Hyrum_Graff

Another service I get to quit. Soon they'll be nothing left.

Delete your Google account and make the NSA sad.

I'd just like to point out that the issues here are not clear cut. Teaching students to hide their activities from the authorities also enables them to hide their activities from parents and schools. I have greatest scope to teach what I like between the ages of 11-14. Are children this young able to responsibly use the skills I might provide them in masking their identities online and protecting their data?

I'm going to teach about HTTPS (It's already on the GCSE syllabus), but teaching TOR might be an issue. Giving students the skills to access the deepweb (Silk Road for instance) might cause some problems with parents.

I like the idea of teaching GPG as I can fit that into a general scheme on cryptography.

There are problems with one of your suggestions however. If I teach students how to use a VPN, I'm potentially giving them the skills to access pirated material anonymously and/or attempt to circumvent the school's safety filters. Their parents might have issue with this.

Here's what I did. http://www.battle-school.co.uk/Blog/2013/06/08/its-our-own-f... Got rid of every cloud based service I use.

Read Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Pharma-companies-mislead-patient...

I'm sure all of this will die down in a day or two and HN will return to links to GitHub and stories about VCs. This only happens once in awhile, the last time being when Aaron Swartz committed suicide.

Same for me.

I argued something very similar in my blog post here http://www.battle-school.co.uk/Blog/2013/01/14/the-second-am... That was following the suicide of Aaron Swartz, which is also the last time I saw the front page of Hacker News swamped with almost identical stories.

If I was a thief then I'd always hit the passenger side front door as it gives me the quickest access to the glove compartment, where valuables are likely to be stored. Not sure what the mystery is here.

I lived in Papua New Guinea for over two years, teaching in a school not far from a mining town. Sorcery was just a part of daily life. I remember a kid telling me he would be off school for a week as he had to go back to his village. When I asked him why he explained that one of his wantok's had been killed by a sorcerer and he was going back to the village for payback.

Payback in general was very common. A kid was run over in our town and it was all the police could do to stop the driver from being massacred by the kid's family with bush-knives. It was lucky that most of our policemen were from outside of the district so they had a disconnect from the local community. We were advised that if we were ever driving and by accident ran over a dog or a pig, we should get to the nearest police station as fast as possible, to protect ourselves from payback.

What shocked me about the article was the torture that was described. I'd never heard of this kind of thing back in 2000. Payback was usually brutal but quick, whether it be retribution against a sorcerer or anyone else. I do have to wonder where the concept of torturing victims has come from, as this seems to be a fairly new development.

This is not an issue in the UK. In our schools teachers are provided with data based on prior achievement and demographics of all their students. If a cohort of students fail to reach their expected target then the teacher is usually considered responsible. Of course, rigorous adoption of a target based system also leads to teachers, schools and exam boards gaming the system and subsequent grade inflation, but that is a different problem entirely.

Sharing this with my AS Computer Science students. Very clear explanations.