p3x.deKids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout
return2ozmaarstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/tiktok-trend-se…
256 Comments
Comments from other communities
Things that shouldn’t exist: TikTok clout
Aatubewould be the same with facebook
TrickDacyYou say that like Facebook and/or clout isn't also roundly in the "worst shit ever," category
Possibly linuxI'm no electrical engineer but:
Why the fuck can you short a chromebook at the power port? Shouldn't that have some sort of safety? Can you short a toughbook through the power port? Definitely keeping the little cover closed on mine when it's not plugged in from now on (garage machine)
That's my thoughts as well
I once abused a USB port on my laptop to use as a 5v power supply but I later shorted it by connecting the wrong wires. It didn't explode but it did blow the fuse for that port.
Especially something marketed to schools to issue to every student. Seems like a basic safety feature. Sure, they shouldn't be doing that but c'mon... kids do dumb shit sometimes.
ChozoYou can short-circuit basically anything with exposed contacts and a paper clip. This isn't specific to Chromebooks.
Pretty much any device with a USB port can be catastrophically short-circuited, because most USB ports are capable of supplying some amount of power. You can even buy "USB Killers", which look like a thumb drive but will fry the internals of whatever they get plugged into.
I guess I just assumed there was some way to protect against it but I don't know anything about electronics.
They do make special shielding for USB and other ports, but most manufacturers don't use them because generally people aren't going to stick foreign objects into their computer for internet points.
Often times, those "public chargers" you sometimes see in airports and such have that shielding installed on the ports (though you should never use public USB ports to charge your devices, for a dozen other reasons).
Don’t you need to manually approve data transmission through USB?
In an ideal situation, yes. Not all devices even do this and when they do, there is the whole concept of hacking.
IIRC USB killers work because they're sustained high voltage. USB ports can often deal with a static discharge or over current, but a sustained 200 volts will let the magic smoke out.
Google didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
"The fuck would we have to say? Don't do this. Obviously. Fucking stupid."
April (She/Her)Unless it's Google hardware I don't really know what they could say. It would have been better for them to contact actual Chromebook manufacturers such as Lenovo, Acer, or Dell.
solsangraalkids would cut their own balls off if someone started a tiktok challenge about it
DominusOfMegadeusIt’s almost like kids are prone to doing stupid things to impress others, because they lack the life experience to properly evaluate something’s potential for causing death and/severe bodily harm. Who knew?
Chloé 🥕no you are wrong. the actual truth is that the new generation is bad and doomed, unlike my generation, which is the best one. /s
You're right. Even the ancient Egyptians were using tiktok to spread bad ideas.
MelodiousFunkIt's so disappointing that this is the first generation of kids to ever do dumb shit for dumb reasons, I personally blame the parents
Its a stupid trend, but at the end of the day teenagers will do stuff like this no matter what generation you look at. I hope they can become educated to why this is bad and you shouldn't do it.
Back in my day it was just dumb shit like breaking the CD ROM drive or sticking gum in the floppy drive. Stupid, but not killing the whole-ass computer.
Schools should just give any kid that fries their laptop a license to use pen and paper for the rest of the year.
I meant more broadly than just breaking computers, but I guess for as long as computers have been in school teenagers have been finding creative ways to break them.
Was always a BYOD kid since our school allowed it (and I think most if not all should) and I preferred using GNU/Linux over Windows so I never really did anything like this myself. I've scavenged parts from (usually ewasted) school computers before, but that's a story for a different day.
The kids in our schools were also surprisingly well behaved in this manner. It's not even that I haven't heard of kids doing stuff to their school computers elsewhere I just haven't really noticed it to be too bad where I was. Maybe a few incidents of kids picking the keys off the keyboard but otherwise not really much. I wonder if it's still the same way or if it's changed, but I guess I'll know that once I start working for a school IT department.
It's different when kids are doing bad shit on a platform that amplifies their reach.
No doubt
Things like this were certainly better before social media, when a trend like this would be contained to a school and would be less likely to spread across the world.
I think if we knew what the capabiltiies of social media platforms would be 25+ years ago, it would certainly be something we would see coming. The idea that a teenagers telling a bunch of other teenagers hundreds of kiometeres away what dumb and dangerous idea they came up with is probably one of the more predicable things that has happened.
NONE
BriictI disassembled 8 today, other guy had 26. We haven't dealt with any catching fire, yet.
I would say a teacher would just shrug, and shake thier head in quizzical abjacet disappointment and move on, but im sure thier sad, because you know there is some module or homework that must be done on that chromebook that id it doesn't get done the teacher will get in troublem
The parents who couldn't afford the optional insurance in shambles
Dunno about other districts, but locally? Only accidents are covered and it's hard to argue this should qualify.
Back in my day, if we'd had laptops in school, we'd have done it to get out of class. Man times really have changed.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a computer programming class surrounded by clunky towers and desktops.
Suddenly, a loud popping, then one of the machines starts belching smoke like a budget fog machine. The kid using it is calmly moved to another station while the prof investigates.
Fifteen minutes later - pop. Smoke again.
Turns out the kid was jamming a paperclip into the power supply like he was playing Operation: Arson Edition.
That was his last day.
On the bright side, computers are a lot cheaper now - and kids are still dumb. So, maybe progress?
My cousin partially set his bedroom on fire doing something very similar with the foil from chewing gum. This was in the 1980s though so no one really cared, I'm pretty sure he just got shouted at.
We just pulled stupid pranks, like setting a repeating function with sound at the highest frequency in BASIC and locking the machines... on all the computers.
This seems like something they should have engineered out of a product primarily used by schoolchildren.
Engineer out the electricity?
You can design something to survive pin shorting.
They said 20 years ago. We literally had 'use a paperclip to turn on the computer on the test bench' as the standard practice. Designing things for people to do them wrong was very much not the style at the time.
