Grade Hackers and Kinky People: Two MoCo Stories
These two stories don't have anything to do with each other and nothing to do with TeachTheFacts but they have brought national attention to our little suburban county home in the last couple of weeks, and I have ignored them with all the snow and flyer business. I am talking about the grade-changing scandal at Churchill High School and the controversy over a kinky party house in Bethesda.
The latest news about the grade hackers came from last week (the whole school district has been shut down since then):
As I understand it somebody put a USB keylogger on a couple of teachers' computers. This would be a small device that you plug the keyboard cable into, then plug the device into the computer, so everything that is typed on that keyboard goes through this device and is saved until the device is retrieved later. A kid could slip this onto a computer pretty easily in a chaotic classroom or during a break, and you could retrieve the teacher's password for the grading system easily. It also sounds like the school was not serious about making teachers change their passwords occasionally, so a good password would get you into the system for years.
Everybody knows that kids know more than grown-ups about computers, so it was perhaps a little bit of a bad idea to put the whole grading system online with no hard-copy back-up. As it is, nobody really knows how many grades were changed, because there's nothing to compare it to.
I imagine that we will have the full range of opinions about this in the TTF community. It is a serious offense that can probably result in the guilty parties' expulsion, and it might be seen as a normal kind of thing that kids will do if they can get away with it. I'm curious to find out how people are seeing this.
The other story that has gotten national coverage is the brouhaha over a house in Bethesda where a guy was having parties for kinky people. I think this story first broke on the Maryland Politics Watch blog. First they published some letters from the kinky-house's neighbors to the County Council, which was fine, and then they published a satirical follow-up that didn't really work, saying that some County Council members had been busted there and so on.
Some neighbors had written letters to the Council complaining ... here's what one letter said (cribbed from MPW):
Some people were concerned about an adult business being run in their neighborhood -- the guy was charging admission to his parties -- and basically I think the whole idea just freaked them out a bit.
From The Post:
This Post story is quite entertaining, and educational.
Of course there's no law against having parties at your house, as long as you don't charge people for them, and there's not even a law against having sex in your house, again if you don't charge for it. Pickthorne was charging admission to his parties, and he got a warning from the county. He told The Post that he used the money to pay for party supplies and donated whatever was left to the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom -- this does not seem extremely different from a campaign fund-raiser at somebody's house, at least in principle. Granted, some of the details do differ.
Again, I'll bet you find the full range of opinions in the TTF community from "those people are disgusting" to "what was that address again?" I don't know anything about this stuff but it seems obvious to me that kinky consenting adults are free to do whatever it is they do in private, just like the rest of us. I saw the guy's web site, and his invitation asked people to dress normally and not make make a lot of noise when they arrive and leave.
Oddly, The Post reports that the neighbors are upset that this situation got publicized. Apparently they thought that Councilman Roger Berliner was going to deal with the situation quietly, shut down this place and nothing said. Unfortunately for them we live in a free and open society where their communications with elected officials are public records and where the government can only punish someone who actually breaks a law, and they can't do it in secret. I don't know why they wanted to keep their complaint under wraps, one guy said something about the parties affecting real estate values in the neighborhood. Also, just a guess, I'll bet this character's parties are going to be bigger than ever now that everybody knows about them.
The latest news about the grade hackers came from last week (the whole school district has been shut down since then):
At least seven students at Churchill High School in Potomac, Md., will be punished for their roles in a grade-changing scheme.
The Montgomery County state’s attorney has yet to decide if charges will be filed.
Even more students could be implicated as the investigation continues, according to Joan Benz, Churchill’s principal. She updated parents, students and staff in a letter sent on Friday.
Benz said the students who’ve been singled out were able to get the user IDs and passwords of Churchill teachers.
They allegedly hacked into the school’s computer system and charged money to improve grades of some students. They also are accused of lowering grades for students that they didn’t like.
The scheme was detected more than a week ago. However, a source told News4 that it might have been going on for two and a half years. Seven Students Punished in Grade Changing Scheme
As I understand it somebody put a USB keylogger on a couple of teachers' computers. This would be a small device that you plug the keyboard cable into, then plug the device into the computer, so everything that is typed on that keyboard goes through this device and is saved until the device is retrieved later. A kid could slip this onto a computer pretty easily in a chaotic classroom or during a break, and you could retrieve the teacher's password for the grading system easily. It also sounds like the school was not serious about making teachers change their passwords occasionally, so a good password would get you into the system for years.
Everybody knows that kids know more than grown-ups about computers, so it was perhaps a little bit of a bad idea to put the whole grading system online with no hard-copy back-up. As it is, nobody really knows how many grades were changed, because there's nothing to compare it to.
