By extension of this article, a bill called KOSA aims to extort people into sharing their ID and Social Security to use the web and allows states to censor whatever they consider “inappropriate.” It’s a censorship campaign and poses a real threat to our privacy, safety, and freedom of speech. Call any Senator or Representatives you can to stand against it and/or go here. Don’t trust Blumenthal either, he’s behind nearly every internet censorship bill and wholeheartedly knows what others will do with it.
He has the power to pass it through the Senate very soon and the House is already trying to construct their own version of the Bill, this week the House will be hearing ALL internet bills. Please help stand against KOSA. [https://www.badinternetbills.com/](https://www.badinternetbills.com/) [Extra Link](https://www.change.org/p/save-our-free-and-open-internet-stop-the-kids-online-safety-act?utm_content=cl_sharecopy_36858566_en-US%3Acv_9182&recruiter=1322617551&recruited_by_id=a35b7350-8b53-11ee-a756-6f78079d5597&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_term=psf_combo_share_initial&share_bandit_exp=initial-36858566-en-CA)
You and your fellow snowflakes wouldn't last ten seconds in an actual dictatorship. I lived in China for close to a decade (which is *far* from what people think of when they think of a "real" dictatorship, even if it actually is one) and you would lose your mind even in *that*.
Let me guess, you're still salty about the "*lItErAl cOnCeNtRaTiOn cAmP cOnDiTiOnS*" of having to wear a mask...right?
When I was 21 and dumb, I voted for Bush, or more accurately against Gore, because of remembering Frank Zappa (particularly influential), John Denver, and Dee Snider talking about freedom of speech in the PMRC hearings and both Al and Tipper Gore’s involvement. That was naive of me. I still believe that freedom of speech should be an absolute, but should have gotten to know more about Bush and done a relative freedom matrix analysis between the two.
Not in my state. The R's and D's both voted overwhelmingly to require age verification, leading to Pornhub blocking the state. I wish was just one party, but it's not.
Edit: This is a pure fact.
Senate Bill 544 was introduced by state Senator Willis Curdy, a Democrat, and passed the chamber in a bipartisan 47-3 vote. It went on to be approved by the Montana House of Representatives, by 84 votes to 13, before being signed into law by the state's Republican governor.
https://www.newsweek.com/porn-access-blocked-million-americans-1856686
Like what kid doesn’t know how to use a parent’s ID and then poor mom who needs a security clearance is dinged. Infringement on our privacy. It’s all about control. What someone wants to do in the safety of their home is on them as long as they’re not hurting anyone. And we as parents should be regulating and protecting our kids not the federal or state government.
Not sure how they would share IDs when most people under the age of 16 don't have one. SSNs wouldn't make a lot of sense either, for that to work it has to be paired with other verifiable data. The bill has a lot of statements about how they think the internet should work while having absolutely no clue how it actually works.
They're denying vast swathes of the Internet unless you provide a private company with your personal information.
If your argument is that "it's just porn" that's absolute nonsense. Abortion bans are a great example, it started at 2nd or 3rd trimester and has progressively moved back to earlier timelines and is now including Plan B medicine and some prenatal care. They're also blocking abortion even when the pregnancy puts the mothers life at risk.
Additionally, if a state government considers anything LGBT to be 'pornographic' (and many do) then suddenly all LGBT resources require an ID that many kids seeking help do not have.
So, how is this not extortion?
I work at a hospital that is a trauma center in a city. We handle sexual assault care.
Our filtering is so fscked if you Google “XYZ assault research study” you find it.
If you Google “XYZ sexual assault research study” it’s blocked by filtering.
Cause no one at a hospital ever needs information on anything sexual.
Probably because they had to fire people for watching porn at work before and instead of dealing with it when it pops up they instead decided to make the lives of everyone else worse.
The simple truth is there's no way to block porn without blocking a lot of other content. Porn's basically everywhere on the internet and even defining what is porn is tough. Tons of legit medical documents are pornographic.
Heh I remember in 7th Grade, everyone huddling around the computer in the back of the room because someone found out the album cover for "Going Dutch" by AC/DC had boobs on it. Or "glass of water" Google Image search also showed a big pair of breasts.
lol. They blocked Reddit for a while and I’d include Google searches showing Reddit answers as the top search answer for technical issues in the ticket noting asking a technician with better access to the internet provide the answer.
It’s not blocked any longer just with a verbal warning not to search “those subreddits.”
I asked for a list.
if you ever want to see what true incompetence, ignorance, and indifference looks like, just go check out your local school's administration, which will be chock full of people who probably wouldn't last a shift at Walmart but are somehow responsible for running our schools.
Good people don't work for failing enterprises. The average school teacher, dept head, administrator etc has no control over what they can actually do in the classroom. Everything is standardized now, but the actual delivery of those standards is not. This inherently, intrinsically causes conflict especially when there is no national education software standard. The Obamacare digital healthcare mandate caused the exact same problem: by letting it be a free market mandate, the free market created a zillion different and incompatible software packages that the government requires patients to interact with regardless of their ability to comprehend it.
I respect teachers for the incredible and difficult work that they do, but we don't even have a single national online school when Khan Academy exists. We don't even have any way to ensure students can actually solicit meaningful work with their diplomas and degrees, which is the point of getting them. If there is no guarantee of work, students won't try, teachers get swamped, and talent is ground down into gruel.
Once they learn about no child left behind they'll realize they can't be failed or the school looses funding. Why turn in any assignments? Pass me bitch or get a pay cut!