I have the same memory, except the teacher would just pop his head out from the office and tell us to knock it off. Someone managed to draw a giant line of Axe spray across the electronics desk/counter things and made a massive fireball. Nobody really got in trouble in that class.
I am rather surprised that works. I thought any modern device would have overload protection in place. I think I even remember accidentally tripping it on some device, but it would just reset after reboot.
I also tried to see the max output current of my previous phone this way. Load it up till the protection trips. Result: Stable up to 2.1A, tripped at 2.5A.
Oh, yeah. A Xiaomi phone charger I have also shuts down if I either overload it or immediately load it near max rating rather than gradually increase the load.
Maybe they are poking a hole in the lithium battery
once put usb-c in a usb-a port and my desktop pc performed an immediate reboot without any permanent harm…
People used to do this in the UK with their ZX spectrums.
Aren't the families responsible for the damages?
Yes they are. These 9th graders are feral though. That realization would require forethought.
Some of these kids should have been sent out to cut trail for a year between HS and Middle School.
This is highly dependent on the state and even the areas within a state. Here in California for instance we have the Williams Act which lays out a ton of guidance. Some of which impact students paying for things at schools. Some districts in the state view Williams Act and 1:1 Chromebook deployments as being something that the student/parents aren’t responsible for paying for even when they purposefully damage it. This can change though from region to region in the state based on how a districts legal team and its board chooses to read the law since no one so far (at least as far as I was last aware and I work in edtech) has pushed to see where it stops or starts. I’ve worked for districts that were on separate ends of that spectrum and even in the district that made parents pay for damages we still would give them a replacement and not charge them since it was added to a “tab” and only if they wanted transcripts did they have to pay.
That's fair. In my district your insurance is covered if you qualify for assistance, but intentional damage isn't included in insurance.
In my school we will still replace the Chromebook though (barring admin or district saying otherwise), and the financial impact will be fought by others at the district level. It's above my pay grade.
What does "cut trail" mean in this context? Do you mean literally going to walking trails and maintaining them? Is there precident for that?
That was what I was referring to. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but a year in national service (beyond just the military) to do community service and gain skills in general not a new proposal. Pete Buttigieg suggested it after HS as part of his candidacy during the 2020 democratic primary.
I was having a similar conversation with my teen - out hiking and wondering how the trails were built and maintained. We talked scouting service projects and all the way back to the WPA, but have no actual info. The park is a hill so there are several rough stone stairways up to the ridge trail. They probably last years but do need attention
Occasionally you see online ideas about a year of service for every new adult and this would be a good option
*Junior High
In the states I've lived in, Junior High and Middle school are both synonymous with grades 6-8
To be fair, I don't really see why they should. Chances are they didn't factor in that level of stupidity when designing those things.
It makes sense that they wouldn't have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don't actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc. Even the Google branded ones are manufactured by someone else under contract.
It'd be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.
That's another thing I was wondering about; Google used to design their own Chromebooks, but those always were the premium options and way too expensive for school use.
I don't get it. I was never this stupid as a kid.
Edit: thank you for explaining to me that many of you were that stupid. I guess I never hung around any of you.
Are you sure? Kids are pretty stupid.
I never intentionally destroyed expensive electronics to "try to impress" anyone in real life, let alone online (although that didn't quite exist yet).
So, yeah, I'm sure.
My buddy stuck a paper clip in an electrical socket while we were in the cafeteria. Because his cousin had told him it would shoot sparks across the room. All it did was make him scream real loud, then the power to half of the cafeteria went out when the breaker blew.
Another friend “accidentally” stapled his homework to his hand, to try and get out of going to music class. Apparently his plan was to ham it up and go to the nurse instead. The teacher laughed, called him an idiot, and sent him to music class with a band-aid.
Kids have always been fucking stupid. The only difference is that now every kid has an internet-connected camera in their pocket, so their stupidity is more visible.
In second grade I remember a kid stapled his tongue lol
I had a girl staple her hand by accident, went to the nurse. We spent the next 30 minutes watching the teacher deal with a kid trying to staple himself on purpose so he could leave too.
He did eventually get to leave, but not because of the staple.
When I was a kid schools didn't have expensive electronics to destroy. But we sure drew a ton of penises in expensive textbooks.
Those textbooks cost pennies. It's the licenses that were expensive.
I used to be a teacher in the 2010s. I remember boys having this ghost pepper challenge they would do that would put them in literal tears.
I never stopped them. Some just have to learn through experience that being an idiot to impress your buds isn't going to result in a good time for you.
That’s, like, a normal logical one. It’s actually food, it’s spicy. It makes sense to compete to see who can handle the spicy food. This is independently invented every day.
Stealing faucets from public bathrooms? That’s not a normal logical one. That’s a devious lick, and something invented to be highly memetic and propelled by a highly optimized algorithm that incentivizes recency, novelty, and dopamine hacking. It even effectively had a brand name!
How about pooping on top of the toilet reservoir?
My kid calls it an "upper decker"
We called it that in the 80s in rural Canada.
That’s actually harming someone, at least the janitor but it’s a hygiene issue and potential disease source. Yes it’s a stupid teenage prank but it does actual harm to someone else. Not cool (plus i don’t get why this would be funny: I’d groups it with the crayon eater and glue huffer , possibly complain to the school about special kids that need more assistance)
I defend that one, it’s just challenging yourself, no harm to anyone else or any property, almost no danger of medical harm. What’s the harm in letting them embarrass themselves for the right to claim they did something others couldn’t?
That's why I let them do it. If it would have harmed them seriously or someone else I would have stopped it. But still doesn't make it less stupid. They put themselves in legit pain due to peer pressure.
If anything it served a good lesson so they might be less likely to succumb to peer pressure on things which may cause real harm in the future.
