Schoolkid chipping trial 'a success' A school in Doncaster is piloting a monitoring system designed to keep tabs on pupils by tracking radio chips in their uniforms. According to the Doncaster Free Press, Hungerhill School is testing RFID tracking and data collection on 10 pupils within the school. It's been developed by local company Darnbro Ltd, which says it is …
the kids can just remove their blazers, stick them in their locker/hide them in the school somewhere and roam free? What's the betting the kids just rip the blazer stitching, remove the tag and carry on regardless?
Also, in my experience, a good portion of kids are just criminals in training. (Ooh, controversial.)
How namby-pamby is this? Chip in a uniform? Get one kid to bring wear 4 sweaters, and 3 friends get a free day off school, surely?
Injecting an RFID chip under the skin is surely a better option.
Then if a kid is not in school by, say, 9:03 (got to give some grace period, I suppose), send a signal that blows their head off. Oh hang on, I seem to be having a Running Man moment there. Must remember we live in an Orwellan future, not a Schwartzeneggerean future...
Excellent idea... that one person will be the diligent school pupil who was already losing out because of the disruption caused by his delinquent classmates.
Now he's getting one-to-one tuition, thereby solving the problem of class sizes at the same time!
To avoid the problem of passing the item of clothing to a suitable geek, just make sure all the kids have to wear school mandated underpants.
Registration would then involve the children lining up and bending over in front of teacher with their trousers round their ankles, ready to be "probed".
Just like the old days.
Now I know how to make sure El Reg gets put onto the national curriculum...
lets go the whole hog and implant IR transmitters and make the little blighters have to sign in to school by pointing the IR at an IR reciever which directs the browser to El Reg. Failure to do so gets them zapped.
Best get them servers upgraded for the rush ;p
We had RFID tagged tie-slides when I was at school in Swindon (oo about 5 years ago), they tracked where you were in the school grounds (when you were in uniform) and we were charged 20 quid everytime we lost one so they abandoned it. They now have swipe cards for each kid hooked up to the electronic register thing that auto-dials your parents with a stephen hawking voice asking why the kid isn't in school. Well done Doncaster for being so far behind technology.. northereners eh?
What with the department for ID cards taking over the Birth Marrige and Deaths office. Now all we need is for hospitals to chip kids at birth and then take a boold sample to record their DNA. We're well screwed.
How about a "Last one to leave the country turn off the lights" icon?
Surely this is just engendering an acceptance of a surveilance future. Get the kids to accept this and by the time they reach adulthood they'll be walking blindly into an era where the authorities can and will know everything about you.
Eventually of course they'll be RFID chips on everything so you will be able to tie school vending machine purchases to the uniform (wearer). I'm not convinced that tracking in this way is a good thing.
How about fingerprint or iris recognition sensors on the door of each classroom, or swipe card readers on the teachers desk, as they saunter in they swipe in thereby registering in the process, without being tracked wherever they are in the school/local environment outside of lessons.
As some one who is generally is concerned with the rights of humans i would normally decry such a scheme or at least i would if it were adults such as with the article on a national CCTV system.
However since its kids well i think a little Orwellian style kicking is completely justified it might even encourage them to think about stuff if they were actually capable of such given the woeful (bah humbug) state of state education.
I would even suggest that this system does not go far enough and "Battle Royale" (Japanese film excellence ;-) style collars would be more appropriate. For those not familiar with this cinematic work of art they basically, after some fair warning, explode following some infraction. Imagine it, sneaking off for dinner and crowding my local sandwich shop no more, they leave the grounds and boom! It would only take a few to get the message through and parents could subsidise the scheme for the right to use them at home. Clean up cost would have to be built into the lease.
If amnesty international complain then just convert them to taser collars which comparatively is much more er "humane". Of course these would cost more and be less effective so only rich parents would get the potential benefit of preventing their children from blowing themselves up.
..(with a small 'r') used to be filled in by class teachers, who performed the useful function of checking the state as well as the presence of the individuals. Dehumanising such simple tasks early in a child's career doesn't bode well for their later socialogical development, I fear.