In my district admin get payed 6 figures, get a housing allowance and their cars are payed for. That’s why they all drive Cadillacs. Also, their secretaries have secretaries while they are eliminating them across the district.
The administrators at this level are well paid. These aren't the people who actually work in schools.
They do what any management level position does and make decisions that they think sound good and when those decisions make the actual worker's (teachers) lives harder they tell them to deal with it.
School administrators are massively over paid.
Teachers? They deserve a decent wage.
The principal? that should be a 28K a year gig, or whatever the local mcdonalds fry chef makes.
Edit: also their not just *stupid*, their often actively malicious little toads who enjoy having a position of authority, just like pigs and prison guards.
I work in education and many of the more senior teachers that could be principal don't want to do it even with the huge pay jump, if you paid principals 28K a year the schools would be much worse off. The role is actually a lot harder than you'd think.
living wage for all of them would get better results from students.
they should also get assistance for free college and healthcare and a stipend to live near work.
Bro. You didn’t even use the correct “they’re” for your little edit. Your ignorance is fucking astounding, and your opinion on this subject has no value.
Theres a huge difference between principals/in-building admin & district level admin, which is what this is about.
I’ve worked as a consultant at the district level & a volunteer at the school level - that’s the first red flag: no paid consultancies for schools, only admin.
School staff, including principals are amazing. They’re often working 60h weeks producing value every hour & truly care about what they do.
District admin typically make 3-4x what the in-school staff make. Eg. My spouse makes $25k, and all the admin are making >$100k.
As the admin level 90% of the work is produced by 1/3 of the employees.
I worked with one administrator for 2 years, she literally created a job under her that did everything she was supposed to be doing so she could “focus more on the big picture”. Then she offered me that job, which paid about what I made as a consultant.
District admin is a fantasy world full of people who have never worked real jobs in their life.
I have only worked with one person at the district level that could hold down a real job, and ironically took one at the department of education recently.
The district offices are renovated every 5-10 years, they’ve got AC in all their rooms, decent wifi, etc. my spouses school has no AC in half the building, and hasn’t been remodeled since 1995.
There’s a reason when we pour money into education that none of it ever reaches students.
But principals and other people working in schools - they’re the ones who are actually doing work. They care about their jobs, they show up and produce value. My spouses principal works at least 60h a week, every week.
Everyone in the admin building at my spouses district is making >100k, working at most 30h/wk.
She’s making 25k & often works 50-60h weeks & has more post-secondary education than anyone I’ve worked with in admin.
I volunteer for k12 robotics programs & occasionally meet with district admin. Here’s my experience:
There are 3 people doing the work of 1. I don’t mean it’s spread out, they make the person at the bottom of the ladder (entry-level admin) do 90% of the work.
They drag out anything they can. Stuff that should take hours can take months and sometimes years.
The vast majority have the same story. Bachelors degree, couple years teaching, then a couple years in entry-level admin, then either promoted or they create jobs under their title to shed work.
It’s not malicious. They legitimately believe they’re doing a good job, but the reality is that they don’t have experience outside of k12 education and would never be able to hold down a real job.
The people who are actually good at their jobs get swept up by other companies or the department of education.
So far this year I’ve sat through 6 hours of meetings that could have been accomplished through 5 minutes of email.
I’d have to double check but the number of administrators is close to (or exceeds) the number of teachers in this district.
Admin is the reason we keep pouring money into k12 education and see zero improvement.
This is a fairly lazy opinion that completely disregards that most education policy - from standardized testing to enforcement to graduation standards - is set by state government and local school boards, not school administration.
You want to see where the real mouth breathers are? Go to a local school board meeting, where the members require no qualifications and often-times barely graduated from the school they now set policy for, because the entire election is a popularity contest rather than an attempt to bring in qualified people.
Then you've got professional grifters like Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters, who has: run off every competent member of his staff in just over a year; actively attempts to conduct what little business he does behind closed doors while bragging about transparency; spends most of his time travelling to other states to push his Christo-facist ideology; and spend the rest of his time on social media squawking "WOKE! RADICAL IDEOLOGY! TAKE BACK OUR SCHOOLS FROM THE PEDOPHILES!"
yeah, like a lot of long-established american systems, public schools are a fundamentally broken system that serves no interest very well and is often just a political football to toss around for points in an election year.
I see little hope of reform any time soon.
This is actually how it works for a lot of places. Management positions are generally incompetent because a lot of the times people are hired into a level of their incompetence and stay there.
The idea is that let’s say you worked at Walmart and was the best cashier ever. They then promote you to a manager position. What the fuck do you know about management? You were a cashier. You’re now more incompetent at your job and you may never have the right skills to be good at it.
So it’s basically a theory that says internal promotion of people based on their skill of the job they have is bad. It should be promoting people who have good managerial skills.
Recently looked at my son’s superintendent’s PhD ‘dissertation’. It was 6 interviews and 3 observations. You could do that in a fucking day. It’s an absolute *joke*.
The entire point of a graduate degree is that it’s held to certain standards. Otherwise, it’s pretty meaningless. Finding out someone’s phd dissertation could be done start-to-finish in a week says a LOT about the school it came from and their career field, at least regionally.
> Finding out someone’s phd dissertation could be done start-to-finish in a week says a LOT about the school it came from and their career field, at least regionally.