If so, I never learned that lesson. When I first heard about the one chip challenge, I was seriously tempted to challenge my teens to see if they could beat me
Eating a spicy pepper is just harmless fun. I'd join in that activity today.
Yeah, but some of that stuff isn't just a spicy pepper. One kid died because of extreme capsaicin revealing a heart issue: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/death-teen-ate-spicy-chip-experts-rethinking-capsaicin-effects-rcna152766
I don’t think anyone should be living their lives in fear of being killed by zestiness
Plus did you read the article? It’s whole shtick is adverting “intense pain and searing heat” as a challenge yet the lawyer is trying to make it a truth in advertising issue. While I feel for the family, I don’t see how requiring an “adult use only”has any benefit to anyone nor clarify what the product is. There so many issues with lying advertising, I don’t see focussing on “telling the truth asa challenge”
If he died because playing soccer revealed a heart issue, would you ban soccer? At some point you need to stop overthinking all possible edge cases, stop attempting to pad yourself from all possible danger
I've done something similar and it was completely harmless and only served as good entertainment for everyone involved.
Same, but I had classmates who were.
I was pretty stupid
You didn’t have the same social and monetary incentives TikTok provides.
Most of us were differently stupid, only because we didn’t have access to other people’s stupid ideas.
My worst moment of stupidity was lighting off fireworks in a barn full of dry hay. That could have gone so much worse than just ruining some cheap disposable electronics
Some of my shenanigans definitely involved breaking electronics
Ditto. I grew up helping fix VCR by replacing displaced bands and gears. I knew to be careful not the let the magic smoke come out. Bad genie!
Same. To me, messing with a computer seemed like a great way to be on the hook for destruction of school property.
(That said, I did once disable the USB inputs for a computer in the BIOS so the keyboard and mouse would stop working, as a practical joke.)
Lol, good point. I often forget how I was put in advanced classes at an early age with other students who performed well. I need to consider that more in my adult life, that most of the adults I'm encountering were the people in the regular classes.
I was. When the bell would ring and the halls were hectic I would put popcorn in the communal microwave and put like 20 min and leave and sometimes nobody would notice till it catches fire
I almost burned down the school a couple times
Hopefully you're less of a piece of shit now
Woah
Dude I was like 12 and severely bullied haha I'm a grown up now with a mortgage and a job
I feel you. I suppose a lot of people can't imagine what it was like.
Dude, Sounds like you were old enough to understand that almost burning down your school intentionally, multiple times, was bad. Bullies or not. I'm not sure why you're taken aback by someone thinking a little arsonist in training isn't a good kid.
IIRC constant abuse tends to 'reset' the brain to earlier points of development where there was no abuse as it attempts to find less painful behaviour patterns. This results in delayed development of certain areas of the brain; most notably the prefrontal cortex that is heavily involved with decision making and social behaviour but that isn't fully developed until one reaches ~25 years old so I don't know what you mean by "should be old enough to understand" because they clearly weren't physically capable of it.
Source is introductory psychology courses. One of my professors is a researcher in child development and worked a lot with kids like the person you're replying too. Treating them like "pieces of shit" just leads to more damage, so chill out.
It never burned down just ruined the microwave
You literally said you nearly burned the school down multiple times.
I was a victim of this prank in college. We were on a road trip, sleeping in a lounge at another school and were awakened by a fire alarm. Somehow while we were sleeping a toaster with broken spring appeared on a table, filled with bread we didn’t have. The room filled with smoke, the entire dorm was evacuated, the fire department came.
After the fact, I realized I was probably explaining the situation to the perpetrators, but I don’t know if my annoyance at stupid prank was still amusing. They did keep straight faces.
TikTok is poison for the mind.
It literally shrinks your brain with excessive usage.
I was dealing with this all last week till finally a kid did it and his battery melted the computer in my classroom. He was told multiple times not to do it so now he is getting charged with possible arson. I have dealt with him doing stupid shit for the past 3 years and now finally the admins do something because it was so outlandishly stupid they have to. I am so glad I am retiring in less than 20 days.
I’m sorry you did such good for the world but found only trash children to educate.
explain to me why tiktok is promoting these videos and not censoring them?
they censor cuss words on there, but not videos of encouraging kids to hurt themselves or others?
but, there were always idiot fucking things up in school… well before the internet. tiktok is just channeling that.
….
also, forcing kids to use chromebooks is child abuse… especially since schools spy on kids through them
I searched and the first time ever received a message about tiktok protection, etc. They are censoring apparently.
So you mean there are laptop USB ports out there without current limiters?
I would want to check my PC's ports, but I am not filthy rich, so I'll just assume stuff is not current limited.
Just got a notification about this from my kids school district in Northern CA.
It’d be a crying shame if the students were required to complete the school year with physical books and a notebook.
Kids were doing dumb shit like this before there was a TikYik to put it on.
Normally that's exactly what they would do if enough students destroyed their computers to blow through the loaners. The frustrating thing is this is happening right when schools are set to do state testing and state testing is mostly online now. This requires every student in the building to have a device at the same time. Normally all the loaners would be for kids who forgot theirs that day.
Wouldn't the port get shutdown/disabled if you try to overload it?
Yes, this can basically only happen by puncturing the battery
the wise committee who designed such ports made the directly access the rest of motherboard and CPU
Sadly, this makes me miss when people pretended to slip and fall at the grocery store so they could throw milk jugs in the air and make a mess.
lol
Man I'm so sorry to my highschool Chromebook. They gave me that shit in yr seven and I was incapable of keeping things in one piece at that age. I think every key had been taken off by the end of the year and there were several holes in the outer casing.
I wish we lived in a world where they're doing it because they don't want locked-down toys issued by an evil corporation. But of course that's not the reason.
P.S. proprietary software should be illegal in education. Full stop.
I suppose the question would be the alternative.
