Students in Laptop Spying case get to view 58k photos | Hacker News Reader

Students in Laptop Spying case get to view 58k photos

arstechnica.com

25 pointsJ3L240414 comments

What has struck me as most odd about this story is that I haven't heard any national news organizations really pick this up and run with it. Why? Is this story too hard to wedge into sound bytes? The dearth of coverage bothers me.

I'll be amused that after some more investigation a pattern is found in the files (name, date modified, etc) and it appears chunks of the pattern are missing.

The patterns of who and when will also be notable. Were cheerleaders more likely to have been watched?

So can they see all of the photos, or only theirs?

I wonder if the LED of the webcam was on when they where spyed (and more generally if you can disable those by software).

I read several times that the light on the camera would come on periodically and they were told it was bug in the software...They were MacBooks.

As far as I know the camera LED in MacBooks is hardwired to the camera. You can’t turn it off in software. If the camera gets power the LED gets power (as it should be).

right, but students were told it is a bug.. I dont know for sure, but probably by that sys admin lady whos job it was to administer the laptops.

I dunno about you, but I just find this whole thing way to bizarre. How it was found out, the magnitude, the fact that it seems one person has done all of this.

> the fact that it seems one person has done all of this.

Uh, where did you get that? The spying software was installed as a matter of school policy; it wasn't the act of a rogue admin deciding to wire up the school laptops to feed their appetites. They had budget meetings where they took notes about how much it would cost to purchase a site license that would cover the installation of this software on all of the school computers; everyone up to the school board participated in and signed off on this. It was not a secret.

It's possible jason_slack meant the whole thing was revealed due to one student, Blake Robbins: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/school-under...

The LED would flash green momentarily. Students who reported it to the school were told it was a harmless bug, iirc.

This may prevent wider embarrassment from, ahem, moments of pubescent weakness...

Indeed, and probably why the viewings will be students sans parents.

From TFA:

> The students will be able to view the images with or without their parents, and request that the court block their parents from seeing "sensitive" photos if they so choose.

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