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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I am actually sad how schools are going to locked down, consumption based hardware. How many people here got their start in computers by messing with school computers to make them do new things? Now, the computer is just a "magic" locked black box to do homework on.

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A Chromebook isn't a locked-down computer, it's a really smart terminal. That might seem like a pedantic distinction, but it's vital if you want to use a Chromebook effectively. Once you start thinking about a Chromebook as a VT100 with bells on, it makes perfect sense. It's a very Unixy way of working. The computer is somewhere, but you don't necessarily care where. It might be a server in Google's DC, it might be an EC2 instance, it might be a Raspberry Pi hooked up to your domestic router. The device on your desk is just a gateway.

Nothing makes teenagers want to do something so badly as being told they can't. Attempting to bypass school computer security was one of my earliest forays into understanding computers.

Nothing makes teenagers want to do something so badly as being told they can't.

Not only teenagers. I was 7 or 8 (~1990) when my dad told me not to use our home PC without his supervision and under no circumstances should I start Norton Commander. The next day when he was at work, I booted the PC, started Norton Commander (I observed that he typed 'nc'), and tried every possible function that I could find ;).

same. we had a lot of content restrictions on my home network growing up, so i learned about tor and isolinux to get past them. tor was actually overkill in this case, but it was still fun.

Ha, this sounds almost like me, except it was SpinRite. I was given my own computer to mess up soon after :)

As a teenager can confirm many hours are spent bypassing school security, but not on chromebooks. They are far to easily locked down with secure boot, and the only way to get past that are hardware changes, which very few people are willing to do.

The environments that iPads/Chromebooks replace, computer labs full of Windows towers, are among the most locked down in existence. We didn't even get Start menus, just the Novell ZENWorks launcher. Trying to make the computer do something new (like change your desktop background, even to a completely unoffensive image) was a great way to get expelled.

Ah the memories of a Novell NetWare high school. I still remember gleaning the librarians password over his shoulder. Low and behold, his regular login had been granted full permission to the tree! It took them four years, but I almost got expelled, weeks from graduation.

Isn't it the case that back then (not sure how far back that is) a school was about the only place you'd be able to use a computer, and even then it was sort of a novelty, and didn't play the more central role in the classroom that computers do today. i.e. if you 'messed with it' to the point where you broke something it wasn't a big deal. If I was a teacher today, I'm not sure I would want my kids messing with one of our tools.

Also, today many more kids have computers at home they can mess with if so inclined. That wasn't the case back then.

Why not both? For a computer class it seems better to give kids a Raspberry Pi or similar for messing around, without risking breaking the computer they rely on for homework. Plus they can use their other computer for looking up things on the Internet.

These days it seems like anyone messing with hardware should have more than one computer.

In some ways having the built in F12 dev tools makes them easier to explore than ever. Almost every child knows how to change things in a webpage using it. It's half way towards Smalltalk almost

For me it was the other way around. The expensive school computer was locked down (this was the mid-1980s) but I learned stuff there that I then explored at home on a home computer. People tried to get into the school computer to capture other people's passwords, so it wasn't a "messing with school computers to make them do new things" as much as a "messing with school computers to prevent other kids from learning anything". I'm glad they were locked down. But I'm also glad my home computer was completely open (Commodore 64, TRS-80, IBM PC) and relatively simple to experiment with. Maybe a Raspberry Pi serves that purpose today but it's so much harder to spend the time to learn that when there's a shiny ipad next to it.

Of the options available, Chromebooks are a lot less draconian about their DRM and lockdown than most Windows and Apple products.

Trying to get kids to Crouton on a Linux distro isn't necessarily practical, but the hardware is so cheap they can often get their own to tinker with at home. Apple and Microsoft products work to get you dependent and then strangle money out of you for as long as possible.

Doing that on a school computer is one of the fastest ways to get expelled.

That's definitely how I got my start in security.

But from a software development perspective it's never been easier to write/run code in a web browser and doing something to your local computer isn't as important as making your computer do something.

iPads are definitely consumption oriented devices, and while I don't love Chromebooks, I don't think it's as dire as it seems.

I agree. The computers that I learned on by taking them apart, reassembling and programming them were not school property. Tinkering with those computers, reinstalling the OS when I overreached and trashed the system, and troubleshooting unresponsive hardware taught me more than any textbook ever could. Schools probably can't afford to let students learn like that because they'd need people to restore everything for the fraction of students who wouldn't be able to recover.

> fraction of students who wouldn't be able to recover.

You got the proportions backwards. It would be a few guys doing something weird that confuses the technically illiterate teacher and disrupts the whole class.

I'm all for hackable computers in schools but it has to be something that can be quickly restored to a known state and used as a dead tree replacement with zero fuss. This is why Chromebooks are owning this market.

School computers were locked down for me since at least 1998.

Same, luckily office macros were not.

New macro, shell(winfile)?

Something like that, in 1996, which the IT teacher mostly tolerated. All we did was change the colour scheme and get to the programming tool the older students used. (I was 10.)

Our generation was locked down consuming TV. They can create Youtube channels and make other kinds of content.

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