Note the devices actively discouraging offline save is a huge asset to schools, since kids screw up a lot, forget their devices and need loaners to get through a day and such. Extra bonus if the device can't be too fun, to avoid them being overly used at home and get broken more.So Chromebook is desirable because they suck so much.
I was thinking of buying a Chromebook for travelling cause it's cheap. I was very close to buying one, but someone told me about the world of used ThinkPads. I ended up buying a used ThinkPad with an AMD R7 4750U and I am so glad I did. It can run literally every game I want lol
It depends on your use case. A same cost Chromebook would be much lighter, faster with the things it can do, and over ten hour battery life. As always, a lot depends on cost: a school districts bulk $50 buy will always be horrible but you can get a much nicer “high end” Chromebook for a couple hundred
I don’t game much and considered a Chromebook for basic travel use, but went with a tablet.
What do you mean by this? Surely you don't mean actual performance, right?
I don't game a ton but having the performance to be able to do so is really nice IMO. The battery life is great as well (like 6+ hours depending on what you do etc), and being able to put any OS I want on it is huge too. I also like how durable it is too.
I feel like if I got a tablet, I'd want a keyboard, and then a mouse too. That'd still be best for portability though, most likely, but it's kind of nice having a full laptop experience.
Actually I do. The thing is a Chromebook can’t really do things you normally associate with performance, like gaming. However I’ve found decent ones to have a snappier ui than low to medium windows laptops
That’s the thing with a tablet: what’s your use case?
I’m not a fan of the keyboard and mice: they work well enough but now you have a bunch of pieces to keep track of and you need a table or desk. If I need a keyboard I prefer a laptop/chromebook form factor because it’s just one piece to deal with and you can use it on your lap
I realized that I spend way too much time e consuming media, but with light typing, such as this reply. a tablet is great and I’m perfectly happy writing on screen. Actually I’m on my phone at the moment. I do use my phone for most things, so maybe I think of the tablet as a larger phone screen for times I don’t need to be as portable
That's why I bought a fold, not a Samsung fan but I didn't want to buy a separate tablet and I really like the sweet spot this phone offers.
99% of the time I'm just using the front screen, but when I want or need that extra real estate (gaming, admining my homelab remotely, partially watching a yt video while doing chores) it's really nice that it's the same device and I can continue exactly what I'm doing on a bigger screen.
ThinkPads generally aren't low to medium Windows laptops though, they're literally several thousand dollar machines. It's just they age incredibly well, so they end up on the used market at a heavily discounted price after a while. I'd be surprised if a Chromebook outperformed a ThinkPad when it comes to actual performance.
Yeah that's a good point about keyboard and mice, that's kind of why I like having an actual standalone laptop. For me I feel like a tablet isn't as portable as a phone, but it's also not as useful as a standalone laptop, so it's kind of hard for me to find a use case for it.
I adore my T-480! I put Linux Mint on it, and it does everything I need it to do, with basically no fuss, and no garbage from Microsoft
🙌
How about the "graduate from highschool challenge"?
Felony conviction any % speed run.
Man I feel like a large part of the internet is out of reach.
Why have I got to sign up for tiktok just to watch this happen?
Shit like this used to be easily finable on google or something. Now I can't seem to find shit. All I get get in news articles about it.
Looks good to investors when they say "this many accounts use this platform."
It's all a part of conditioning people to accept more and more abuse so rich people can get richer.
They don't want people with standards. They want people with Stockholm Syndrome.
Let me give you a bit of the outside of the story as well.
For sure tiktok and meta and Google want you in their walled Garden for all the obvious reasons. However, and it's gotten even worse as of late, if you have any kind of computationally expensive but desirable content/data the crawlers/scrapers/scripters will pummel your site. Despite how annoying you find the captchas and bot detection a computer doesn't give too shits about it and at this point they basically serve as a rate limit or effort to make your content too computationally expensive to scrape and be worth it.
While accounts don't necessarily solve this problem they do help as another impediment.
That's generally a good thing, those kids don't need their bullshit going viral outside of tiktok. Give it 3 months for Instagram to pick up 5% of it, and then FB can pick up 5% of that.
Yea but if I want to find something I want to be able to find it.
Eh, I kinda like the ephemeral nature of most tiktoks, having things go viral within a group of like 10,000 people, to the extent that if you're tangentially connected to the group, you and everyone you know has seen it, but nobody outside that group ever sees and it vanishes into the ether like a month later makes it a little more personal.
Chromebooks are absolute garbage.
Most computers I have used over the last 15 years will disable USB power if you short out the port (working with electronics you tend to replicate the "sticking scissors into a USB port" with some regularity)
Pencil lead I am sure causes other issues though... it gets red hot and melts eventually
Is there a better option schools should be buying at a similar price point?
Pinebook Pro
Usually, organizations would want to manage all of then from a single interface and keep the devices locked down. Chromebooks usually won't allow you to tamper with the OS in any way. (not easily, anyways)
I mean, you can't have kids playing video games on a school-issued laptop in the back of the classroom, right?
Plus, only a large corporation could even provide the device support like repairs and stuff. Unless small companies can manage to provide support for schools around the country (or even the world, depending on how large they want to expand), for the mean time, its seems like Chromebooks have won. 🤷♂️
I would ask what value chromebooks add to education?
We are not teaching kids to do anything with them other than consume Google and Adobe services.
It’s no better than schools were when I was in school where we used windows and mainly learned to consume Microsoft products.
Welcome fellow codger. Back in my day we had books made from real paper and we loved in. Handing in an assignment meant writing by hand in actual paper and physically handing it to the teacher.
Everything is online. My kids have had very few physical textbooks in years. “Writing a paper” means typing into a n online document. “Handing in” an assignment means dropping some sort of file into an online folder. It’s not really a matter of learning anything, but that school resources are all online and every student needs access.