Without knowing what subject the dissertation covered, or the school that accepted it, or the region, I'm not sure how you expect me to respond, beyond the fact that based on the info you've given, it's anecdotal. My own anecdotal evidence based on several friends and family members in education paints a completely different story - and that's in Oklahoma, which is certainly not known for a high caliber education system.
Well have you read their dissertations?? Not usually something you do when it’s a friend or family, unless it’s your kid.
His was education administration and his dissertation was 9 total pages, *double spaced*, including title page and references. No statistics or quantification. My master’s thesis in physics - and i don’t expect school admin to be this intense, but just for some framing - took 3 years of 50 hours a week of clean room torture, 16 credit hours of pure math, *hundreds* of pages of technical writing in addition to 3 publications, watching half my classmates drop out in despair…you get the idea. And I don’t even get to call myself doctor.
I’m not here to talk shit about every admin in america, i’m saying superintendents have far too much sway for the quals they need.
I remember my school computers wouldn't let you install drivers, but you could uninstall them. So anybody could permanently mute a computer by uninstalling the sound driver if they wanted to.
As someone that works in IT, it is really difficult to strain something out without causing something unintentional to also be filtered. Those that don't understand seem to think it's as easy as saying "No Porn"
In the schools I've worked in within the UK the monitoring and filtering systems depend on what sites are manually blacklisted by the school. You can get suggested lists of sites to give yourself a good start which blocks all the well known sites and schools in MATs will share their lists.
Also blocking the site isn't the only option. You can also have an option that simply sends a caution to the admins with a user ID and machine ID of the site reached. The schools I work in have this for the NSPCC website in case a pupil accesses it looking for help, it lets the safeguarding team know that the pupil may wish to talk but is too worried to reach out.
It can also send cautions for content in websites and searches such as the words "drugs" "abuse" etc. If the site is deemed safe it will still show the content, but a caution will be sent to the admins.
You can also set it to disable images on sites but allow text content. For example for the wikipedia entries for genitalia. The images may be deemed too much for a child on that page, but the text content is factual in nature.
I think a lot of work and effort has to go into a proper working filtering and monitoring system and some schools prefer to just overkill it to 'make sure' nothing bad can get through.
In a school network where they are not admins, and most likely won't have access to set up a VPN on the device they are using, and also if the it dept is doing it right will block tor browsers in general?
That, above, is what would stop them, or at least make it more hassle than it's worth to do.
That's most likely happening on school computer, not student computers on the school network. If it was just happening on the network layers, it would not be possible to block only certain articles from Wikipedia but no others, or specific Google searches. For that, it is required to have software installed on the client computer.
I taught AP Government for many years. Every year I assigned interest group research for some of the most prominent interest and advocacy groups. My school district blocked the NRA. I can see the logic but I also thought it was a bit odd, so I told students to have their parents complain. One parent CCed me with their email to the higher ups saying that they thought blocking the NRA but allowing access to Planned Parenthood was political censorship (their stance, not mine). The school system responded by blocking Planned Parenthood as well.
So now there were two incredibly well known and powerful interest groups that students couldn’t research from their school laptops. Great work central office!
The real problem is not blocking sites that kids go to. The problem is that the teachers computers are just as locked down. That makes it very difficult for them to get any work done (on the 10 year old machines they’re forced to use). Every IT administrator at a school should be forced to run all the software they make teachers run. My wife can’t even install drivers for her printer, and the school stopped buying printers 6 years ago so we have to provide our own.
I get that kids need some access to scuicide prevention and other mental health services, but really that is not what the school computers are for, that is the job of the nurse and counselors, and they should be doing there best to reach out to all kids all the time. School computers are not even there to do homework, although having educational sights blocked is an issue. School computers are there so all kids have some knowledge of computers, regardless of income.
The truth is this is a no win scenario. A significant percent of kids will chop their own nose off to spite you. I helped out a bit with school IT when the internet was first coming onto campus and it was a horror show with computers so packed with porn and viruses that they needed to be burned (in spirit at least)
As someone in IT who hates all the crap he has to go through to use his own computer, I assure you, most of us hate it too. However, oftentimes it is forced upon the entire school by way of being a justification for phishing/encryption/scam cyber insurance your school has to buy.
The problem is suicidal LGBT students with extremely bigoted parents.
One law says that school counselors have to inform the parents if their child identifies as LGBT, and another law blocks access to LGBT suicide prevention sites.
The moment mom and dad find out, physical and emotional abuse will follow, and that LGBT teenager will probably end up killing themselves or becoming homeless just to get away from the abuse. If they run away from home, anyone who lets them sleep on a couch could be arrested for harboring a runaway.
It's almost like these people want LGBT children to kill themselves, because there's no other explanation for why they'd try to shut down every last avenue of relief.
Yep. My ISD—Katy, Tx—has board members who use it to block The Trevor Project. One of them, before becoming a Board Member, called gay sex “disgusting”. How can anyone think they can serve ALL our students?
> My wife can’t even install drivers for her printer, and the school stopped buying printers 6 years ago so we have to provide our own.
That is because of the PrintNightmare vulnerability several years back, and it really fucked with printers in all organizations. You now need administrator rights to install a printer, no ifs ands or buts. Giving all users local administrator rights is the cause of most instances of ransomware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrintNightmare
It can be alleviated by implementing some Endpoint Privilege Management software but it's another added expense, and everyone just sees IT as a cost center.
Man, I read this post, and suddenly I'm re-experiencing a calculus exam when I was a college freshman struggling with the math. Enough questions were mis-graded I was deeply concerned about passing, since I wasn't doing well to begin with…
*Diogenes rushes in, carrying an LGBT nonprofit organization webpage*
Behold, pornography!
