iPad Rollout in LA School Postponed When Students Hack Around the Safeguards

[Maura]

Engadget reports today on a story in the Los Angeles Times about how schoolchildren in LA have caused an iPad rollout program in local schools to be put on hold, because they have figured out how to bypass the safeguards installed to stop them accessing sites such as Twitter on th.

According to the report, 300 children at Theodore Roosevelt High School were easily able to work around the protective features that had been installed on the iPads that were given to them as part of a plan to give iPads to all 640,000 school students in the area. This meant that the children were freely able to access such forbidden sites as Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently it was as simple as deleting their preloaded personal profiles on the iPads via the Settings menu, but that simple move has now had the effect of prompting the school district police chief to recommend that the school board halt the $1 billion rollout of the iPads, lest it become a “runaway train scenario.â€

Meanwhile, as the school board tries to figure out a better way to restrict access to the unwanted sites, the children are banned from using the iPads at home.

Source: LA officials may delay school iPad rollout after students hack them in a week

 

[shadowfax38]

No way

 

[golddust34]

Lol, no surprise there. I worked as a high school computer lab manager a few years back. Those kids know how to get into everything. We had a program called Fortress on our desktop pcs and the kids found the way around it in days. It was so simple it was mind boggling.

 

[orion]

Yeah but now those kid ruined it for the rest of the kids. They should have just reported the problem instead of taking advantage of it.

 

[s2mikey]

I thought school systems were all broke? They always tell us that. iPads for students? Must be nice.....

 

[golddust34]

First off schools never pay anywhere near full price. Secondly, they probably had a corporate backer to pay for it - or most of it.

 

[golddust34]

I also forgot to mention, there's a growing trend to making schools go paperless. We have one such school in our county here in Florida. It's brand new and this is supposed to cut expenses in the long run. I guess they are using it as a test case to see what the actual savings will be.