Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”
Parental controls are an excellent tool to teach kids how to bypass parental controls.
I support this, so long as there’s no rules against kids learning how to bypass parental controls. It’s basically a CTF. All kids should learn how to mitigate internet censorship.
“Would someone think of the children” gets used way to much to defend policies that harm children
Surveillance and control around tech has become highly advanced which means that it isn’t trivial to bypass restrictions like to was before. Chromebooks get locked down heavily and everything students do is carefully watched and controlled. What’s worse is that kids who can afford a laptop will have a major advantage which will further increase inequality.
My daughter learned how to spoof her MAC address at age 12 to bypass any controls I added. Then I went with a separate WiFi for her which physically powered down when needed. She ‘solved’ that with a hammer to the lock on the cabinet with the equipment.
Sigh … eventually (after broken walls, me getting punched hard, police visits, dropping out of school) I kinda gave up and let her deal. She actually went to college after the public system basically gave her a high school degree for doing very little, but dropped out of that. Now she’s back home and as I type she’s rage yelling at her computer.
Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!
We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like “Barn Swallow”, “Guitara Latina”, or “Sperm Whale” and get my search blocked because of certain “keywords” in them…
By highschool that didn’t really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I’m not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)
We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn’t touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).
I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can’t remember the website name tho.
Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.
So it sounds like the problem isn’t the computers, it’s kids using the computers to fuck off and being distracted.
Do these not come with any sort of parental controls?
Parental controls are an excellent tool to teach kids how to bypass parental controls.
I support this, so long as there’s no rules against kids learning how to bypass parental controls. It’s basically a CTF. All kids should learn how to mitigate internet censorship.
“Would someone think of the children” gets used way to much to defend policies that harm children
Surveillance and control around tech has become highly advanced which means that it isn’t trivial to bypass restrictions like to was before. Chromebooks get locked down heavily and everything students do is carefully watched and controlled. What’s worse is that kids who can afford a laptop will have a major advantage which will further increase inequality.
My daughter learned how to spoof her MAC address at age 12 to bypass any controls I added. Then I went with a separate WiFi for her which physically powered down when needed. She ‘solved’ that with a hammer to the lock on the cabinet with the equipment.
How did you reward her for this epic win?
Sigh … eventually (after broken walls, me getting punched hard, police visits, dropping out of school) I kinda gave up and let her deal. She actually went to college after the public system basically gave her a high school degree for doing very little, but dropped out of that. Now she’s back home and as I type she’s rage yelling at her computer.
Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!
We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like “Barn Swallow”, “Guitara Latina”, or “Sperm Whale” and get my search blocked because of certain “keywords” in them…
By highschool that didn’t really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I’m not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)
We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn’t touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).
I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can’t remember the website name tho.
Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.
I guess it’s too much to ask for parental controls to actually function properly without significantly impairing students’ ability to learn.