Also the online services are all “free”. Yeah they might be exploited by advertising but no kid pays and no kid is locked into a commercial vendor (Google at least doesn’t charge)
I'm not entirely sure, but I found having easy access to a computer helped me with school work. I imagine these level the field a bit since perhaps not all kids have easy access to computers otherwise?
Youthful rebellion transcends technology.
Is there much difference between this and, say, using a pen to drill a hole in your desk?
Desks are cheaper, and the hole only slightly impairs functionality.
I'm not so sure about cheaper. A quick google search shows the desks I used in school are priced around $400-$600 depending on type (different subjects had different desks), whereas the Chromebooks are around $250. I definitely agree with your second point, though.
its cheap when you consider the desk could still be fully functional 100 years from now. good luck getting a chromebook to last even a quarter of that
Huh. Never realized chromebooks were priced that low.
Thanks for the correction.
Chromebooks are designed to be cheap and disposable. I've seen some as low as ~$100. That doesn't mean you can't get some very expensive ones, but since they basically only allow you to use Google and a select few apps from the play store, I don't know why the expensive ones exist.
I got an EOL Chromebook for $50, dropped Mint on it & use it to run a 3D printer instead of a raspberry pi.
laptops > raspberry pi imo. Having a screen is SO useful. I just got an old laptop to watch YouTube and mp4s on my TV without ads. Way better than the slow ad filled Roku OS
I used to have one as my primary work device for a few years. Honestly, it was surprisingly usable once you find online analogs for all typical things you do on a computer.
The biggest issue is you'd be using a free online service for some application, and then they start charging per month or the company goes under and you lose your work, so you have to keep finding new services and exporting your work to a common format that won't disappear to a central file system like Drive diligently.
They are very cheap. We had to buy them ourselves for our kids, which at least gave choices. We settled n $400 because for the cost of the cheapest piece of shit laptop, we could get a high end Chromebook that ran circles around it: faster, much more durable, much lighter, multiple times battery life
i don't know much about school desk but I can get a nice standing desk for $600. That is nuts.
Also I wonder if they sell replacement parts.
Industrial strength furniture that can withstand decades of abuse is not cheap.
And isn’t rendered unusable by a “hole drilled by a pen”. The person comparing a desk to a Chromebook is making a ridiculous comparison.
I'm sure the schools don't pay that much for the desks (or the Chromebooks) since they buy in bulk -- those are just the prices I could find for single units. I was more trying to show the difference in price, rather than exactly how much the schools spend.
Not even that, but they are simple and repairable. I remember we had these sleigh-style desks (same idea except the seat was one-piece molded plastic) that were a total of four parts (two rails, the seat and the desk top) aside from bolts/hardware, and they had a graveyard of parts to replace pieces as needed. And those desk were tough as all hell.
Sounds great, but... unfortunately, it seems impossible to tilt on the chair with those, which I see as an essential part of going to school.
Also, the heights of the chair and table seem unadjustable, and it seems the pupil is seated too far away from the desktop to actually be comfortable.
What a useless piece of piss. Yeah, at least it's repairable, but is such a stupid piece of faulty furniture even worth repairing?
Also, most school laptops are old. Someone did this at my school and got charged (iirc) $175 since it was the really old kind
What sort of hole were you drilling in a desk with a pen in order to completely render the desk unusable?
They also don't release magic smoke. All my homies hate vandalizing desks.
Pen is less likely to start a fire and or create toxic smoke.
We did it for the love of the game and not to impress strangers
Bullshit you did it to impress the other nosepickers, same reason these kids are doing it.
Yup, the nose pickers just moved online.
Drilling a hole in your desk doesn't lead to cancer.
I've never done that either. The fuck? did you eat paint as a kid?
Thank you, it's relieving to see that some people don't fall for the "kids today" bullshit
Kids are dumb and they do dumb things. There's not really that much to wrap one's head around.
And it's not even like Internet trends are a new thing. TikTok has simply offered a platform that's extra predatory about it.
I can imagine that TikTok has been for Internet trends, to what slot machines did for gambling.
Yeah, like, first time?
The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled "Bad Ideas." This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. All of this with an strong implicit suggestion to try it yourself. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.
The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.
I sure was, when I was one.
Anyone else remember kids watching videos of other kids nearly choking to death on cinnamon, and thinking "hey this looks like fun"?
Or the "chug a gallon of milk" thing? Those "trends" were just weirdly masochistic and sadistic. It wasn't even misinformation or anything. Kids watched other kids suffer, and then chose to suffer too.
It's closer to what mobile apps did for gambling. Crazy how quickly that was normalized in the US, and it's tragic how easily people can just delete thousands of dollars from their bank account on a whim from the comfort of their couch.
I guess what I'm saying is, maybe sometimes children and adults really do need some protection from their stupid impulses.
To be more specific than mobile apps, sports betting apps are so insanely predatory
When I was a middle schooler I definitely wanted to see what would happen from messing around with things like that would be like...
But I also wasn't inundated by short form videos trying it out and encouraging me to do it myself also as part of a trend...
Just gotta get some of that Magic Smoke.
Perhaps it's more like "Kids short-circuiting school issued chromebooks because of excessive surveillance."
...but probably not (or at least, not entirely) because many kids are dumb.
source: was a dumb kid.
Nah, before Chromebooks we'd vandalize the text books and desk.
I would take the balls from mice
And also computer mice
Which also meant that they had to seal them in...
Which means that you couldn't clean them out when they got dirty.
Fun times.
Excessive surveillance? It’s school property lol
It's school property with a camera and microphone in their homes lol
Recording everything just in case they're cheating lol
You’re assuming that they’re ones that leave the school property. You’re also assuming that they are constantly recording audio and video, which being chromebooks we know they’re most likely not since they’re low spec low storage devices since they’re cloud based.
