MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-12-02 |
| FROM | Paul Robert Marino
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Next NYLXS Meeting
|
Well I had an easier time with Free Software and the NYC public school
system
Partially because I had a District technology director who was a fan of
free software backing me up to the point where if she could have gotten
away with it every comuter in the district would have been running Linux
or Mac OS and every computer would have had open office and Gimp
installed. She definitely had an agenda of removing all Microsoft
products from the district computers.
In addition i was working at one of several experimental technology
schools where every kid had a laptop assigned to them and our district
had two of them neither one of which was running windows. Some of the
other districts tried it with MS windows and the failed catastrophically
due to support requirements. Only the ones running Mac OSX and or Linux
exclusively succeeded in their goals.
As far as the curriculum goes we didn't exactly get stonewalled there
was a condition to adoption that we never made progress on. We would
have had to have at least one collage using the same curriculum this
isn't just a condition for a Linux technology curriculum but for any
technology curriculum due to the misguided idea that computer science is
an "Advance Placement" subject.
I was able to avoid the circumventing safe guards argument entirely by
following the relevant federal state and local laws related to school
computer networks and being able to prove my network was more compliant
with said laws than any other school within the NYC DOE. By the way
there are a lot of them that the DOE is not compliant with such as the
federal law that requires in the name of equal access every student in
the school must be assigned an individual user account and password,
must be informed of the user name and password at the beginning of the
school year and must be provided with timely assistance in the case of
difficulty with their account. further more the same law also states
that all students must be allowed access to the schools computers
regardless of the classes they are taking, in other words in schools
where students there are students that do not have classes where they
are allowed tou use the computers must be able to use them during non
class time. Most New York City DOE schools are NOT compliant with either
of these laws. as a matter of fact the policy of students only being
able to login as the user "student" per the standard when i last worked
for the NYC DOE is in direct violation of the first law. further more
there are monitoring requirements that are not met by the NYC DOE's
proxy server infrastructure that require the school to be able to
provide a parent with a complete list of all of their internet activity
for the last month upon request. An other thing i did was require all of
the students and parents to sigh two contracts that that they would
adhear to the terms of use as defined by the NYC DOE, District 79 and
the school. the first contract was supplied by the district if they did
not their internet access was cut off by a transparent Squid proxy
server that was integrated into the DOE's proxy infrastructure (though i
did every once in a while get questions from project connect as to why
only one IP address on the student network ever accessed the internet
and why it used it so heavily) .
the funniest thing was when they decided to upgrade the network and
install new wifi base stations. the exiting ones were not provided by
project connect, they were supplied by the district and I had configured
them my self in a far more secure way. the wifi network was on an
isolated switch with its own dhcp server an no direct access to schools
student network instead it had an IPsec gateway (Free Swan) and the
laptops automatically connected to the gateway via a cert so all of the
traffic was more heavily encrypted then and secure then the current wifi
encryption protocols of the time were capable of. well for some reason
they called the custodians office to him the reasons why they were
replacing them, and panicked him explaining all of the bugs in their
implementation of the same model base Cisco stations that caused them to
cut off student access until the base stations were hard reset after
rebooting a windows NT box because they thought they had set up the base
stations. the custodian immediately ran to my office and told me about
all of the bugs and asked me if i was aware of them, so i had to explain
to him that those bugs only applied to the base stations they setup due
to a faulty authentication server (Radius on window) in their
implementation and that since i had set them up we didn't have these
issues. oh by the way the policy is that when they setup the base
stations they refuse to give the technology support personnel the wep
keys to connect computers to the network so a district technition must
come to the school to connect new computers or repaired computers.
Ruben Safir wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 07:10:14AM -0800, Elfen Magix wrote:
>
>> What would you propose?
>> I mean, not to throw everything on you....
>>
>> On the Bored of Ed side, Blame Bloomberg for this, work with Open Source Software amounts to 'Hacking The System' because it
>> supposively circumvents the 'SafeGuards' they put in with the MicroShit Software.
>>
>
>
> I know. We have gone through this and it is even tougher than you
> describe. We even had NYLXS people on the inside doing Mac
> installations and it was still impossible to even bring a true computer
> science based education into the schools. The levels of corruption
> which are preventing children from getting true computer education runs
> all the way to the Regents and the Texas and California publishes that
> have a lock up of the texts and programs that can be approved by the
> regents. Other programs are stone walled by not having job related
> certification programs and endemendies.
>
> It is just a dirty street fight all the way into the classroom.
>
>
>
>> As is, I'm being writting up for 'Hacking the system' and it maybe used as an added reason in another Termination Squabble
>> I'm about to go through this up coming week. They are looking for excuses to terminate me. But thats another story for another time.
>>
>
> Paul has expereince with regard to exactly this.
>
>
>> The Community Center Project was great, though we only helped out in only 1, and we should continue with others. Even if they wont switch over to Linux, we can insure that they use Open Office and Gimp for free instead of spending $299 for MS Office and $1200 for PhotoShop!
>>
>>
>
> One option might be to create a Free Software users computer group on
> the high school and colledge levels and join them up in a form of
> mentoring.
>
>
>
>> Viva Free Software!
>>
>>
>>
>
> Yeah yeah...
>
> Life sucks and then you die...and maybe not soon enough.
>
>
> Ruben
>
>
>> --- On Thu, 11/26/09, mrbrklyn wrote:
>>
>> From: mrbrklyn
>> Subject: Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Next NYLXS Meeting
>> To: hangout-at-mrbrklyn.com
>> Date: Thursday, November 26, 2009, 11:45 PM
>>
>> Elfen Magix wrote:
>>
>>> NYSIA (New York Software Industry Association), closed its doors in May, but its been in a smokey burning death spiral since summer '08. The City is no longer willing to fund such programs (NYSIA used to be a City Agency and then became a city funded organization), regardless of the PLUSES is may offer. Many small companies under the NYSIA Incubator was in GNU & Free Software for professional applications from graphics to security...
>>>
>>> A new group has recently opened by the same ppl. Its called NY Technology Council (nytech.org).
>>>
>>>
>>> ???
>>>
>> We just need to get our asses into gear.? No excuses.
>>
>> Ruben
>>
>>> --- On Thu, 11/26/09, Ron Guerin wrote:
>>>
>>> From: Ron Guerin
>>> Subject: Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Next NYLXS Meeting
>>> To: hangout-at-mrbrklyn.com
>>> Date: Thursday, November 26, 2009, 2:44 PM
>>>
>>> Ruben Safir wrote:
>>> ???
>>>
>>>> So what is with the worlds business GNU/Linux group?? I can't get you
>>>> guys to respond to anything at this point.? WAKE UP
>>>>
>>>> ? ?
>>>> ? ???
>>>>
>>> Feels like that all over.???I think the economy has a lot to do with it.
>>>
>>> - Ron
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ? ? ???
>>> ???
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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