Although I'm amazed to see something that coherent in the Free Press, a paper whose articles are there to hold the ads apart and which made my Thursday mornings hell at the tender age of 13 - there's nothing like hauling 60 copies around at 6am on a winter morning.
The point is though, it's *voluntary*. The kids involved are doing it as an experiment. Hungerford School is a science and technology centre of excellence. It does surprise me that no-one's thought about it before but I also doubt that the kids are involved are the ones that you find in the Frenchgate Centre on a Tuesday afternoon.
They have a right to be respected as human beings, but they aren't considered legally capable of being responsible, and if they're misbehaving their parents have a duty to them to educate them about what they're doing wrong, and so need to be able to keep tabs on them. Teachers are "in loco parentis" and working with far more "loco filii" than most parents have to deal with. Is a little technical assistance out of place?
Mind you, the potential for abuse is very large. My teachers all knew who was supposed to be in their classes. If things have deteriorated so much that this is no longer expected of teachers, and they need to take a register in every class, there's something systemically wrong and a few RFID chips is a sticking plaster on a haemorrhaging Femoral.
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And what about all those children in poverty ( you know, the ones the Government continually harp on about but no one ever sees!)...what happens when Johnny hands his blazer onto Tommy, who hands it on to Sarah...
"So our data indicates that Johnny has been attending for the last 10 years...."
Teacher talking to the pupil "Mr Smith, you're were in the crapper for 30 minutes at lunch, are you constipated?"
Could also help with discipline, say goodbye to the smoking club - Can't beat the excitement of toking a quick one at lunch while playing hide'n'seek with the Dinner Ladies, its like real life GTA.
I support a scholarship scene for junior/high school students in Kenya. At that level, education has to be paid for. Kids do not tolerate 'time wasting' visitors and western teachers, i.e chatting, anecdotes. Some children turn to prostitution to get the money to pay for schooling. These children don't need chips: they are desperate, desperate, for education, and theirs would seem basic to us. I sometimes want to scream at kids I see bunking off from school. Kids their age suffer to get what they spurn.
[www.canadianharambee.ca, if anyone is interested]
Blowing the kids' heads off is going too far. A strong electrical shock that persists until they get their butts to school seems more reasonable (and, unfortunately, more realistic).
The big question to me is: how accurate is this tracking? Can it just tell if the kids are at school, or can it tell *where* they are at school. Because 50 kids in the coatroom would raise a few red flags (and if it can track them down accurately, admins/teachers can nab them easily when they want them).
The moment they try that in my daughters school, she'll be out of there!!!
My children will then be home taught!
fortunately, the Headmistress of that school, is still completely sane and has so far always listened to the parents when it came to controversial implementations.
She has always made her decision based on a vast majority of parent's opinions, or she managed to convince the people that something was necessary! but never against parents wishes.
One of the Heads of school I have encountered (and that even including my own school career.
I am carrying my German RFID raped passport on a thin metal box since RFID is probably the most insecure data device created in the past 10 years.
I wouldn't have a problem with it, if those companies would get some sens and implement a proper crypto stack!!!
It's not difficult, but would only make their current developments obsolete.
Apart from that they are so simple to clone! It's scary, that this sort of technology is even contemplated!!!
....in more ways than one, eh?
Puns apart, although voluntary, this is leading the way to something quite distasteful. Kids getting used to being tracked leads to citizens getting used to being tracked. Not a very "independent thought" moral being taught to our young ones. Heck, the most creative ideas in school for me came out through the process of evading the headmaster and his croonies. But me thinks this most likely wont become mainstream since parents and adults still have SOME sense in them against such stupidity such as this...
...right?
Just like pollution, the next generation will have to carry the burden of the current generations laziness and unwillingness to do what is truly necessary.
Growing up is about learning how to behave and interact in a society, and unfortunately a lot of the same people who complain about chipping now are the same ones who complain about parents who discipline their children. Now we have a generation of children that have figured out that the worst punishment that anyone is 'allowed' to give them is really 'no big deal' and the gauntlet of rules and surveillance is treated like a game whit the object being to overcome the rules instead of obeying them. Students need to be put in more of a team building environment where their friends are counting on them to show up and watching out for them if they get into trouble. When the establishment decides that the students are a problem that needs to be dealt with it give rise to an 'Us against Them' mentality which only invites the children to fight back and make the problems worse.