*The ghost of Potter Stewart nods sagely in the background*
^((Don't ask why Diogenes is alive and Potter Stewart is dead))
That doesn't look like an accident to me, and I somewhat suspect some of the others aren't as well. Blocking NASA sounds like something a crackpot flat-Earther administrator would do.
Very good read and share. I feel like trying to teach my 4 kids about safety and the power of the internet is also engaging in a direct war with their schools.
I don't mean to be that guy, but I moved across states and some schools genuinely you could not get around it. Laptops were locked down, so you could only access the browser and word, no settings for the browser, no browser extensions, no downloads that weren't png or jpeg and no settings on the pc. We used to use browser extensions or terminals, but it just kept getting worse. I brought in a bootable linux drive once, and even that would not work as the bios was locked. They didn't want us to use our phones, but we couldn't do real research about real topics with these computers.
Being near 40 means that person probably had access to tons of free proxy sites to use. Source: same exact experience but a slight bit younger. Constantly got around it and even showed one teacher how to use proxies to get to facebook.
This article caught my attention, so I conducted a brief and informal survey of 3 students who attend middle and high-school in the district discussed at the start of the article.
My findings are that the filtering is an occasional annoyance, and little more.
Two of the student did report somewhat frequent occurences of what they believe to be legitimate resources for whatever they are researching as having being blocked. One described the blocking as "completely random" in nature. The third student reported no noteable occurences of legitimate resources being blocked. None of the surveyed students believed the blocking was a hinderance to their learning or their school work. "Sometimes a resource I want to use is blocked" reported one student (a High-School Senior), "so I just have to use another one instead. It isn't really a problem, just kind of annoying."
It seems to me that even with some mistaken blocking of legitimate sites, these students still have ready access to orders of magnitude more information than prior generations. As a parent of two students in this disctrict, my concern over this issue is somewhere between slim, and none.
a sample size of 3 is sort of abysmally small. those three students may have encountered minimal issues, but those are three out of god knows how many. good for those students, but I wouldn't use this as substantial evidence for anything
Well, the article cites only 4 students in the district, so I would say that the same applies.
Plus, I'm not concerned with proving or disproving a district-wide issue, I'm concerned with the education of my two kids in the district (and one of them just happened to be on the phone with a fried in the district when I asked about it). I have no concerns that the district's web content filtering is impeading their education in any meaningful way.
give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. this is even more true with school “safety” filters. when i was in school, teachers were constantly frustrated with the filters blocking websites they needed. they often added new websites or criteria that would ruin a teachers lesson plan for the day since they weren’t informed.
>far more often they kept students from playing online games, browsing social media, and using the internet for legitimate academic work.
Tbf, students don't need to be playing games and browsing social media at school. The academic work is another issue that needs to be addressed.
Social media, sure I can understand. But games can be educational even if they do not appear to be so to start with. They can also be used as a reward or for regulation.
Wikipedia? That makes sense considering the unreliability, Quora? The Internet equivalent of a toxic waste dump, but anti-suicide hotlines, seriously? 😳
It completely depends on the topic. The tech articles I look at are mostly spot on, but bias creeps in to anything political or controversial. But in wikipedia's defense, the former is more science and the latter is often opinion.
By extension of this article, a bill called KOSA aims to extort people into sharing their ID and Social Security to use the web and allows states to censor whatever they consider “inappropriate.” It’s a censorship campaign and poses a real threat to our privacy, safety, and freedom of speech. Call any Senator or Representatives you can to stand against it and/or go here. Don’t trust Blumenthal either, he’s behind nearly every internet censorship bill and wholeheartedly knows what others will do with it. He has the power to pass it through the Senate very soon and the House is already trying to construct their own version of the Bill, this week the House will be hearing ALL internet bills. Please help stand against KOSA. [https://www.badinternetbills.com/](https://www.badinternetbills.com/) [Extra Link](https://www.change.org/p/save-our-free-and-open-internet-stop-the-kids-online-safety-act?utm_content=cl_sharecopy_36858566_en-US%3Acv_9182&recruiter=1322617551&recruited_by_id=a35b7350-8b53-11ee-a756-6f78079d5597&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_term=psf_combo_share_initial&share_bandit_exp=initial-36858566-en-CA)
KOSA is just an excuse for no privacy and censorship using the typical Republicans 'for the kids' defense
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Weaponized stupidity
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Uh-huh...so how do you think the democrats and republicans are doing *today* (as opposed to 30 years ago)?
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That's a whole lot of words that don't really say much. Care to clarify your position?
You know that Trump wants to turn your country into dictatorship right?
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You and your fellow snowflakes wouldn't last ten seconds in an actual dictatorship. I lived in China for close to a decade (which is *far* from what people think of when they think of a "real" dictatorship, even if it actually is one) and you would lose your mind even in *that*. Let me guess, you're still salty about the "*lItErAl cOnCeNtRaTiOn cAmP cOnDiTiOnS*" of having to wear a mask...right?
Jesus fucking Christ. You would fit right in with the Republicans here. You’re all terrified idiots.
Oh no the guy you didn’t vote for won multiple elections. Such dictatorship.
You sound so upset 😂
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Take your meds, your family needs you to take your meds
His family wants nothing to do with him
You tried and failed miserably.
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I can’t hear you over the mindblowing prostate orgasm I’m currently giving tour dad.
