Students Find Ways To Hack School-Issued iPads Within A Week
by SAM H. SANDERS
September 27, 2013 3:02
AM
Kevork Djansezian/Getty
Images
Los Angeles Unified School
District started issuing iPads to its students this school year, as part of a
$30 million deal with Apple. The rollout is in the first of three phases, and
ultimately, the goal is to distribute more than 600,000 devices.
But less than a week after
getting their iPads, almost 200 of the districts' high school
students found a way to bypass software blocks on the devices
that limit what websites the students can use.
Roosevelt High School in
East LA has the most offenders. Earlier this week, Mayra Najera, a high school
senior, told NPR that she hasn't hacked her school-issued iPad just yet, but
that some classmates have offered to do it for her.
"They told me Friday,
'I would do it for you because you're my friend,' " she says. "They
told me that!"
If you weren't a friend, the
hack would cost $2.
"They were charging
people to do it. It was like a little black market," Najera says.
The students are getting
around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are,
and what the students are doing with them at all times. This software also lets
the district block certain sites, such as social media favorites like Facebook.
The district's chief
information officer, Ronald Chandler, says he wasn't really surprised that
students bypassed blocks so quickly. He says that hacks happen at all levels,
whether it's secured parts of the federal government, or student iPads.
"So we talked to
students, and we asked them, 'Why did you do this?' And in many cases, they
said, 'You guys are just locking us out of too much stuff.' "
He says, after talking with
students, that the Los Angeles Unified School District's iPad policy probably
should be changed, allowing for some social media and music streaming sites.
"They were bound to
fail," says Renee Hobbs, who runs the Media Education Lab at the
University of Rhode Island. She's been a skeptic of the iPad program from the
start. "Children are growing up today [with] the iPad used as a device for
entertainment. So when the iPad comes into the classroom, then there's a shift
in everybody's thinking."
And sometimes that shift is
hard for everybody. Hobbs says this isn't the first time educators have tried
to co-opt things that lots of people use for fun.
"Back in the 1930s,
there was a big initiative to use radio in education," says Hobbs.
"It was the original distance education." But, Hobbs says, that all
fizzled out.
"Within a decade, we
discovered that the commercial use of radio, for soap operas and music shows
and game shows, actually eclipsed the educational use of radio. And the
entertainment function is just so [dominant]. You can't compete," Hobbs
says.
Los Angeles Unified School
District, for its part, says it's addressing what it calls "a glitch"
in the iPad software. The district told NPR that for now, the hackers won't be
punished. But home use of the iPads has been halted, indefinitely.
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. In
November, the district is set to start moving into Phases 2 and 3 of the iPad
program.
In light of the hacking
scandal, Mayra Najera, the Roosevelt High School senior, isn't sure she needs
an iPad at all.
"It's hard to
tell," she says. Najera says she doesn't even do digital homework on her
school-issued iPad. She takes care of that on her personal iPhone 5.
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