Following the recent Crowdstrike/Microsoft debacle, we apparently now have this little problem:
Students in Singapore are scrambling after a security breach wiped notes and all other data from school-issued iPads and Chromebooks running the mobile device management app Mobile Guardian.
According to news reports, the mass wiping came as a shock to multiple students in Singapore, where the Mobile Guardian app has been the country’s official mobile device management provider for public schools since 2020. Singapore’s Ministry of Education said Monday that roughly 13,000 students from 26 secondary schools had their devices wiped remotely in the incident. The agency said it will remove the Mobile Guardian from all iPads and Chromebooks it issues.
Allow me to repeat the warning: the more centralized the dissemination method, the greater the vulnerability becomes, and the more people will be affected.
I’m not all for going that far back to when lecturers and teachers handed out paper copies of material, and students took actual notes by writing them out during class — but you have to admit that this Singapore incident would never have happened under those circumstances.
Sometimes, conveeeenience comes with a high price tag — something I’ve also often said before.
I will acknowledge the convenience of carrying a Kindle vs a lot of books, and the fact that it has allowed me to read some technical books that otherwise would not have been published because the market was too small for traditional publishers. However, there is a lot to be said for a physical book that cannot be arbitrarily removed from your possession (Amazon has already done this), and more importantly, cannot be “updated” to conform to the current political orthodoxy.
I’m all for going back to textbooks, notebooks and printed material for exactly the problem faced by students in Singapore. This centralized electronic storage of notes, work etc is not secure. Sure high school notes have little value but business documents and contracts on the other hand can be stolen, erased, held hostage or manipulated to change the terms and conditions of contracts. George Orwell warned us of this with Winston Smith’s work at the Ministry of Truth in his book “1984.”
We homeschooled our two youngest. Reading paper and writing by hand helps most people learn faster.
Kindle is good for fiction but for heavy reading a big screen formatted to look like a book or a book is better.
Shoot, my daughter buys real books for reading she hates the screen
When I were at college back in my 50s, I used to take notes manually in my History classes, then straight afterwards head to the coffee shop and type them into my notebook PC while the content was still fresh in my mind and I could expand on what the lecturer had said.
Manually writing notes also helps memory retention: proven fact.
When the Big Dog speaks, he speaks straight and sure.