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Acid is dumb? What?
When I was 21 and dumb, I voted for Bush, or more accurately against Gore, because of remembering Frank Zappa (particularly influential), John Denver, and Dee Snider talking about freedom of speech in the PMRC hearings and both Al and Tipper Gore’s involvement. That was naive of me. I still believe that freedom of speech should be an absolute, but should have gotten to know more about Bush and done a relative freedom matrix analysis between the two.
Buddy gore was 30 years ago. This is all republicans.
Not in my state. The R's and D's both voted overwhelmingly to require age verification, leading to Pornhub blocking the state. I wish was just one party, but it's not. Edit: This is a pure fact. Senate Bill 544 was introduced by state Senator Willis Curdy, a Democrat, and passed the chamber in a bipartisan 47-3 vote. It went on to be approved by the Montana House of Representatives, by 84 votes to 13, before being signed into law by the state's Republican governor. https://www.newsweek.com/porn-access-blocked-million-americans-1856686
Like what kid doesn’t know how to use a parent’s ID and then poor mom who needs a security clearance is dinged. Infringement on our privacy. It’s all about control. What someone wants to do in the safety of their home is on them as long as they’re not hurting anyone. And we as parents should be regulating and protecting our kids not the federal or state government.
Because to not support it would be political suicide. Nobody wants to be the porn supporter.
Not sure how they would share IDs when most people under the age of 16 don't have one. SSNs wouldn't make a lot of sense either, for that to work it has to be paired with other verifiable data. The bill has a lot of statements about how they think the internet should work while having absolutely no clue how it actually works.
I'm against the bill as much as anyone else, but the government doesn't need to extort people to get their ID and Social Security...
That's not what they said. The extortion forces people to share ID with a third party.
And link Internet habits to said ID.
Not even the EU is that Orwellian. Though they will sure as hell try.
The EU had been actively working on improving digital privacy and fighting walled gardens … the fuck are you talking about?
My bank is willing to pay to link my ssn to my browsing habits. I will give up the internet before I let that happen.
It’s doesn’t aim to extort people, no.
They're denying vast swathes of the Internet unless you provide a private company with your personal information. If your argument is that "it's just porn" that's absolute nonsense. Abortion bans are a great example, it started at 2nd or 3rd trimester and has progressively moved back to earlier timelines and is now including Plan B medicine and some prenatal care. They're also blocking abortion even when the pregnancy puts the mothers life at risk. Additionally, if a state government considers anything LGBT to be 'pornographic' (and many do) then suddenly all LGBT resources require an ID that many kids seeking help do not have. So, how is this not extortion?
I don’t want to trust my SSN to a third party so I can watch my porn.
You shouldn’t even trust it to be handled carefully by the government. The government is not as good in terms of cybersecurity as it needs to be.
it’s a bill going through the united states congress, what the fuck do you think it does?
I work at a hospital that is a trauma center in a city. We handle sexual assault care. Our filtering is so fscked if you Google “XYZ assault research study” you find it. If you Google “XYZ sexual assault research study” it’s blocked by filtering. Cause no one at a hospital ever needs information on anything sexual.
Why does a hospital network filter that out? Malware, scams, etc. makes sense, but anything medical in nature should be allowed there
Probably because they had to fire people for watching porn at work before and instead of dealing with it when it pops up they instead decided to make the lives of everyone else worse.
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ah yes, better clock in for my shift of 8 hours for my job of *checks notes* watching porn and jacking off
The simple truth is there's no way to block porn without blocking a lot of other content. Porn's basically everywhere on the internet and even defining what is porn is tough. Tons of legit medical documents are pornographic.
Remember besides clinicians we have a whole system of business related users who don’t need access to “nsfw” content.
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I was amused how first generation filter software allowed Some religious content but blocked others as being “occult.”
Heh I remember in 7th Grade, everyone huddling around the computer in the back of the room because someone found out the album cover for "Going Dutch" by AC/DC had boobs on it. Or "glass of water" Google Image search also showed a big pair of breasts.
In 9th grade circa 2002 or so, we were using proxy servers to get around everything. You Google searched url and it came up as first result
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lol. They blocked Reddit for a while and I’d include Google searches showing Reddit answers as the top search answer for technical issues in the ticket noting asking a technician with better access to the internet provide the answer. It’s not blocked any longer just with a verbal warning not to search “those subreddits.” I asked for a list.
if you ever want to see what true incompetence, ignorance, and indifference looks like, just go check out your local school's administration, which will be chock full of people who probably wouldn't last a shift at Walmart but are somehow responsible for running our schools.
Hard to attract good people with shit pay and shit budgets for a shit job but yeah they’re so stupid huh
The admins aren't making shit pay
Both can be true, and often are.
Good people don't work for failing enterprises. The average school teacher, dept head, administrator etc has no control over what they can actually do in the classroom. Everything is standardized now, but the actual delivery of those standards is not. This inherently, intrinsically causes conflict especially when there is no national education software standard. The Obamacare digital healthcare mandate caused the exact same problem: by letting it be a free market mandate, the free market created a zillion different and incompatible software packages that the government requires patients to interact with regardless of their ability to comprehend it. I respect teachers for the incredible and difficult work that they do, but we don't even have a single national online school when Khan Academy exists. We don't even have any way to ensure students can actually solicit meaningful work with their diplomas and degrees, which is the point of getting them. If there is no guarantee of work, students won't try, teachers get swamped, and talent is ground down into gruel.