I imagine that we will have the full range of opinions about this in the TTF community. It is a serious offense that can probably result in the guilty parties' expulsion, and it might be seen as a normal kind of thing that kids will do if they can get away with it. I'm curious to find out how people are seeing this.
The other story that has gotten national coverage is the brouhaha over a house in Bethesda where a guy was having parties for kinky people. I think this story first broke on the Maryland Politics Watch blog. First they published some letters from the kinky-house's neighbors to the County Council, which was fine, and then they published a satirical follow-up that didn't really work, saying that some County Council members had been busted there and so on.
Some neighbors had written letters to the Council complaining ... here's what one letter said (cribbed from MPW):
It has come to our attention that a renter at 6304 Tone Dr. who calls himself "British Lucky Paul" is using the house for regularly scheduled "sex parties" advertising "bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM)." His website features pictures of the house, himself and some party participants and also is linked to many other BDSM websites. In addition to parties at the house, he is offering "keyholder positions open too if you just need a regular place to play".
Some people were concerned about an adult business being run in their neighborhood -- the guy was charging admission to his parties -- and basically I think the whole idea just freaked them out a bit.
From The Post:
"BDSM" is short for "bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism." Velvet whips, leather hoods, six-inch stiletto heels, that kind of thing. If you were into the BDSM scene and periodically threw BDSM parties in your home -- as Pickthorne, a burly, jovial Briton, does in the castlelike 3,600-square-foot McMansion he rents at 6304 Tone Dr. -- you'd attract quite a crowd.
...
"Kinky people" is the accepted term for folks who derive erotic pleasure from BDSM. "An amazing cross-section of humanity," says Pickthorne's friend Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. "Men, women, transgender, heterosexuals, gays, bisexuals. Every ethnicity. White-collar and blue-collar. It's really very, very diverse -- though we do have an unusually high percentage of lawyers. I don't know why."
Anyway, you can imagine what Pickthorne's non-kinky neighbors think of all this. Fed up, they convened a meeting in someone's living room last week, then fired off indignant e-mails to County Council member Roger Berliner (D), whose district includes their Merrimack Park subdivision.
"I share your sense of outrage that a sex club is operating in your lovely neighborhood," Berliner wrote back. "I want you to know that my office has been advised that our County has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community."
The county moved, all right. Pickthorne received a written warning from a zoning inspector Monday. But hold on. Suppose Pickthorne stops charging admission, as he says he might? Suppose he complies with the inspector and holds all BDSM gatherings as strictly noncommercial functions in accordance with Section 59-C-1.31? What then?
"Well," Berliner says on the phone, hesitating. "Certainly one has to respect everyone's constitutional rights." Montgomery County sex-party host must role-play by the zoning rules
This Post story is quite entertaining, and educational.
Of course there's no law against having parties at your house, as long as you don't charge people for them, and there's not even a law against having sex in your house, again if you don't charge for it. Pickthorne was charging admission to his parties, and he got a warning from the county. He told The Post that he used the money to pay for party supplies and donated whatever was left to the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom -- this does not seem extremely different from a campaign fund-raiser at somebody's house, at least in principle. Granted, some of the details do differ.
Again, I'll bet you find the full range of opinions in the TTF community from "those people are disgusting" to "what was that address again?" I don't know anything about this stuff but it seems obvious to me that kinky consenting adults are free to do whatever it is they do in private, just like the rest of us. I saw the guy's web site, and his invitation asked people to dress normally and not make make a lot of noise when they arrive and leave.
Oddly, The Post reports that the neighbors are upset that this situation got publicized. Apparently they thought that Councilman Roger Berliner was going to deal with the situation quietly, shut down this place and nothing said. Unfortunately for them we live in a free and open society where their communications with elected officials are public records and where the government can only punish someone who actually breaks a law, and they can't do it in secret. I don't know why they wanted to keep their complaint under wraps, one guy said something about the parties affecting real estate values in the neighborhood. Also, just a guess, I'll bet this character's parties are going to be bigger than ever now that everybody knows about them.
posted by JimK at 6:48 PM
14 Comments:
on the Churchill scandal, we have have a system that makes school a competition
the goal should be learning not turning out grades
cheating?
they're only cheating themselves
vice is its own reward
the strange guy in Bethesda can do what he wants in his own house
sharing expenses as long as the amounts are de minimis and clearly not for profit shouldn't change a thing
if I was a parent in the neghborhood, I'd keep your kids away from these people, however
like gays, discretion should be the rule
no gay kissing or whips in the front yard or the picture window
The County should leave Pickthorne alone. He can do what he wants, as long as it's legal and everyone is consenting, within his own house.
