this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Whoever is in charge of this:

Nextcloud is a very solid cloud solution which doesn't suffer from those data leaks. https://nextcloud.com/

You do not have to sell the chromebooks, you can replace the OS with fedora. You can customize your OS acording to your needs with ublue https://universal-blue.org/

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I applaud your optimism that there are enough people employed in the school IT to do that properly.

Don't get me wrong, you are absolutely right with those statements, but the schools used Chromebooks for a reason I would think, the same reason that if they had not used Chromebooks it would be some Windows installation.

It is what people know, it is "easy" to work with and so on. Those are obviously not great reasons and not 100% true, but that is what counts for those schools.

I am very curious what they are going to replace this with and I am unfortunately 100% sure it is going to be Windows and the Onedrive/Outlook ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Many government organizations in Sweden use Nextcloud for exactly this reason.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Thats great and commendable. But the fact is the schools do not have that running, else they would not need the Chromebooks in the first place, would they? They still have to get this started which means employing and paying someone to do this, having budget for paying the servers and whatnot. Seeing how efficient governmental work is, it won't be as easy as borrowing some server capacity from a different government agency plus one of their IT guys for a short while.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Concerning the cloud workspace, it would be possible, that the IT services of the Danish regions (or of the whole state) run centralised clouds (Nextcloud, Moodle, ...).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Any suggestions for replacing the admin tools and examination mode on Linux?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

In our university we have an Ansible playbook to set up firewall rules etc. and change the network share and user logins so that they can't access the Internet or any previously saved files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How easy is it for a teacher spontaneous to put a previously not lockdown mode into such a state?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Depends, it's definitely something you can automate so it works at the click of a button on some website (and another to revert). We just run the commands from the terminal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is Nextcloud also for personal use or just corporate? I can't seem to find any kind of pricing on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You may use Nextcloud for personal use, I've been using it for 2 years now.

try this url link to sign-up https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Practical consequence to comply: throw away all them Chromebooks. Because one thing a Chromebook will not do is refrain from sending personal data to Google.

Or better: convert them into Linux machines. But I doubt whoever went with Chromebooks in the first place has the resources or the knowledge to do this: why would they have chosen to buy Chromebooks otherwise?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (2 children)

chromebook's are incredibly easy to manage from an I.T. perspective, and they are cheap to replace and repair. that's why they are popular

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Indeed. And all that goodness is on purpose: Chromebooks are Google's trojan horse into your private data.

All Google products are designed to be as attractive and popular as possible so people are drawn to them like flies to a turd and give Google their data. That's why Google axes so many projects that aren't quite attractive and popular enough.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

I know the word is overused now, but this is basically endhittification step one.

And considering it's Google, I'm not sure there need to be any other steps. They are luring people in as young as they can, establishing patterns with them (using Google services and Google software as soon as possible) and basically guaranteeing customers / surveillance targets for life

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

Google! - the best spying engine the world has ever seen - collaborating with the 3 letter agencies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Ironic, given they were spying for the US

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Oh no how dare the data sharing service I signed up for shares data

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

Kind of a captive audience if your school requires it right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

@pineapplelover guess this will just make them sign up to services that don't share data to Google. 🤷

@throws_lemy