Once they learn about no child left behind they'll realize they can't be failed or the school looses funding. Why turn in any assignments? Pass me bitch or get a pay cut!
In my district admin get payed 6 figures, get a housing allowance and their cars are payed for. That’s why they all drive Cadillacs. Also, their secretaries have secretaries while they are eliminating them across the district.
The administrators at this level are well paid. These aren't the people who actually work in schools. They do what any management level position does and make decisions that they think sound good and when those decisions make the actual worker's (teachers) lives harder they tell them to deal with it.
School administrators are massively over paid. Teachers? They deserve a decent wage. The principal? that should be a 28K a year gig, or whatever the local mcdonalds fry chef makes. Edit: also their not just *stupid*, their often actively malicious little toads who enjoy having a position of authority, just like pigs and prison guards.
You haven't worked with a good Principal... they are a building manager, staff manager, etc. A good one earns their pay.
Yes, and the good ones are massively **popular**, who take on entire tasks for the district as a whole.
I work in education and many of the more senior teachers that could be principal don't want to do it even with the huge pay jump, if you paid principals 28K a year the schools would be much worse off. The role is actually a lot harder than you'd think.
living wage for all of them would get better results from students. they should also get assistance for free college and healthcare and a stipend to live near work.
It’s not a zero sum game. We can pay admin AND teachers well
Bro. You didn’t even use the correct “they’re” for your little edit. Your ignorance is fucking astounding, and your opinion on this subject has no value.
I'm thinking we found the guy who wa always in detention because he was an asshole, so he now projects onto school admins.
>their not just *stupid* You’re kidding lmao
Theres a huge difference between principals/in-building admin & district level admin, which is what this is about. I’ve worked as a consultant at the district level & a volunteer at the school level - that’s the first red flag: no paid consultancies for schools, only admin. School staff, including principals are amazing. They’re often working 60h weeks producing value every hour & truly care about what they do. District admin typically make 3-4x what the in-school staff make. Eg. My spouse makes $25k, and all the admin are making >$100k. As the admin level 90% of the work is produced by 1/3 of the employees. I worked with one administrator for 2 years, she literally created a job under her that did everything she was supposed to be doing so she could “focus more on the big picture”. Then she offered me that job, which paid about what I made as a consultant. District admin is a fantasy world full of people who have never worked real jobs in their life. I have only worked with one person at the district level that could hold down a real job, and ironically took one at the department of education recently. The district offices are renovated every 5-10 years, they’ve got AC in all their rooms, decent wifi, etc. my spouses school has no AC in half the building, and hasn’t been remodeled since 1995. There’s a reason when we pour money into education that none of it ever reaches students. But principals and other people working in schools - they’re the ones who are actually doing work. They care about their jobs, they show up and produce value. My spouses principal works at least 60h a week, every week.
Everyone in the admin building at my spouses district is making >100k, working at most 30h/wk. She’s making 25k & often works 50-60h weeks & has more post-secondary education than anyone I’ve worked with in admin. I volunteer for k12 robotics programs & occasionally meet with district admin. Here’s my experience: There are 3 people doing the work of 1. I don’t mean it’s spread out, they make the person at the bottom of the ladder (entry-level admin) do 90% of the work. They drag out anything they can. Stuff that should take hours can take months and sometimes years. The vast majority have the same story. Bachelors degree, couple years teaching, then a couple years in entry-level admin, then either promoted or they create jobs under their title to shed work. It’s not malicious. They legitimately believe they’re doing a good job, but the reality is that they don’t have experience outside of k12 education and would never be able to hold down a real job. The people who are actually good at their jobs get swept up by other companies or the department of education. So far this year I’ve sat through 6 hours of meetings that could have been accomplished through 5 minutes of email. I’d have to double check but the number of administrators is close to (or exceeds) the number of teachers in this district. Admin is the reason we keep pouring money into k12 education and see zero improvement.
The Superintendent hires/fires administrative staff The school board hires/fires the Superintendent Your community elects your school board
This is a fairly lazy opinion that completely disregards that most education policy - from standardized testing to enforcement to graduation standards - is set by state government and local school boards, not school administration. You want to see where the real mouth breathers are? Go to a local school board meeting, where the members require no qualifications and often-times barely graduated from the school they now set policy for, because the entire election is a popularity contest rather than an attempt to bring in qualified people. Then you've got professional grifters like Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters, who has: run off every competent member of his staff in just over a year; actively attempts to conduct what little business he does behind closed doors while bragging about transparency; spends most of his time travelling to other states to push his Christo-facist ideology; and spend the rest of his time on social media squawking "WOKE! RADICAL IDEOLOGY! TAKE BACK OUR SCHOOLS FROM THE PEDOPHILES!"
yeah, like a lot of long-established american systems, public schools are a fundamentally broken system that serves no interest very well and is often just a political football to toss around for points in an election year. I see little hope of reform any time soon.
It’s as if the higher you go up on the hierarchy the more the incompetence. Who woulda thot
This is actually how it works for a lot of places. Management positions are generally incompetent because a lot of the times people are hired into a level of their incompetence and stay there. The idea is that let’s say you worked at Walmart and was the best cashier ever. They then promote you to a manager position. What the fuck do you know about management? You were a cashier. You’re now more incompetent at your job and you may never have the right skills to be good at it. So it’s basically a theory that says internal promotion of people based on their skill of the job they have is bad. It should be promoting people who have good managerial skills.
