Kids are short circuiting their school issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout Ars Technica
Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout
I'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)
You 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.
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.
kids would cut their own balls off if someone started a tiktok challenge about it
That's a great idea. Solves the entire issue in just a few generations.
Give AI another year or so
does not look as cool as arson
they ate tidepods, and did the blackout challenge, where someone even died from blacking 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."
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.
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.
It’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?
It's so disappointing that this is the first generation of kids to ever do dumb shit for dumb reasons, I personally blame the parents
This is how you can tell they live in the first world.
I disassembled 8 today, other guy had 26. We haven't dealt with any catching fire, yet.
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.
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.
Things that shouldn’t exist: TikTok clout
would be the same with facebook
Would be the same with stories told at the [insert local hangout]
You say that like Facebook and/or clout isn't also roundly in the "worst shit ever," category
I'm pretty sure Facebook has no Clout left