Life In The Fast Lane

I saw links to a local teacher/pornography story in Boing Boing  and I followed up through a couple of links. The  school district in question is in my neck of the woods and I have a couple of educational colleagues who work there, one who inevitably will be in the middle of this one. Even though it was reported in the local news it was only after reading the Boing Boing link that I realized that it was pop up adware that was causing the problem. According to this side of the story, the schools protection and filtering had expired, and the policy of the school was to have the teacher’s machine on at all times. At one point the story says that the teacher (and I might add SUBSTITUTE teacher – which often gets overlooked in these bad teacher stories that hits the news. The headlines screams TEACHER gets in trouble when often it is a sub, not a regular staff person – but I digress) asked for help from the assistant principal and got none. The kids were exposed to pop-up ads for porn/adult sites.

One can imagine a situation where embedded spyware or adware on a school machine starts throwing up pop-up boxes, one after another, with adult content. Persistent boxes, boxes with window closing X’s off screen, boxes that trigger other boxes, malware that triggers itself into pop-up windows at random times no matter what page you are on. If you have ever been caught in these pop-up casacades, you know how bad it can become, and if they are naked people in the casacade, in a classroom full of kids! Without taking sides either way, I can see that scenario being plausible. Spyware/adware could have been lying dormant for a while.

Having had my own run ins with machines infected with bad spyware/adware in school it can happen. And we are pretty tight with virus protection, filtering and keeping current with pop-up blocking. However, I do have machines in special situations that are running older software or are running unfiltered. Do we have folks that use their school machines to shop, or at least look at on-line vendors that can drop cookies, or get emails that can lead to trouble? You bettcha.  Do we have lots of schools who are way behind in technology? Yep! Heck my wife operates in a high school classroom where the main computer is Windows 98.

My usual way of dealing  with a spyware infestation in a classroom computer is to wipe the machine clean and start  over. However, that would not have helped  the situation in Norwich. I would have hoped that one of my folks would have had the good sense to turn the machine off and get it away from kids, but I am sitting here with my coffee this morning and thinking and rethinking my schools and our protections against this situation.

Here are some links to follow up on:
Boing Boing: Teacher faces 40 years for porn in classroom, blames adware

Boing Boing links to a blog by Ben Edelman that is a discussion about how adware and spyware interact to take people to sexually explicit sites. Link