The Churchill student hackers should be punished within the school system's cheating rules. This was just a more elaborate way of cheating.
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Off topic, annoying.
JimK
yeah, that is annoying when the evidence keeps piling up
No, it's annoying when you copy and paste unattributed articles about a topic that has nothing to do with either of the stories discussed in this post.
JimK
Grades are not given, they are earned.
I hope you encounter a GREAT therapist, AnonBigot.
You need one.
In a serious way.
of the many you've tried, Derrick, who's your favorite?
"Grades are not given, they are earned."
Teachers take themselves too seriously and their mission nt seriously enough.
Grades should be done away with and replaced with a certification that you either grasped the subject or you didn't.
Kyler Van Nocker was born November 30th, 2004. He had almost three years as a typical kid until that day in June, 2007, when his mother felt a lump in his jaw and then came the bump on his head and then he couldn‘t walk. On July 11th, 2007, he was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma—cancer.
The 2-year-old boy began chemotherapy. They harvested his stem cells. They used them later for bone marrow transplants. They cut him open to take out the primary tumor. They subjected him to radiation therapy.
When he contracted veno-occlusive disease, they asked his insurance company, HealthAmerica, division of Coventry, to cover a drug not approved by the FDA. Thumbs up from HealthAmerica, Coventry on that.
He spent summer in 2008 in intensive care. That August, they took out one of his kidneys. In October, they asked HealthAmerica, Coventry to cover another drug not yet approved by the FDA and thumbs up again. The cancer in remission and Kyler went home.
Last September, it came back. This time, doctors had only one course of treatment, MIBG radiation therapy, $55,000 per session. This time, HealthAmerica, Coventry said “no.”
Kyler is getting the treatments anyway, but now, the family is on the hook for $110,000 and counting, and the insurance company? Coventry CEO Allen Wise, on Tuesday, telling analysts, quote, “This company knows how to control costs and we will.”
The company reporting a loss ratio of 82 percent—meaning 82 cents of every dollar they got from the Van Nocker family went to treatment and 18 cents went to things like Wise‘s $23 million compensation.
http://savekylervannocker.ning.com/
this is something that needs to be changed
when someone has health insurance and gets sick, the insurance company should have to pay for treatment until the individual gets better or passes away
period
such a requirement can be passed without a governmental takeover of health insurance
other steps, like tort reform and allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines and governmental funding for a dramatic increase in available medical school spots could bring costs down enough to cover the increase in costs to insurance companies
"I know how bitter and contentious the issue of health insurance reform has become, and I will eagerly look at the ideas and better solutions on the health care front.
If anyone here truly believes our health insurance system is working well for people, I respect your right to say so, but I just don't agree and neither would millions of Americans with preexisting conditions who can't get coverage today, or find out that they lose their insurance just as they're getting seriously ill. That's exactly when you need insurance, and for too many people, they're not getting it. I don't think a system is working when small businesses are gouged, and 15,000 Americans are losing coverage every single day, when premiums have doubled and out-of-pocket costs have exploded and they're poised to do so again.
I mean, to be fair, the status quo is working for the insurance industry, but it's not working for the American people. It's not working for our federal budget.
It needs to change. This is a big problem and all of us are called on to solve it.
And that's why from the start I sought out and supported ideas from the Republicans. I even talked about an issue that has been a holy grail for a lot of you, which was tort reform, and said that I'd be willing to work together as part of a comprehensive package to deal with it. I just didn't get a lot of nibbles.
Creating a high-risk pool for uninsured folks with preexisting conditions; that wasn't my idea, it was Senator McCain's. And I supported it and it got incorporated into our approach.
Allowing insurance companies to sell coverage across state lines to add choice and competition and bring down costs for businesses and consumers -- that's an idea that some of you, I suspect, included in this better solutions. That's an idea that was incorporated into our package. I support it, provided that we do it hand-in-hand with broader reforms that protect benefits and protect patients and protect the American people.
A number of you have suggested creating pools where self-employed and small businesses could buy insurance. That was a good idea. I embraced it. Some of you supported efforts to provide insurance to children and let kids remain covered on their parents' insurance until they are 25 or 26. I supported that. That's part of our package.
I supported a number of other ideas from incentivizing wellness to creating an affordable catastrophic insurance option for young people that came from Republicans like Mike Enzi and Olympia Snowe in the Senate, and I'm sure from some of you as well.
OBAMA: So when you say I ought to be willing to accept Republican ideas on health care, let's be clear: I have. Bipartisanship, not for its own sake, but to solve problems, that's what our constituents, the American people, need from us right now."
Obama speaks at House Republican retreat in Baltimore
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/obama-speeches/speech/173/
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