Maybe I'm late to the game, but you have to read this.
I fucking hate Windoze. So I am not an expert in it, I've never had to install and re-install it, nor have I had to deal with spyware, malware, or even viruses. Hey – I have a Mac.
Anyway, without getting on a Macevangelist streak, enter a middle-aged substitute teacher in Connecticut who is using the computer in class when it starts going into a pop-loop showing people humping, pumping, and squirting all over the place.
On the morning of Oct. 19, 2004, Julie Amero's life changed forever when pornographic ads flooded her web browser during a class. According to the prosecuting attorney, David Smith, Amero's computer began displaying images of naked men and women, couples performing sexual acts, and "bodily fluids."
Now she's in the danger of going to the clink for 40 years on charges having to do with the mucking up of the morals of children (10 years for each of 4 counts), all for being an computer noob.
The prosecution's witness is a cop who's got 2 weeks of training and certification in using some weak-ass commercial computer security program – named, appropriately enough, "ComputerCOP Pro" – which simply tracks which sites were logged into at what time, and can't distinguish between human and malware-produced clicks.
Compared to Horner, the prosecution's expert witness has little formal IT training. Detective Lounsbury has completed two two-week FBI training seminars on computer security and other continuing education programs. He is also a certified user of the computer monitoring software ComputerCOP Pro.
Allison Whitney, ComputerCOP's director of communications, explained how her company certifies police officers to use the software:
"They get a full hour of training, and then they're tested," Whitney said. "A lot of these people don't have any kind of training. Their [superior] officers may give them some kind of low-level training. Most of the time we do the training over the phone."
Niiiiice. On top of that, the computer, according to experts in the IT field, was probably pre-loaded with malware – in fact, their analysis positively showed it to be – likely primed and ticking from before she even went into the room. And let's remember – she's a substitute teacher, so it's not even her computer, nor was the computer secured before she started class – umm, hello, dorky boys surfing the Internet for porn before class?!
"She was set up days or weeks before she ever sat down," Horner said.
Here are just a few of the red flags Horner discovered in course of his laborious forensic reconstruction: Anti-virus software triggered security alerts as soon as he started copying the hard disk for testing. The computer's Norton activity log showed that by the time Amero came to Kelly, her computer was already infected with spyware from notorious websites including marketscore.com and new.net.
One piece of spyware had been already been tracking the computer for about a month.
Horner also discovered that someone, presumably the computer's regular user, had been accessing eHarmony.com before Amero's visit. As he noted, dating sites are notorious for spreading porn-related adware.
Another program called Pasco showed that malware had automatically redirected Amero's browser. Horner stressed that this particular form of hijacking is invisible to ComputerCOP Pro.
On Oct. 19, someone did an online job search shortly after 8:00 a.m., activating several different malware apps. At approximately 8:15 a.m., someone accessed www.hair-styles.org, Horner suspects student involvement, in part because the next visit was to Crayola's homepage. Over the next several minutes, still more malware came alive, most likely triggered by the hair site.
The user kept surfing, and by this point, "crap was pouring into the computer at the speed of electricity," Horner said. The real point of no return was when the computer received a huge porn-filled Java file. From that point on, the machine was locked in an endless porn loop.
Note that Amero's class started around 9 a.m. Neither the prosecutor nor detective Lounsbury was able to tell AlterNet whether the room had been locked before class, or exactly what time Amero sat down at her desk.
Damn. As a teacher who's been forced to many an unknown computer in classrooms and lecture halls, most of them unsecured and surrounded by pubescent kids, I sure am glad I'm living in tech-savvy Korea, where IT at least has a clue as to how to lock down a system, or at least secure a computer for users.
As a Mac user, I would feel as helpless as this noob teacher if some crap like that happened to me, and I'm not a nice, 40-year-old white lady substitute teaching in Connecticut. If it were a dude at the computer, who would even extend him this much credit?
Which goes to show you – that's another good reason to bring my Mac laptop, work from the video out and audio outs, bringing the appropriate cables with you. And even if malware took over my computer – or the popup ads started flying – I could at least pull the plug.
Moral of the story – use your Mac with a User ID made for classroom presentations, separating your class materials from your personal stuff, while using Firefox, Camino, or Opera with popup suppression.
Geez – poor lady.
But as always, there's another side to the story...
But The Register contextualizes things even a bit more:
The substitute teacher said she immediately stepped in and shielded the children from the images, pushing them away or physically blocking them from seeing the images. As she tried to close the pop-ups down, new ones would pop-up. She walked down the hall to get the assistance of another faculty member, who advised her that there was nothing that could be done. Meanwhile, of course, the hard-core porn was popping up on the computer for all the seventh graders to see. The substitute asked one of the teachers to call for the school principal to help, but no help was forthcoming. At the end of the day, Amero reported the problem to the assistant principal, who told her "not to worry". Apparently, the incident was not seen as all that significant, and the log data indicates that Amero had continued to use the computer for the rest of the day – browsing lots of other sites, unrelated to porn. Oh yeah, and unrelated to her work as a substitute teacher. In fact, it appears that Julie continued to browse the web all day – even after the pop-up incident.
