One of the things that happened to me once when I was teaching an introductory computing class over in Education was a student, when searching for images for her website entered a “classically confused search term” – and this before safe search – and she hit a site that fired off a flurry of popups and many of them certainly didn’t meet the university terms of service. She freaked out and was afraid of what might happen to her and what might happen if/when this would happen in the classroom.
At the time, we told the student that because she wasn’t hunting for that content intentionally and the messages were all popups it was an honest mistake. But it seems that one teacher wasn’t that lucky.
The teacher wasn’t able to stop the pop ups and was charged with “risking injury to minors” (likely at this time, the gym teacher was drilling kids with well… drills – lines and the like – or dodgeballs, isn’t that more likely to risk injury?). The true travesty of the situation is that the school’s IT person (who as the “expert”) was not aware of spyware or malware that would cause the pops. “Never heard of them” said the individual… BS says the rest of the online community. How on Earth do these people get these jobs?
The worst of this, the teacher in question was a sub and was charged with this and there is no news about what happened to the teacher who actually, though unknowingly, downloaded the stuff. At least the teacher charged is going to get a second trial.
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