This is also assuming there's some mastermind at the school compiling all this data versus some teacher working essentially a second job dealing with broken chromebooks every day because kids are irresponsible. Suggeating this is anything but good old fashioned vandalism of school property is ludicrous, but it's also an expected conclusion for here on Lemmy. Some of the comments in this thread are seriously unhinged.
To sum it up, kids are dumb and always have been and it's nothing more than that.
Check out the down/up votes on your comment vs mine, and also the stupid conspiracy theory one I replied to. People on here are so brainwashed that they follow every dogpile they see, which in this case is purely because of who is saying something - me in this case. I’ve got a bunch of lemmings following every comment I make across instances just spouting hatred and abuse and downvoting and reporting everything. An admin has even confirmed to me that 90% of the reports they get, and there are lots, are from the same users over and over and over on every comment I make.
Lemmy is so far beyond gone it’s not even funny at this point. The actual reality and truth doesn’t matter, only what the mob decides does.
Yeah, here and Reddit, I find myself nodding along often enough, and that's when I know I should perhaps adjust my viewpoint, just for the sake of making sure I'm not just nodding along. It's unfortunate you're perhaps being brigaded a bit, but it doesn't matter. I say what I'm gonna say, people can think whatever. I like to think that we can come here speak on things, have philosophical discussions, but it feels like sometimes the whole discussion has been aimed in a certain direction before it even got underway.
Hi there, I'm currently in highschool. You don't understand how school laptops work. There was a court case where a school laptop was recording from a child's home - it actually happened.
Also when you shut the screen it doesn't turn off all the way. I've had times where I shut the screen, out it in my bag and 45 minutes later on my Bluetooth headphones I'll head the windows notification sound.
And just for clarity, do I personally believe that they are spying with audio/video? probably not tbh.
Do they track EVERYTHING you do on the laptop? yes. Very obviously yes.
Hi there, I’m a tech enthusiast who has worked in the industry longer than you’ve been alive. I know how they work, but thanks for trying to teach me (honestly, good on you for the way you’ve gone about your post)
Closing the screen hasn’t been a complete shutdown in at least a decade. It defaults to a low power state. On devices that are more “always on” like Win10onARM and Chromebook devices, they default to a low power state that still receive notifications etc. This can be changed, but likely not on a school owned and issued device.
Yes, they obviously track everything you do on school issued devices. This should be clear to everyone. It would be spelled out in the terms and conditions of getting it in the first place. The case you’re talking about was almost 20 years ago iirc (2007 I believe), and the photos taken by the device were part of a “help us retrieve stolen devices” thing, that was “not adequately explained” to the parents/kids. It would regularly take photos so it could have evidence of who stole them and where they might be.
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/pennsylvania-school-fbi-probe-webcam-students-spying/story?id=9905488
It happens, for security sake it's usually safer to prepare for the worst case scenario.
the worst part is expecting kids to learn about computers using a fucking Chromebook.
They're not learning. They're being implanted into Googles software as a service model. Get the kids on Gmail when they're young and they'll never use anything else.
Yeah and then they enter the workforce and find that everyone uses outlook. Despite all of Google's attempts I don't know any businesses that actually use g suite mostly because Microsoft bundle O365 with everything these days so there's no point business is going out and buying a second licence for software they essentially already have.
Yep.
Same shit happened when conditioning students to use "PowerPoint" for science fairs.
The indoctrination starts young.
Chromebooks aren't replacing computer classes. They're replacing textbooks and mimeographed handouts for a variety of classes. Most of that stuff is web based now, and Chromebooks are cheap so they're the perfect tool for the job.
We're going to have a whole generation of kids pretty soon that are going to be entering the workforce and they're barely going to be able to operate a mouse and keyboard. Although it's not really the Chromebook at fault this started with the damn iPads. Why were schools issuing iPads to students anyway, they have the absolute worst possible UX for note-taking.
That's like if you taught the next generation of carpenters using Fisher-Price toy tools (all sponsored by Fisher-Price, by paying huge campaign money to the politician).
I thought system will turn off USB port if notice current over draw. Look like I am wrong.
What i saw they were shorting the charging ports, not the USB slots.
Both ports the same. Two girls, one port? Killing two birds with one port?
Lots of chromebooks have bog standard barrel jack plugs.
I remain utterly convinced that Tiktok is nothing but a chinese psyop experiment to see how far they can manipulate people into actions that would otherwise be prevented by our brains screaming in self preservation.
Has there ever been a "good" trend on tiktok? Every week its just another destructive thing that gullible idiots are being tricked into doing.
Soon as Chump took office the moderation flipped. It was open and handled well. Now if you call a corrupt politician an asshole you get a violation.
Talk about Palestine get a violation. Critical of the Chump regime get a violation.
Chow somehow inserted himself fully up Chumps ass on like Jan 22. TT hasn't been the same since.
TikTok always favored Trump because China always favored Trump and TikTok is operated by Chinese Military directly out of Chinese servers which also store location data, contacts, text message history, and photo library of every device which has ever installed TikTok.
It's a weapon to be used against the US now and since always.
It wouldn't surprise me, but can you point me to a trustworthy source confirming that claim? Also, does the TikTok app refuse to work without those permissions granted (Location, Contacts, SMS, Photos and videos)?
Years ago it was reported on by Internet 2.0 which was shared by news organizations such as Huffington Post. Additionally there was this guy on Reddit 5 years ago who decompiled the app and shared all the results on a subreddit made specifically for it LINK HERE and he claims that the app is literally more malware-like data collection than actual video playing app, like the amount of install data is mostly just the data collection tools.
There were also House of Representatives intelligence briefings that went public but god those things are hard to sit through and read.
If TikTok didn't want these stories swept under the rug and if there wasn't truth to these stories they could have sued these people for defamation. But they didn't, implying they would have lost the case handily and looked bad for it.
