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.
It’s different when kids are doing bad shit on a platform that amplifies their reach.
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 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?
no you are wrong. the actual truth is that the new generation is bad and doomed, unlike my generation, which is the best one. /s
You’re right. Even the ancient Egyptians were using tiktok to spread bad ideas.
Things that shouldn’t exist: TikTok clout
kids would cut their own balls off if someone started a tiktok challenge about it
Give AI another year or so
That’s a great idea. Solves the entire issue in just a few generations.
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.
IIRC USB killers work because they’re sustained high voltage. USB ports can often deal with a static discharge or over current, but a sustained 200 volts will let the magic smoke out.
I guess I just assumed there was some way to protect against it but I don’t know anything about electronics.
They do make special shielding for USB and other ports, but most manufacturers don’t use them because generally people aren’t going to stick foreign objects into their computer for internet points.
Often times, those “public chargers” you sometimes see in airports and such have that shielding installed on the ports (though you should never use public USB ports to charge your devices, for a dozen other reasons).
Don’t you need to manually approve data transmission through USB?
In an ideal situation, yes. Not all devices even do this and when they do, there is the whole concept of hacking.
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.
