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Monday, February 26, 2007

Porn in the Classroom

This actually doesn't fit so well here, as we tend to focus on different subjects than this one. Technically, it should be posted on The Wording, but this blog gets far more hits than that one and I feel this is a very important subject, so I wanted to make as many people aware of this as possible.

According to an article I came across, a substitute teacher is being unfairly railroaded by yet another prosecutor more concerned with making a splash and furthering his own career than actually upholding the law. She apparently left the classroom she was teaching and when she returned, some of the students had accessed a hairdressing site which rerouted them to a porn site that started spewing pop-ups. The teacher was unable to stop them and was told in no uncertain terms not to turn the computer off. Several students were apparently exposed to pornographic images when this happened.

Now, why the teacher didn't throw a coat or something over the computer is not immediately answerable, but the prosecution and many others involved in the case are skeptical that this could even happen! Now, maybe I'm a little ahead of the curve, but unless my calendar is completely wrong, this is 2007. If you don't know enough about computers to have experienced this, or known someone who has, then you are not qualified to make any sort of decision concerning computers!

The first time I experienced this exact same thing was when I was working computer tech support for (what was then) a multi-million dollar, international company. Their network was broadband and outfitted with what was then top-of-the-line anti-spyware and yet I - through absolutely no fault of my own - somehow got redirected to a porn pop-up site which began literally spewing one window after another. I was on the phone with a customer when this happened and several co-workers came over to help me try and stop it. ESC didn't work and the windows were popping up faster than you could mouse-over and shut them; you couldn't reboot the computer because the windows were popping up faster than the computer could respond. One guy knew to hit F12 because it had happened to him before and we managed - between about three of us -- to keep hitting F12 enough to slow the windows so another one could hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and shut the windows, then reboot the box.

Now, again, we were trained support technicians with a background in computers and we couldn't get away from this site and stop the pop-ups. We were on a highly-sophisticated network with all sorts of security measures that didn't stop the pop-ups and, like the teacher in the article mentions, they literally splashed across the screen one after the next faster than any of us could respond. I happen to know, firsthand, that the teacher is being honest about that much. 


 Again, I don't know why she didn't think to just turn off the monitor, at least, but she claims she doesn't know much about computers and was told not to turn it off, so she might not have known the monitor could be turned off without switching the CPU itself off. In fact, I still routinely meet people who don't know the difference between the monitor and the tower and don't realize that turning one off doesn't necessarily affect the other.

At any rate, this is yet another case of prosecutorial injustice run rampant. I don't think that these cases are just now coming to light because they are necessarily anymore prevalent now than they ever have been, but instead because people are now more aware of such abuses of the system.


So, what should happen? 

Pretty simple: the school should be held responsible for having lax computer security in place (there was no firewall software on the system because they didn't pay a contractor) and the teacher should, at most, be required to take some computer courses.

The only thing the teacher in this case is guilty of is ignorance of computers and that's not a crime -- even if it should be.

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