• GodTM

    Easier said than done… There’s a tradeoff between usability and virus protection. On top of that, products like Symantec Endpoint (a more corporate version of AV) can be slow at times (after it updates its definitions, it’s known to ‘break’ occasionally where it’ll really slow down your system consistently until the next virus definition update).

    Sure, someone will say, “they should use Linux”. That’s all fine and dandy, but again, it still comes down to usability (compatibility) vs virus protection.

  • Vortex3D

    According to the news, even antivirus and firewall software are installed, what is to prevent any student from disabling or removing them? They need to understand that when the antivirus or firewall software is preventing or blocking some students from running certain software or games, and if the student has enough knowledge, both antivirus and firewall can easily be disabled.

    This simple example is something school or any company aren’t ready to deal with. All they can hope is all their students or employees aren’t too technical or willing to obey the rules.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_H2MPSBDFEKBB7NGLRMF6M2WNVE Eric

    At my old college they had the hard drives all read-only for regular users. If you needed to save anything, you had better have either brought a thumb drive, writable CD/DVD/floppy/zip disc… or you can email it to yourself.

  • Buddy

    It also comes down to budget. It’s a disturbing but growing trend to
    relax security policies to reduce the IT budget. Also, many schools
    rely on teachers and TA’s to manage these devices. It wouldn’t surprise
    me if the forensics showed that a TA with Admin rights decided to
    install a pirated game and got pwned by a keygen/crack. They simply need more qualified people.

  • Uncle George

    The Uncle agrees. The delivery of knowledge via instructional technology is boundless, but the complex equipment does not run itself. Further, a metropolitan area enterprise network with 25,000 nodes consisting of both instructional and business systems is no place for amateurs or on-the-job training.

  • Uncle George

    As a professional in the field of instructional technology, I find it very disturbing that students are essentially bearing the blame for this infection. This is not proven in fact, nor ultimately is this infection the responsibility of the student population at all. The adults in the room are the district administrators, and they have failed their students, their staff, their citizens, and besmirched the vast promise of technology in education by their serendipitous irresponsible management of the resource. Roll-outs such as these are not without precedent. The district failed to provide due diligence in basic project management.

    Integration of take home district owned laptop computers to a sizable portion of the student population is not a trivial undertaking. It would be hoped that Lake Washington will cooperate with Microsoft and provide education with an unbiased and complete postmortem report.

  • Mitchgo

    Oddly enough I went to Highline SD which is a neighbor to Lake Wa SD. About 10 years ago I was one of the IT guys. I’m out of the computer world these days however a Teacher’s laptop brought from home infected the Network and traveled down to the 24 schools in the district. In all it took almost a month of battleing to end the network virus. Was an extremely fun ( For me ) experience.