Students Hack School-Issued iPads Within One Week 375
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Los Angeles Unified School District started issuing iPads to its students this school year, as part of a $30 million deal with Apple. Now Sam Sanders reports at NPR that less than a week after getting their iPads, high school students have found a way to bypass software blocks on the devices that limit what websites the students can use. The students are getting around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are, what the students are doing with them at all times and lets the district block certain sites, such as social media favorites like Facebook. 'They were bound to fail,' says Renee Hobbs, who's been a skeptic of the iPad program from the start. 'There is a huge history in American education of being attracted to the new, shiny, hugely promising bauble and then watching the idea fizzle because teachers weren't properly trained to use it and it just ended up in the closet.' The rollout of the iPads might have to be delayed as officials reassess access policies. Right now, the program is still in Phase 1, with fewer than 15,000 iPads distributed. 'I'm guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,' says Steven Zipperman. 'I want to prevent a "runaway train" scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.' The incident has prompted questions about overall preparations for the $1-billion tablet initiative."
Re:I'm a tech coordinator for an Ohio district (Score:4, Informative)
So everything we do with policies can simply be removed by the user. No password required.
I hate to break this to you, but you're a shitty 'tech coordinator.'
You can lock down the profiles so they can't be removed by anything short of total reset of the iPad, and yes that means that you can't even use an admin password to remove or modify it. You can also configure them to use an http proxy for all internet traffic, again not changeable by the user of the device even with an admin password with reseting the device to factory default.
Re:I'm a tech coordinator for an Ohio district (Score:5, Informative)
There's details in the linked story in the linked story. The students had a specific profile setup for them individually which they just erased because they had full rights to do so. This is a non-story unless you want to talk about incompetent IT.