Who'd be a teacher?

I'm not wholly convinced about the use of computers in class rooms. I don't believe any computer is a substitute for a competent teacher. As a taxpayer and someone who supports these evil things for a living, I'm not even convinced it's a good investment of my tax dollars.

Now teachers might agree. First we had the Julie Amero case where a Connecticut school temporary is facing 40 years in jail for a spyware infected computer. Now we have the Alexander Ponosov case where a Russian school teacher is facing a spell in Siberia for buying computers with pirated software.

The injustices in both of these cases is breathtaking. In the Ponosov case, the spectacle of provincial school teacher being used an example so Russia can prove it's worthy of joining the WTO is a digrace. I'd like to know what happened to the people who sold him the computers.

Julie Amero's predicament is also disgraceful. The real villains in this are the local school board who allowed filters to expire and accepted pop-up ads on classrooms computers as being normal. It really seems the charges were only a butt-covering exercise by these incompetents.

Incompetent is the best description of the prosecution's "expert" witness, Detective Mark Lounsbury who claimed Amero musts have "physically clicked" on pornographic links. The frightening thing is Detective Lounsbury recieved training from the FBI in basic network intrusion and advanced network intrusion in Unix. He admit even admits he's not an expert and relies on Computer Cop software.

It surprises me that more schools and businesses haven't fallen foul of the law because of malware infested PCs. Given it's considered sexual harrassment to have a girly calendar on an office wall, hard core porn on a computer desktop must beyond the pale. Every office and school should have proper filtering and spyware protection and policies to deal with the unexpected.