Children need the freedom to make mistakes because experience is the best teacher. All other forms of learning are based on analogy to experience.
I'm going to be forced to have chip implanted some day for the same reason I'm forced to use a Texas Instruments calculator today. Get 'em while they're young and don't know any better and you've got a customer for life. Then just let the need for compatibility weed out anyone who dares think for themselves.
All your reverse polish is belong to us.
Before people make wild comments, why don't they get the correct facts and do not jump to conclusions, exactly as the press have done, there is nothing to compare the system to. The system is is not a suveilence or tracking system of any sort, it is a system that has been developed as part of a embroidery process, not implanted or embedded in clothing, it is a totally passive chip, exactly the same technology as a swipe card door entry system, but obviously you won't go to school without your clothes, it cannot be replicated as it has a unique number that is allocated to that child, it saves time for the teacher by instant registration and allows for more teaching time and the benefit for the parent is that they do not have to write or label garments for their child, they only have to have that read at the nearest classroom and it will identify the owner, the chip cannot be removed, the chip does not hold anymore info than is already resident on the schools computer.
If your so concerned about the surveilence and tracking of a child the take away their mobile phones, these can be used to track a person to within 3 feet of their whereabouts. get real!
It should be compulsory for these toe-rags to have a chip injected under their skin, then the Police can know exactly where they've been all the time and bang them up when they lie about having been somewhere else when the phone box got smashed up.
And don't give me that hoary old balls argument about "freedom", that's a lame excuse, normally emanating from pathetic people who weren't brought up right to respect authority.
In fact I'm pretty sure you Register readers are all a nefarious bunch, up to your ears in criminal behaviour, but you're all so used to it you probably don't see any wrong in it at all. You need to be banged up for a few weeks, that'd sort you out. Though if National Service still existed to smash all this pathetic crap out of you sad sacks before you got a chance to corrode society with your warped sense of right and wrong (never wrong are you?) then we'd all be in a better place.
"while ensuring parents of their children's security."
Hahahaha!
Have these morons completely forgotten Dunblane, Columbine and all the other myriad of school massacres? These were all perpetrated by people who entered the school, how can this ensure the children's security? It could catch skivers, smokers etc. but it's not going to ensure any security from people entering the school. What a spurious claim!
Ok kiddies.. Welcome to "Microwaving your school uniform 101".
To rid yourselves of those pesky RFID chips in your clothes, and many other nasties that they may contain, just pop them in the microwave for a few seconds. Just be careful of where you put the metal bits.
(When's the new "Radioactive" icon coming?)
Why not let the people in charge of this scheme wear them also. I mean, you wouldn't want paid employees to be showing up late to work or leaving early. You could also monitor them to see if they're possibly bantering with a group of others when they should be working. You can monitor how much time they spend in the loo. Think of how easy it would be to keep track of that one person you don't care for to make sure they don't slip up. It would be a great morale booster!
... if you've nothing to hide. Which is why Tony Blair threatened to resign if the police decided to interview him as a possible suspect in the cash-for-questions inquiry. What was he afraid of?
Can we use these chips to keep track of what the members of our government get up to?
Kids (I was one once) will always find a way to bunk school, if they are motivated to do so.
Most kids,
(especially the kind of kids this system is being designed to track!!) already know how to defeat contemporary RFID chips, even if they don't know it!
Seen a *ridiculously expensive* CD in HMV that you like?...
Cue the old tinfoil lined hoody pocket and BAM, RFID, er, foiled.
Lets face it, I know kids that are capable of following even the most complicated instructions pertaining to various hacks etc (think xbox mods and so on..)
I can see no real significant obstacle to cloning these flaky devices, even for school children.
Which brings me to the worrying conclusion that, say your child became the victim of your neighbourhood pedo/priest/teacher, whaty's to stop them cloning the devices to create the perfect alibi?
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