shouldn't (and now I'm talking about posting stuff, not using Internet banking or similar things that everybody needs to do).
Actually, firefighters do that all the time. Going into a burning building is a very high-risk operation, and you need to carefully examine many factors, including temperature, before you decide to enter. Similarly, school-teachers are, like most people, emotional beings, and if the abuse is to large, they can't continue teaching.
Parent
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi (Score:5, Insightful)
On what grounds, littering? It's legal to dislike someone. It's legal to say you dislike someone.
It's legal to make posters describing how much you dislike someone.
Parent
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi (Score:4, Informative)
That is libel. And some of these kids have done essentially that.
Parent
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi (Score:5, Insightful)
I just can't understand why a grown adult would not be able to leave the house because some little fucking bastard said she had fat legs on the Internet. Both the adult and the student need to grow up -- fast.
Parent
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi (Score:5, Interesting)
What is there to do when the kids keep upping the ante and there's no recourse on the school ground? Hit 'em were it hurts. Maybe if parents have to pay for a lawyer for mommy's little bastard's behavior, some parents will start, you know, parenting...
Parent
hacking servers (Score:4, Interesting)
one student disliked me so much he hacked AOL's IM database to disable my IM account.
i had evidence it was him as well as people telling me he was bragging about it. at the end of the day i just tossed it up and said "hey he's still a kid making mistakes he'll learn" maybe not the best choice but presenting my evidence to superiors would have ended in blank stares.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My ten bucks says you had an easily-guessed password. Most of those little snots talk a big game but can't handle doing anything more advanced than double-clicking the script.
Depends on the prank... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was something dumb and non-harmful, it was good for a laugh... this is where most teachers fail it.
If it damaged an OS install, I'd make the kid stay after school the entire week and re-load every workstation image in the classroom each day.
If it escaped the local network and damaged something else (fortunately I never saw that happen), then the kid gets to face the consequences full-on, and I would've been stuck with preparing a forensics report to show how it happened and what I would do to prevent it in the future.
The point is to make this clear up-front, and if it isn't harmful, use it as a teaching aid. It also helps to know, as a techer, WTF you're doing around the machinery (unlike one Texas teacher who IIRC had a kid arrested for "hacking" because he used Windows Messenger to pass notes in class... can't remember the specifics, but it was a dumb overreaction to say the least).
Those aren't pranks... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait 'till they need a job (Score:5, Insightful)
It's going to be a hard lesson to learn (for those that commit serious enough 'offenses') but I strongly suspect that the next generation of kids will know the risks as they get pummeled by their school with "Cyber Bullying awareness" classes and such along with all the other becoming an adult type sex education classes.
my wife is a teacher, and it sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
my wife is a teacher, and believe me, it is bad out there. she teaches 6th grade mathematics, and she is dealing with the internet, bullying, and humiliation on a weekly basis because of it. fortunately, the kids at her school aren't really old enough to know how to create proper websites yet, or dont have the money to sneak small webcams into the classroom, but their internet usage definitely affects the school environment.
with the prevalence of myspace, many kids are threatening each other and bullying each other over the internet (i still dont see how cyber-bullying is possible, since you can always just "not go to that site", but whatever...). they get caught up in the "he said, she said" game, and say some very awful things. teachers are all advised not to have myspace pages or facebook pages, for if they post pictures of them at the beach, at the bar, or even at home, children can and will spin them so that the teacher somehow comes across in a bad light. and the kids are so resourceful that they dont even take into account what a teacher says about themselves. one of my wife's coworkers had a friend sign her "wall" or whatever in myspace, and the comment left made a reference to a stripper or stripping (something along the lines of "you looked like a stipper that night"), and the kids in her class saw the comment and started telling people around the school that one of the teachers was a stripper. of course, this made it all the way to the parents, and they began calling the school. the kids spun something that someone else said, not even what the teacher said.
they are threatening each other, and posting inappropriate material about each other, which is creating fodder for the classrooms. 5th and 6th grade girls are posting pictures of themselves wearing little clothing, talking about their sexual experiences and knowledge online, and are basically begging to be preyed upon. what is worse is that the parents don't know and don't care. people can dismiss it as much as they want, and believe that it doesn't happen or that it is just a small percentage of kids. well, believe me, it is not. it is much worse than you think.
it is a parent's responsibility to know what their child is doing on the internet. those who say that it is "too much work" and that their kid is "smarter than i am" are full of it, because we often do meet the parents who put in the work, who monitor their children properly, and who properly look after their children and prevent this kind of behavior. we know that parents can handle it because there is still a small percentage out there who do it right. the rest of them need to look at themselves, and not their children, and certainly not the teachers.
teachers get paid a small amount of money to do a ton of work. my wife works 10 hour days, gets a 15 minute lunch, and is not only expected to be the one to educate them with the material that the school board deems appropriate (which grows larger every year), but yet she is expected to be their moral educator as well; a job she gladly does. most of them take pride in their work, and believe me, they hate giving out bad grades and low test scores because it makes them look bad. the problem with education these days is not the school, nor the teachers, nor the funding (believe it or not). it is the parents. parents have stopped being accountable. they have stopped checking their kids homework, monitoring their activity, and disciplining their children. they make excuses for their children (ADD, ODD, ADHD...), and often laugh at the behavior that their child is displaying. parenting in america has become a dismal affair.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'll play (Score:4, Funny)
When all we had was Dec printer terminals, I wrote a program that waited until I was long out of the computer room (about 30 minutes) and then sent a stream of form-feeds to all of the printers. Form feed shot a page of fan-fold paper out of the printer at high speed. The room filled up with curling paper and looked like someone dumped a box of detergent in all the washing machines at a laundrymat.
