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from the 1984-was-not-a-"how-to"-manual dept.
When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.
"They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change."
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide Wi-Fi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyse their conduct or assess their mental health.
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilise students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.
In response we have:
How to (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's Surveillance System:
This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: "Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands," read the Washington Post link.
Vick countered with an offer to students:
If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system.
We're always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Sunday December 29 2019, @03:31PM (19 children)
Get everyone to do this and the whole class can have perfect attendance with just one student and a bag of phones:
When the teacher sees one person in class but the computer says everyone is there, there's no way that they can ever trust the system again.
And wtf is it with taking attendance. We stopped doing that part way through high school.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:43PM (13 children)
Depends on the nature of the school, even some community colleges are more in the business of babysitting than they are "higher education."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @06:57PM (11 children)
I work for a J.C. We get funding from the state based on bodies in classes and labs (and what we can steal from taxpayers through large, and poorly managed, bonds). Next year, pay per student instructional hours is changing to pay based on certain outcomes like percentage of students attaining two year degrees. We are mainly a transfer school (students going on to four year colleges), so the new method is expected to severely impact our funding.
Aruba is always sending sales people over pushing beacons for tracking, and also tracking students based on the APs the clients are visible from. So far, technical staff have been able to keep this nonsense from happening even though we installed Aruba wireless.
But, Palo Alto has been more successful in reaching the creepy fuckers in management. They pushed tracking every connection (full urls) that clients make, and tying them back to usernames. Management pretty much got a boner. Those worthless fucks want us to MiM all SSL traffic, by installing fake trusted certs on all school owned equipment) so management can spy on faculty, staff and students-- even their encrypted communications. I pointed out that this allows *anybody* to MiM these connections since Palo Alto would hide the attackers bad cert behind the school's fake "good" cert-- since privacy and decency arguments fell on deaf ears, but security issues also fell on deaf ears. I'm not allowed in these meetings anymore, but when I stated, "If we are really going to go forward with monitoring all activities by employees and students, we, at least, need to make an announcement that our policies have changed, as this monitoring is contrary to everything we have stated about our policies, in the past." The Executive Director of IT (and husband of the school president; even though our anti-nepotism rules are supposed to forbid this) said, "No, they [specifically talking about faculty] would not understand." So far the creepy pro-spying fuckers have not succeeded, but those of us trying to subvert it (and still keep our jobs*), are not very hopeful, as the managers are talking as if all the decisions have already been made-- they do not want us to do an evaluation of other vendor's products-- which was how we had hoped to thwart this, by showing that vendors that had the features we *need*, but not the spying capabilities cost a fraction of Palo Alto, so there could be no good reason to select Palo Alto.
Suggestions, that do not involve being fired, to push back on this crap are very welcome!
*small town; non-retail/fast-food jobs are scarce.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
Is moving an option?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:41PM
Sadly, not for some years.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:29PM (3 children)
Do you have a local or regional newspaper that will print a letter to the editor (from an Anon)? Or a news line where you can call in a tip (reporters live on suggestions of improper behavior)?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 29 2019, @09:53PM
This. I grew up in a small poor region and even small poor regions have some kind of a local rag. And those small local rags love to pounce on and amplify any kind of controversy. Mine has a section where people write in their gripes and some of them were ridiculously insignificant -- one example was a problem neighborhood dog that kept running loose and pissing on all the neighbors' lawns. Basically a semi-anonymous form of public shaming where everybody including the dog-owner knew exactly what the paper was talking about so the problem was solved in short order.
Given that there are often a lot of religious people in small areas, you could play the "mark of the beast" angle on all the digital tracking and whatnot. Even when done facetiously it will attract enough alarm to get those angry letters and possibly even protests sent their way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:46PM (1 child)
This fails the "not get fired" requirement. It is a very short list of people aware of the project. Whittled down further to people who have expressed misgivings / opposition to the project. It would basically come out as a coin toss between two people. I could see them firing both of us.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @11:08AM
Do it with public information. On every computer, go to https://google.com [google.com] and you can then check the cert. If it doesn't match the expected path, boom, you have a story. Don't talk about internal meethings, who did what. Just the results you, and everyone that looks, is aware of. The certs are fucked. MiTM is obvious. QED.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @08:40PM (3 children)
Nonsense like this just creates a perverse incentive to hand out degrees like candy, which is already a problem. The entire system is a scam, and we need drastically reduce the amount of jobs that require degrees. Employers shouldn't be requiring pieces of paper just to save themselves some money on training and hiring (the former they should do regardless).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @11:55PM
The administration is way ahead of you. We've already begun contacting students to let them know that if they take just one additional class in subject X, they can get an additional two year degree! Or, these three classes will allow three degrees instead of just one!!!