But at the very least, why wouldn't the Chinese government do what they think can get away with?
Same reason they could be respecting human rights but choose not to.
People have just been doing dumb things for reputation since forever. We had the cinnamon challenge back in our day.
yeah, the cinnamon challenge was dumb.. but it didnt involve mass destruction, psychotic behavor, or contaminating food\ in stores.
So its hardly comparable.
Also it wasnt Tiktok. Predates it, significantly.
Deleted by author
We skipped our 3310s down the road Infront of our school without tiktok brainrot.
Kids today need chinese to tell them to be stupid. Back in our day, we were stupid on our own!
Was the road ok?
Yeah, this is yous lemmitors being conspiracy poisoned by the internet.
back in our day, our stupid wasnt malicious mass destruction or food tampering.
It was actual stupid shit, like trying to jump over your friend as he raced towards you on his bike, or falling off a roof, Shit that only hurt yourself, if anyone. Wasnt breaking and entering and destroying shit so people in the next town over would think you were cool. We were stupid, but we werent that stupid.
Nah kids always do things that end up being malice since they don't know it is maliceful.
Kits are by definition retarded. Its expected of them to do dumb things.
The fact you didn't just means you were lucky.
The ice bucket challenge was making rounds again. But there's basically infinite harmless trends that nobody thinks of. The 100 men versus 1 gorilla thing is a trend and unless somebody jumps in a gorilla pen for Harambe 2.0 it's been harmless.
Reminder that the ice bucket challenge is something that raises awareness and funds for ALS research.
My question was "was there ever a good trend from tiktok"
Icebucket challenge was from before tiktok existed.
So kinda proving my point.
I know, but it's recently began again on TikTok after years of being a pretty dead trend.
I agree. I was exposed to a lot of leftist content on tiktok and it's made me want to protest. Good thing you explained that it's stupid.
TBF TikTok wants the US Government to fail regardless of who is in office at the time.
It's like that meme from flippanarchy the other day.
Sees teenagers doing dumb shit, like they have since literally forever
"Is this a plot by the despotic orientals?!"
Fucking listen to yourself. I'm not on TikTok. I just don't care for vertical short-form video as a concept. But even I can tell you that not every TikTok trend is teenagers being destructive idiots.
oh wow the .ml user is getting super offended over criticism of china/russia.
how original
Russia isn't even a part of this discussion. I'm honestly more offended by your opinions of teenagers.
But that aside, it's not about "defending" these States. It's that your tone is dripping with orientalist racism
Sure buddy.
Lmao what a fucking racist loser! You can't even respond with anything meaningful
Sure pal.
Olympic level stretching
Accurate username
It's curated to cause problems, I wouldn't believe anything otherwise. Douyin which is the Chinese version shows completely different content, including government narratives. Tiktok is straight brain rot, and I believe it's curated to encourage poor behavior in users outside of China.
Yeah because usa needs help destroying their youth
Obligatory "China hate" comment missing the forest for the trees.
Behold the next generation of voters.
It's how the US got Trump. The "Trump Train" was a meme, first.
As I age I find myself feeling more and more like the cool step-dad or uncle.
Y'know I hate everything Chromebooks stand for. "You get 'em, kid. Now how about we get some pizza?"
Fuck chromebooks anyways, Google shouldn't be allowed to steal so much information about our youth directly from the devices they use at school. They should be using laptops with Linux installed on them, preferably Pop!OS to preserve the kids privacy.
I don't condone damaging school property, although I think it's a lesser evil to Google's privacy practices on Chromebooks.
I agree but I'm not sure why specifically popos though
Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring a custom GNOME desktop.
It is designed to have a minimal amount of clutter on the desktop without distractions in order to allow the user to focus on work.
This distro was also designed with security and privacy in mind.
So students can more easily focus on their work while also being more secure and private while using an easy to use interface, I know it's not the only one but its a good one!
https://system76.com/pop/security/
Linux mint or something fedora based are also good choices. Lots of flavors out here in the linux world.
Yeah, no worry about the lithium fires. Fuck those chromebooks.
I'm with you, but that's not the reason these kids are doing this. It's because they are idiots.
They should be using Debian, the universal operating system.
Debian works too, it really doesn't matter as long as its not windows and google Chromebook crap.
Linux distros aren't all made the same, but they're all pretty much the same in spirit. Tux is universal.
I personally think that Pop!OS is a user friendly distro that would be an easy introduction to Linux for students while also focusing on privacy and security with less clutter.
We live in hell
Why throw the kids in the slammer? So they can eventually come back out as hardened criminals and contribute to the recidivism statistics, further circling society down the drain because they were betrayed by the corporations that injected their explosive products into our tax-funded school systems? They should give the TikTok kids full STEM scholarships for exposing these dangerous design flaws!
Hold the Chromebook manufacturer liable for the unsafe hardware design flaw with no overcurrent protection, hold the school liable for recklessly issuing these dangerous laptops that cheaped out on safety features, and hold Google liable for neglecting power handling in their Chromebook software! Get the CPSC on the phone and get every single Flamebook recalled across the nation!
It's outrageous, egregious, preposterous!
But how else will google sell overpriced computers to schools despite lack of funding and force children to growing up with google products?
Isn't the entire premise of Chromebooks is that they are extremely cheap compared to having actual laptops or iPads?
I think that's what corporate propaganda said but I have never been able to find the procurement co tracts for these. I would love to see how the cost structure. I have a feeling it won't that cheap TBH
What does "clout" mean?
Another word for fame
Also reputation
Aura
Thanks
more like a rap sheet
Net Cred
Yeah basically it's like good aura
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/clout
Are you not a native English speaker? It's not an uncommon word.
Nope.
It's the first time I've seen this word.
It's definitely slang.
I honestly envy this person for not being exposed to it.
