The Salt Lake Tribune
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
5th graders access devil's playground
Two American Fork 11-year-olds face possible pornography charges after hacking through their elementary school's computer content filter. One of the fifth graders' moms says the unspeakable crime began with browsing online for pictures of "sweet cars," then playing with some innocuous-sounding search terms until the kids hit the jackpot — nude women, which they showed to classmates. Sharing is good, right?

My guess is that Alpine School District, American Fork cops and the Utah Education Network are going to come out on the short end of this ludicrous mess. It looks more like a collision of teacher neglect, UEN's lousy Internet-nanny system and healthy curiosity than trafficking in porno. The mother told KSL's Doug Wright:
My first reaction was: ‘Why would you do something so stupid?' Then, I'm like, ‘How? How did you do this? How was this able to be accessed when I send you to school and there's supposed to be a filtration system?

3 Comments:

At April 15, 2009 10:58 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Public schools are some of the most technologically backward organizations in the nation. I don't doubt their filtration system was pretty easy to crack.

 
At April 15, 2009 12:32 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whoopsie - looks like somebody forgot to deny Google's image search in the filter :)

 
At April 15, 2009 1:32 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sweet Cars / Sweet Cans.

I can see where this went wrong...

The fact is, those filters are not very useful.

 

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