Mother Jones
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Los Angeles has a $1 billion plan to distribute iPads to all its students, but it ran into a snag this week:
Following news that students at a Los Angeles high school had hacked district-issued iPads and were using them for personal use, district officials have halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.
It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Theodore Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf the Web on their new school-issued iPads, raising new concerns about a plan to distribute the devices to all students in the district.
That’s no surprise. There are some pretty bright high school kids out there, and it was inevitable that one of them would figure out how to do this. So how did our young scholars do it?
Students began to tinker with the security lock on the tablets because “they took them home and they can’t do anything with them,” said Roosevelt senior Alfredo Garcia.
Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their technique Tuesday outside school. The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf. Soon they were sending tweets, socializing on Facebook and streaming music through Pandora, they said.
Seriously? That’s it? The geniuses at LAUSD hadn’t even tested something as simple as this? Hoo boy. I predict that this particular war between the adults and the kids is not going to end well for the adults.
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