Re: big brother at school

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

Sorry for following up my own message, but two other things have occured
to me:

1. Surely any competent thief, on bagging one of these laptops, would
begin by making sure the computer was disconnected from all networks
(perhaps turning off the wireless via a hardware switch, if available)
and then reloading the software, starting with the operating system.

Poof goes the remote webcam access that putatively had something to
do with recovering stolen systems.

2. As we all know, the number of Windows systems that have been
zombied has been monotonically increasing for most of a decade.
We are at the point, I think, where any Windows system chosen at
random has a double-digit chance of being zombied -- where that
probability is calculated across *all* systems of course, because
local conditions widely.

This means that it is near-certain that at least one of those student
laptops is a zombie.  My guess would be "likely many more" as they're
in the hands of teenagers, who will click on anything, download anything,
install anything, etc.

The new owner of the zombie has full access to the webcam.

And this is before we discuss whether or not any of the administrators'
systems have been zombie'd, in which case the new owner would, I presume,
have full access to all of the webcams.

---Rsk
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