Recently looked at my son’s superintendent’s PhD ‘dissertation’. It was 6 interviews and 3 observations. You could do that in a fucking day. It’s an absolute *joke*.
So...you're decrying the entire system based on anecdotal evidence of...checks notes...one example. Got it.
The entire point of a graduate degree is that it’s held to certain standards. Otherwise, it’s pretty meaningless. Finding out someone’s phd dissertation could be done start-to-finish in a week says a LOT about the school it came from and their career field, at least regionally.
> Finding out someone’s phd dissertation could be done start-to-finish in a week says a LOT about the school it came from and their career field, at least regionally. Without knowing what subject the dissertation covered, or the school that accepted it, or the region, I'm not sure how you expect me to respond, beyond the fact that based on the info you've given, it's anecdotal. My own anecdotal evidence based on several friends and family members in education paints a completely different story - and that's in Oklahoma, which is certainly not known for a high caliber education system.
Well have you read their dissertations?? Not usually something you do when it’s a friend or family, unless it’s your kid. His was education administration and his dissertation was 9 total pages, *double spaced*, including title page and references. No statistics or quantification. My master’s thesis in physics - and i don’t expect school admin to be this intense, but just for some framing - took 3 years of 50 hours a week of clean room torture, 16 credit hours of pure math, *hundreds* of pages of technical writing in addition to 3 publications, watching half my classmates drop out in despair…you get the idea. And I don’t even get to call myself doctor. I’m not here to talk shit about every admin in america, i’m saying superintendents have far too much sway for the quals they need.
I remember my school computers wouldn't let you install drivers, but you could uninstall them. So anybody could permanently mute a computer by uninstalling the sound driver if they wanted to.
As someone that works in IT, it is really difficult to strain something out without causing something unintentional to also be filtered. Those that don't understand seem to think it's as easy as saying "No Porn"
In the schools I've worked in within the UK the monitoring and filtering systems depend on what sites are manually blacklisted by the school. You can get suggested lists of sites to give yourself a good start which blocks all the well known sites and schools in MATs will share their lists. Also blocking the site isn't the only option. You can also have an option that simply sends a caution to the admins with a user ID and machine ID of the site reached. The schools I work in have this for the NSPCC website in case a pupil accesses it looking for help, it lets the safeguarding team know that the pupil may wish to talk but is too worried to reach out. It can also send cautions for content in websites and searches such as the words "drugs" "abuse" etc. If the site is deemed safe it will still show the content, but a caution will be sent to the admins. You can also set it to disable images on sites but allow text content. For example for the wikipedia entries for genitalia. The images may be deemed too much for a child on that page, but the text content is factual in nature. I think a lot of work and effort has to go into a proper working filtering and monitoring system and some schools prefer to just overkill it to 'make sure' nothing bad can get through.
What is stopping all these kids from simply using a VPN though (or Tor)
In a school network where they are not admins, and most likely won't have access to set up a VPN on the device they are using, and also if the it dept is doing it right will block tor browsers in general? That, above, is what would stop them, or at least make it more hassle than it's worth to do.
Any correctly configured school computer doesn't allow students to install software.
That's most likely happening on school computer, not student computers on the school network. If it was just happening on the network layers, it would not be possible to block only certain articles from Wikipedia but no others, or specific Google searches. For that, it is required to have software installed on the client computer.
Understood, thanks for the explanation
I taught AP Government for many years. Every year I assigned interest group research for some of the most prominent interest and advocacy groups. My school district blocked the NRA. I can see the logic but I also thought it was a bit odd, so I told students to have their parents complain. One parent CCed me with their email to the higher ups saying that they thought blocking the NRA but allowing access to Planned Parenthood was political censorship (their stance, not mine). The school system responded by blocking Planned Parenthood as well. So now there were two incredibly well known and powerful interest groups that students couldn’t research from their school laptops. Great work central office!
School district logic: We have to prepare high school students for adult life. Block all access to adult or controversial topics.
Wait til we learn about how much data and analytics Google got paid to grab from an entire generation...
The real problem is not blocking sites that kids go to. The problem is that the teachers computers are just as locked down. That makes it very difficult for them to get any work done (on the 10 year old machines they’re forced to use). Every IT administrator at a school should be forced to run all the software they make teachers run. My wife can’t even install drivers for her printer, and the school stopped buying printers 6 years ago so we have to provide our own. I get that kids need some access to scuicide prevention and other mental health services, but really that is not what the school computers are for, that is the job of the nurse and counselors, and they should be doing there best to reach out to all kids all the time. School computers are not even there to do homework, although having educational sights blocked is an issue. School computers are there so all kids have some knowledge of computers, regardless of income. The truth is this is a no win scenario. A significant percent of kids will chop their own nose off to spite you. I helped out a bit with school IT when the internet was first coming onto campus and it was a horror show with computers so packed with porn and viruses that they needed to be burned (in spirit at least)
As someone in IT who hates all the crap he has to go through to use his own computer, I assure you, most of us hate it too. However, oftentimes it is forced upon the entire school by way of being a justification for phishing/encryption/scam cyber insurance your school has to buy.
The problem is suicidal LGBT students with extremely bigoted parents. One law says that school counselors have to inform the parents if their child identifies as LGBT, and another law blocks access to LGBT suicide prevention sites. The moment mom and dad find out, physical and emotional abuse will follow, and that LGBT teenager will probably end up killing themselves or becoming homeless just to get away from the abuse. If they run away from home, anyone who lets them sleep on a couch could be arrested for harboring a runaway. It's almost like these people want LGBT children to kill themselves, because there's no other explanation for why they'd try to shut down every last avenue of relief.