Not even that bad, they are learning about electricity in a hands-on manner. USB standards protect against short circuits so this is over exaggerated heavily.
Fucking a computer with scissors is a way to perhaps die and/or burn down buildings, I don't think they learn shit
If this were an unbiased and honest article; then it would read “Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for social clout.” The subtle message, in this article, is TikTok = bad, which is illogical because events such as this will occur regardless of platform or even lack of a platform. It will ALWAYS happen. The question is how to mitigate these events as much as possible, because it’s impossible to completely eradicate “kids doing X for social clout.” It’s a part of learning and being human.
Yes but without tik tok this is a kid or two being stupid and charged a couple hundred at one school. I think we had 3 kids today at school destroy their laptops.
You can replace TikTok with any social media platform. That’s why this argument is illogical in that it blames TikTok.
I don’t remember Friendster causing mayhem like this.
Lemmy seems to not be spreading challenges either.
You have a point, but TikTok has a unique power in this moment.
And if the students did see it on TikTok, then it’s factual, specific, reporting.
TikTok is at the forefront of designing algorithms that optimize for this sort of situation. Reddit isn’t. YouTube does not appear to be. They have their own issues, but it’s not exactly this sort of optimization.
VRChat is another social network not optimized around incentivizing this mimicking and reposting behavior.
Snapchat is not built around this sort of algorithm either.
If it had happened on Friendster; then it would have been because of the specific user(s) creating and posting such content, not because of the platform. To say platform = bad because a user or users post negatively affecting content is a sweeping generalization which does not reflect reality, meaning that the negative connotation of TikTok = bad is still incorrect. The users which created and posted such content, in this case, are to blame.
If students see such content on social media; then the first thought should not be: platform bad; it should be: who posted it, and for what reason(s).
It can be an issue with the people starting these challenges while also being an issue with the way tiktok works with sharing these copycat videos on the platforms algorithm.
I don't think "omg tiktok bad" but in the case of these dumb challenges, it is one of the few things I can see people actually pointing at when saying tiktok is bad, rather than "but china."
Yes, and this article reinforces that idea, regardless of whether or not TikTok = bad is correct, which is my point.
But it's not happening on any social media platform. These sorts of "challenges" and trends seem to happen almost exclusively on TikTok, for whatever reason.
Yeah, could have been called “kids are learning how circuits work thanks to TikTok trend” and suddenly the story has a whole other meaning
Good. Less spyware machines in the world.
Well, maybe a school-issued computer should be designed differently than a consumer device.
Maybe such things should be considered beforehand.
In industrial ergonomics you are supposed to, ideally, present a worker with a few buttons with abundantly clear results of pressing them and no forbidden combinations leading to unexpected\undefined\dangerous results.
Kids sticking things into what's given to them are not an unexpected event. I'd say kids doing that are better than kids not doing that. And if it's expected, then this is almost entrapment.
Oh, oh, OH, you can't just put a consumer device with a web browser with Google and MS and Apple shit into schools then? No kickbacks from those companies? So fucking sad.
Forcing a kid to wear around a centrally managed device with a microphone and a camera makes me want to vomit. That should be illegal as many other things. It's a disgusting world.
These should be military-level (by resilience to attempts to throw them out of the window, sink them in the water, overheat them and so on) devices with something like FreeDOS+OpenGEM. That's by far enough to run school programs. If you think it's not, then you are possessed by collective delusions, that's a thing in crowd psychology, so drink a glass of water, listen to cars\birds, look at the sky and answer which fundamentally new tasks you need to solve as compared to having year 1999 Internet (as in open a static webpage, follow links, send forms), WordPerfect and Basic. Especially at school.
We use axes, knives, hammers and screwdrivers and other stuff to do things, more or less as they existed 300 years ago, when we are not professionals, who of course use power tools.
That's not cheap. Schools can't afford that. The kids know better.
Chromebooks are much more expensive than normal computers.
A Chromebook for school kids costs around $200 when I was in school 5 years ago... A normal computer would cost closer to 500
Chromebooks are cheap compared to average laptop but still expensive compared to identical laptops with same components.
So I should have said overcharged instead of expensive.
2GB ram chromebooks you can find on ebay are an exception as they are not getting any more updates soon.
Wrong.
A standard issue laptop would be around 500 for mid range. Maybe prices have changed recently idk
That can be as cheap as Chromebook. Expenses at reliability are partially redeemed by no need for such complexity and computing power.
Chromebooks that schools use don't have any computing power to speak of. There's none to lose
Compared to a machine good enough to run TIE Fighter and not more - they do. Should remove that difference.
Arguably they already do take physical abuse into account, by focussing on cheap replacements
Sigh. Watching windows users try to make sense of the computing world is always cringe.
I'm not a Windows user. Unix-likes are also too complex for most tasks.
And your tone evokes suspicion that you've switched to Linux not so long ago and think that brings authority. Nah. It's just an OS. Its users are as qualified as Windows users. When you'll be able to explain to me how an IP packet passes through the networking stack, or something like that, then maybe. At least how virtual memory works, or swapping, or syscalls, or process scheduling.
OK, admittedly I don't remember shit of any of that.
Just - wanting something more minimal doesn't mean I'm ignorant of Unices.
Unsure why this has downvotes and not more conversation, it's not that hot of a take and downvotes don't mean anything here.
It's maybe not that hot a take to lifelong nerds who grew up with the Apple II and are disconnected from how kids use computers in schools in the 21st century.
"School computers should be more durable and run Linux" isn't that hot a take. FreeDOS???? WTF?
Not to mention that he basically called everyone who disagrees with him stupid.
r/kidsarefuckingstupid
These kids know they’re gonna be replaced by tech and they’re fighting back
The ones that are dumb enough to do this won't be getting jobs to be replaced anyway.
Good, chromebooks suck.
What do you suggest children use instead?