Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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School Spyware (self.privacy)

submitted 1 year ago by HumanPerson to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi. My school just started issuing devices last year, and they have this Lightspeed spyware on them. Last year I was able to remove it by booting into Linux from a flash drive and moving the files to a separate drive and then back at the end of the year. This year I have heard from sources that they have ways of detecting someone booting from Linux so I am hesitant to do that option. My only other idea is to buy an old laptop off eBay that looks like it and install Linux on it. I could probably get one for about 50€. Does anyone have any cheaper ideas?

Oh also talking to IT isn’t an option.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Install Linux on a USB stick or live CD. Boot into that OS and do exactly what you did last time.

Unless they have gone into the firmware to prevent booting from anything but the HDD, this will will work and they can’t detect it.
Once you make the changes and boot back into Windows they won’t know either. While the OS is offline their spyware does nothing. Once you boot back into Windows, it can’t run and can’t “call home”.

As someone else said, they will know eventually that something is broken on your computer, that is, no data from your machine and it becomes a stale object. But they may not automatically believe it was intentionally disabled. You’d be surprised how low compliance numbers need to be in order to be satisfactory, and no security or monitoring solution is flaw-free. They may just blame the software. Many low-level IT admins are prone to this assumption in order to avoid spending a lot of time diagnosing the problem.

Source: am a computer systems engineer