Okay Geek Farm
Schools seek out to build the 'unhackable' netbook network for students
Brandon Davenport
The NSW Department of Education (one letter away from being NSFW) is using asset-tracking software, RFID tags, and BIOS-embedded filtering smarts to roll out 240,000 netbook computers into what CIO Stephen Wilson calls "the most hostile environment you can roll computers into" - the local high school.
Over four years, 240,000 Lenovo netbooks will be offered to students in Year 9. The netbooks can be kept until Year 12, or permanently should the student finish his or her studies at the school. Netbooks are also being offered to teachers.
This sounds like a good idea, but what about viruses and our, oh so faithful Linux high school user-groups who want to hack the crap out of these? Well, these gurus have some hoops to jump, as these laptops will be near perfect.
At the physical layer, each netbook is password-protected and embedded with tracking software that is embedded at the BIOS level of the machine.
That sounds super-duper secure and the even cooler part, the laptops come armed with an enterprise version of the new Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft Office, the Adobe CS4 creative suite, Apple iTunes, and content geared specifically to students. Incredibly, while the netbooks are loaded with many hundreds of dollars worth of software, 2GB of RAM and a six hour battery, the cost to the NSW Department of Education is under $500 a unit.
But how will they update such a humungus bunch of netbooks? Simple. The netbooks are set up so the department can remotely upgrade and patch the devices over a wireless network.