When the students told their parents what had happened, they told the administration, who vowed that Julie would never work in the classroom again. But they went further. The 40-year-old substitute teacher was arrested, indicted, tried – and here is the kicker – on January 5, 2007, she was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-21).
Sounds like the sort of thing that could have been shoved under the rug, especially since:
Julie faces 40 years in the slammer for exposing the kids to porn. This despite the fact that a recent study by the University of New Hampshire, published in the journal Pediatrics, which indicates that 42 per cent of children ages 10 to 17 have been exposed to pornography on the internet in the last year, with two-thirds of them saying this exposure was inadvertent – due to pop-ups, bad URLs, or bad search results.
That's why, when I do certain search results during history class, I get a little careful and unplug my Mac when I sometimes have to do a spontaneous search during class. Imagine getting to WWII in a Korean class, the issue of the "comfort women" coming up, and deciding to search in Google for that one site I heard about that had the thing with the guy who said whatever; the search term: "korean women sexual slavery."
Playing with fire, even in Google "safe search" mode. And it's not just sexual content, but content that might better be described than seen, such as the picture of a Chinese woman in a chair contraption with some objects inserted into her vagina.
Point is, things like this can happen when dealing with multimedia, equipment that most of the operators aren't equipped to fully handle, or just in the course of teaching, when things slip up.
I wanted to show parts of the film The Name of the Rose, which I thought was an interesting film to see after the kiddies had finished A History of Knowledge and had learned about the loss of great Greek texts, the tensions about "the two truths" of the spiritual and material, and how many texts were rediscovered hidden away and forgotten in monasteries across Europe. Sounds boring, but after reading the book, the kids found it fascinating, yet weird that someone had actually made a movie about this stuff.
Except that there's a scene in the movie where the younger monk (a young Christian Slater, a fact not lost on pubescent young high school girls) shags the stuffing out of a peasant girl in a shed. I mean they get aniMAL up in there.
Even if they had a "SKIP A SPECIFIC CHAPTER" feature on DVD players, I wouldn't leave them alone with it and go have a smoke, trusting a piece of confusing consumer firmware to not show a roomful of high school kids just how well a monk can get it on doggie style with a peasant girl on a 100-inch screen.
Not. Good.
So I am always waiting for chapter 11 ("Interlude With the Girl") to show up, my hand on the button, baby. I would also never trust some smiling student to skip chapter 11 while I go chat on MSN, because there's a conflict of interest there. They're gonna watch that shit in slow MOTION. You know they are.
So you're stuck with using the material – it's a good murder mystery, and properly primed and prepped, even middle school students could find it interesting – and being pretty careful.
In the Korean case, it does help that the film ratings on home material gets real conservative when it comes to sexy stuff, although you can have a vampire speared in the heart and diced in a giant blender and still get a 15+ rating.
Or in actuality, you can get the important film Amistad – which is very useful for demonstrating the conditions of "the Middle Passage" (although the events in the movie occurred well after its legal heyday) and the interesting legal, moral, and political battles that were starting to warm up in the 1830's and 40's that would eventually explode into Civil War...
But the movie starts with a slave revolt, necks being slit open, and the captain having his sword slowly and painfully driven through his chest, all the way through to the floorboard of the ship. That's even before the scene where they drop dozens of chained African prisoners off the side of the ship, laden down with rocks to make sure they sleep in Davy Jone's locker.
That's tough to watch, and I weigh the fact that many sheltered Korean kids – especially the girls – have never seen any stuff on this level in their lives. Even I find it the "human freight" unloading scene hard to watch. It's something these kids will remember for the rest of their lives, just as watching and excerpt from the original 1933 black-and-white King Kong was a revelation to many of my kids, who found it pretty surprised that, on the big screen, the movie is still pretty damn good, even as we picked scenes apart for clues as to the racial, gender, and class codes that were signs of the times, as we looked at the film as a primary document.
In any case, is purposely exposing kids – and yes, with good educational purpose – to images that can and will fright and thrill really less scarring or jarring than a substitute teacher who got barraged with porno popups during her class? It's not like half of these kids – or more – aren't already surfing to these sites like made when they get home.
Point is, here's another case of American polyanna, Puritanical propriety meeting legal ignorance of computers and reality.
Although perhaps on a lesser scale, shouldn't Grandpa go to jail for leaving his box of Playboys in the garage for us to find? What if he knew the kids had breached the box, but he really didn't care, since "it was time those kids learned to be men, anyway?" Shouldn't he go to jail, too?
Dudes. Some porn got ahold of the system that a sleep-at-her desk sub was using, and she wasn't swift enough to get on top of it, it wasn't a big deal, the administration said that it wasn't a big deal, until somebody started talking lawsuits, jobs, and "heads rolling." Probably after a couple kids told their parents, while having dinner, about what their stupid sub did that day in class.
Gawd. Some kids saw some naughty popups in class. That's gonna happen somewhere, right, what with Windoze 98, all kinds of malicious software, and a fuddling substitute teacher trying to use the Internet to keep her kids busy while she checked her email.
She deserves 40 years for this?
Geez.