After we upgraded to new-fangled CRTs (keyboard and monitors to you young'ens) I wrote a program that randomly drew an asci-art horse galloping across the screen from one edge to the other in the middle of whatever the user was doing. They never did find out where it was coming from or how to stop it. I quietly disabled it when the word "expelled" started being thrown around.
Pranks from the chalk face for fun and profit (Score:5, Funny)
A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I always used to dress completely in black for the first day of term - suit, tie, shirt the lot - Gothed up to the max. I wore those pinz-nez glasses on a chord around my neck so that when I addressed a student, I had to peer over the top of them. Scared the living daylights out of the little darlings.
There were five IMacs in my tutorial room and each one had the clock set 3 minutes ahead of its neighbour. The macs pipped, pinged and giggled on the hour, on the half hour and on the quarter hour. Drove some students mad but drove my boss madder. Students of course cannot work Imacs and were unable to retaliate even when I sent them (for stats practical) to determine the total consumption of potatoes and KFC (popular foods in that part of Scotland!) amongst their fellow students.
I told them that the air conditioning system on the roof was a penthouse apartment, that another male lecturer, who dyed his hair and moustache(?) a charming shade of mahogany, had an unusual genetic condition and that was his natural colour.
When students asked me where I had acquired all my computing skills I told them I learned them in Bar-L (The Scottish High Security Prison). When they asked me for an idea for the cover of the college magazine I suggested a crop circle in the shape of the college logo set in a potato field. When they were stumped for a design for the same magazine, I had them lay it out like one of those airline mags, although, rather disturbingly, this was regarded as award winning work.
When my departmental head suggested the college have a top 100 books online poll, I had my students rig it so that Larry Niven's Ringworld was number one and Jane Eyre (her choice) was last! They also added 80 other hilarious titles. My head of department avoided contact with students at all costs and conducted most of her business via email. This was in the days before account verification so I regularly signed her up for every newsletter that had even the slightest connection with our faculty subjects. She was under the delusion that these internet sites had sought her out because she was so important a figure in the world of education...
My college circulated a monthly staff suggestions form (probably to comply with some iso 9001 crap). I regularly suggested painting our corridors light pink to calm down difficult students. When I missed my flu jab I jokingly suggested that they implement a college wide vaccination program. Not only did they take up the idea, they awarded me 100 pounds for making such a practical suggestion.
All of this pales into insignificance when I think that I could have sold the damn place on Ebay!
Re:Unlikely Statistic (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yet another case made for homeschooling... (Score:4, Insightful)
Homeschooling just segregates them even more and inhibits their socialization. The fact that you want to choose with whom they socialize is kind of disturbing. They aren't some sort of pet that you get to train. You should allow children to grow and develop with guidance, rather than follow some sort of path that you want to vicariously travel. In my opinion it's homeschooling that will hinder your potential child's socialization, rather than public schools.
Parent
Re:Yet another case made for homeschooling... (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, she had never learned that girls aren't supposed to be good at math. She didn't realize that when you're in class, and you don't understand something, you're supposed to keep quiet instead of raising your had to ask for clarification!
And worst of all, she didn't know you're supposed to pick on kids who are smaller/weaker/different! I guess they had to work out some remedial classes for her or something...
Parent
Re:Yet another case made for homeschooling... (Score:5, Insightful)
No thanks. Home and private education worked fine for hundreds of years before the late 1800s when public schools were invented to turn kids into wage slaves at factories.
And simply because a kid is home-schooled doesnt mean they don't have friends and get out more. We have churches and civic programs that kids need to be involved in as well.
Parent
Re:Yet another case made for homeschooling... (Score:4, Interesting)
We homeschool our 2 kids (currently 4th & 7th grade). We live a bit out of the way, and we just don't care for the wasted time and resources public education drains on everyone (us, the kids, etc.). We're in the middle of a family debate on whether to re-introduce them back. They want more social interaction, but that just means they want daily contact w/ kids their own age, not that they have any trouble socializing.
Our kids lack a bit of "street smarts", but they're pretty sharp. The are not finely tuned to pass standardized tests, but they have the ability to figure stuff out. Combined with the fact that we haven't had TV in 7 or so years, they are also a bit lacking in current pop culture references and almost totally lack the branded, consumerist mindset most kids (and adults) have today. Sure, I doubt my kids will be National Honor Society material, but I think that's a good thing.
Personally, my wife and I feel that for the vast majority of occupations, college is more of a liability than anything these days. Education has become such a boogeyman for gullible parents that it has become commoditized and commercialized to the point of loosing any meaning it once had. The cost (and potential debt) is outrageous, and it seems so few actually ever use their degree (for example, I once had a manager when I was waiting tables that had a chemistry degree -- WTF?!?). If my kids *want* to go down a career path that requires tons of education (academia, law, medicine, etc.), then they'll be motivated to find a way to get there. If not, then they'll start off in a slightly lower caste, but with substantially less baggage than their college-educated, debt-laden, Prozac-popping peers.
Sure, home-schooled kids *may* be slightly less equipped to handle the "real, big bad world" than their hardened, systemically-programmed public education counterparts. However, we believe that it will be far easier for our kids to catch up on any good things they missed out on in school once they are adults than it will be for them to shed the stupid habits and conformity they would have gained there.
Parent
Re:Yet another case made for homeschooling... (Score:5, Funny)
I was going to point out that I was home-schooled through high school, and am perfectly well socialized... but then I remembered where I was posting this. :)
Parent