In fairness, evaluating school performance with simple metrics is probably always going to fail-- regardless of metric. And, going beyond simple metrics is always going to be dismissed as impractical due to the work required, and opportunities for subjective bias.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 30 2019, @04:11PM (1 child)
Totally agree.
85% agree, there are still significant bastions of actual research and learning in academia - they've been in the minority for some time now, but they still exist.
That sounds like the Pol Pot solution: abandon the cities, return to agrarian economy, smelt metals in residential backyards!
How about: we require the ability to perform a job competently, whether demonstrated via degree or apprenticeship / time in grade? When I was coming up through high school, the students were teaching the teachers computer science, and even at University level roughly 5% of the students were at a peer or better level with most of the Comp Sci professors. This isn't just about computer science, either - if you've got 10 years working experience in all areas of a business, getting a paper MBA from some institution is a waste of everybody's time and your money. Government, the courts, and corporations need to back off on the idea that a University degree somehow "qualifies" people for certain job titles and start recognizing alternate forms of learning / experience / demonstration of ability.
Having said all that, I'd say that we need to drastically increase the amount of people appropriately trained for the available jobs and get over the idea that passing the 4 year $100K B.S. gatekeeper is all that it takes to get a job in this economy. The gatekeeper indeed should be rendered irrelevant, but not by sending the boys back to the farms to plow the fields with oxen.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @11:02PM
Rather, jobs that did not used to require degrees (and indeed do not need degrees at all) now require them. Software development is an example; more such jobs now require degrees, completely unnecessarily.
This is more what I meant. I agree.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @12:00AM
Do not demonstrate their stupidity to them. Let someone else do it, or perhaps anonymously. I did this a while back. The flak was extraordinary.
Remember that the education system is a bubble. A mini-pond with it's own ecosystem including scum. Your goal is to stay alive.
Good luck.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday December 30 2019, @02:33PM
When I attended SIUE I only had one instructor who took attendance, and it was a smallish class with maybe twenty students. But then you could take a bypass test, and if you passed you didn't have to take the class. Late seventies so It's probably different now.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @04:54PM (1 child)
Or get a phone that doesn't support the app. I recently switched to a KaiOS based phone because I wanted my life back. A fringe benefit is that unless these apps are specifically written for the OS, then they won't even run. I can also turn off data and bluetooth as well as they aren't relevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @12:02AM
Just disable bluetooth permanently?
I don't understand why people leave bluetooth and wireless and network data on all of the time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday December 29 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
>And wtf is it with taking attendance. We stopped doing that part way through high school.
This is my question too. I went to two different state universities (I transferred halfway through), and I don't remember any class ever taking attendance. If you wanted to learn the material, you showed up. If you didn't think you needed to bother, you could skip it. Attendance was always optional, unless of course there was an exam that day (I guess you could say that was optional too, but you wouldn't pass without it of course). I ended up skipping my freshman Chemistry class lectures because I didn't find them useful, and only attended the once-a-week small-group class led by a TA, because I found that far more useful than the 300-person lecture. I ended up getting an A of course.
This attendance thing sounds like a power play by angry and incompetent professors who aren't doing a very good job teaching and who want to see a lecture hall full of students sitting through their useless lectures, instead of skipping them and just studying the material on their own or with TAs that are far better at teaching than them.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 29 2019, @07:33PM
> This attendance thing sounds like a power play ...
More like the grade school funding mechanism where my high school got a fixed amount of state aid (money) for every student that showed up for a day. I came in late nearly every day my senior year (no morning classes), but always signed in before 10am which meant that the school could claim a full day of compensation for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 30 2019, @11:43AM
My experience is now close on 20 years out of date, but back then we required it for lab sessions in engineering degree courses. We also required them to show their student ID cards at the lab doors for verification on entry, even if they popped out to the toilet their ID was checked when they came back.
Extreme?, maybe, but long story short, it cured some blatant abuses of the system being perpetrated at the time by a certain group of people more used to buying their degrees than working for them.