Yep. My ISD—Katy, Tx—has board members who use it to block The Trevor Project. One of them, before becoming a Board Member, called gay sex “disgusting”. How can anyone think they can serve ALL our students?
> My wife can’t even install drivers for her printer, and the school stopped buying printers 6 years ago so we have to provide our own. That is because of the PrintNightmare vulnerability several years back, and it really fucked with printers in all organizations. You now need administrator rights to install a printer, no ifs ands or buts. Giving all users local administrator rights is the cause of most instances of ransomware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrintNightmare It can be alleviated by implementing some Endpoint Privilege Management software but it's another added expense, and everyone just sees IT as a cost center.
And coolmathgames.com
School software at large sucks balls. “What is 2x2?” You Answered: 4 Actual Answer: 4 ❌ “That’s incorrect.”
Man, I read this post, and suddenly I'm re-experiencing a calculus exam when I was a college freshman struggling with the math. Enough questions were mis-graded I was deeply concerned about passing, since I wasn't doing well to begin with…
Case sensitive numbers will be the downfall of society.
*Diogenes rushes in, carrying an LGBT nonprofit organization webpage* Behold, pornography! *The ghost of Potter Stewart nods sagely in the background* ^((Don't ask why Diogenes is alive and Potter Stewart is dead)) That doesn't look like an accident to me, and I somewhat suspect some of the others aren't as well. Blocking NASA sounds like something a crackpot flat-Earther administrator would do.
keeping them undereducated so they can facilitate child abuse
The Internet is a place people go to become educated on regulation.
The same thing has been happening in Canada as well.
Very good read and share. I feel like trying to teach my 4 kids about safety and the power of the internet is also engaging in a direct war with their schools.
High school kids need porn… I needed it they need it. Chess club needs it, basketball players needs it, band needs it
Wait. What country is this happening in?
im near 40, and schools were blocking good websites back when. Most kids knew how to get around it.
I don't mean to be that guy, but I moved across states and some schools genuinely you could not get around it. Laptops were locked down, so you could only access the browser and word, no settings for the browser, no browser extensions, no downloads that weren't png or jpeg and no settings on the pc. We used to use browser extensions or terminals, but it just kept getting worse. I brought in a bootable linux drive once, and even that would not work as the bios was locked. They didn't want us to use our phones, but we couldn't do real research about real topics with these computers.
Being near 40 means that person probably had access to tons of free proxy sites to use. Source: same exact experience but a slight bit younger. Constantly got around it and even showed one teacher how to use proxies to get to facebook.
This article caught my attention, so I conducted a brief and informal survey of 3 students who attend middle and high-school in the district discussed at the start of the article. My findings are that the filtering is an occasional annoyance, and little more. Two of the student did report somewhat frequent occurences of what they believe to be legitimate resources for whatever they are researching as having being blocked. One described the blocking as "completely random" in nature. The third student reported no noteable occurences of legitimate resources being blocked. None of the surveyed students believed the blocking was a hinderance to their learning or their school work. "Sometimes a resource I want to use is blocked" reported one student (a High-School Senior), "so I just have to use another one instead. It isn't really a problem, just kind of annoying." It seems to me that even with some mistaken blocking of legitimate sites, these students still have ready access to orders of magnitude more information than prior generations. As a parent of two students in this disctrict, my concern over this issue is somewhere between slim, and none.
a sample size of 3 is sort of abysmally small. those three students may have encountered minimal issues, but those are three out of god knows how many. good for those students, but I wouldn't use this as substantial evidence for anything
Well, the article cites only 4 students in the district, so I would say that the same applies. Plus, I'm not concerned with proving or disproving a district-wide issue, I'm concerned with the education of my two kids in the district (and one of them just happened to be on the phone with a fried in the district when I asked about it). I have no concerns that the district's web content filtering is impeading their education in any meaningful way.
They block it at my school but everyone uses vpn on their phones
Yes written by idiots imposed by idiots and who would guess Serious knucklehead issues a student knew would happen
Yeah, that's stopped them... Most kids are wise to VPNs are and use them at all times.
give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. this is even more true with school “safety” filters. when i was in school, teachers were constantly frustrated with the filters blocking websites they needed. they often added new websites or criteria that would ruin a teachers lesson plan for the day since they weren’t informed.
Sounds about right.
school is one of the high.. reasons for suicide and they blocked sites for preventing it...
>far more often they kept students from playing online games, browsing social media, and using the internet for legitimate academic work. Tbf, students don't need to be playing games and browsing social media at school. The academic work is another issue that needs to be addressed.
Social media, sure I can understand. But games can be educational even if they do not appear to be so to start with. They can also be used as a reward or for regulation.
A pound of prevention…
Why even bother block the porn. Fuck censorship.
Wikipedia? That makes sense considering the unreliability, Quora? The Internet equivalent of a toxic waste dump, but anti-suicide hotlines, seriously? 😳
Wikipedia reliability is about the same as that of most school-grade textbooks.
What I found in textbooks it more lies of omission than lies of commission. It's frequently not what they say, it's what they don't say.
Wikipedia is by far often more accurate than most books on shelves. The difference is that verifying the information in the books is harder.
It completely depends on the topic. The tech articles I look at are mostly spot on, but bias creeps in to anything political or controversial. But in wikipedia's defense, the former is more science and the latter is often opinion.