Brazilian Schoolchildren Tagged By Computer Chips 288
New submitter smi.james.th writes with an AP story, and extracts from it: "'Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if they are cutting classes, the city's education secretary, Coriolano Moraes, said Thursday.' Personally I don't find this too inspiring. Mr. Orwell certainly has warned the world about this."
Oh the possibilities (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, 'cause predatory paedophiles will have such a hard time finding kids otherwise, right?
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:5, Informative)
Certainly not at random, no, given that the vast majority of the time it's a family member or friend who perpetrates the offence.
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say the pedo-hacker, good at what he does, has a preference: a young girl, aged 13, blonde, tiny. Let's say he goes on facebook and finds that preference: name, location, school they go to. Let's say he knows how to get into this chip-system, which might just list their names or giveaway-details (which may or may not be the case, but for argument's sake, it does). Oh hey, there's lil' Jenny McVulnerable, waiting outside for the bus stop.
Yea I know, it's not the USUAL, but things like this bring up the UN-usual.
Since he's such an uber-hacker, he could just hack into the school's ID card database, and download student pictures, home address, parents' names, possibly siblings and emergency contact info, then he can intercept the kid and say "omg Josh, your mom Mary and Uncle Joe were in a terrible accident, your sister Maria is already at the hospital, they sent me to pick you up".
This RFID system doesn't add a risk that's not already there.
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, if they wanted to track you; then they'd sure as hell do it no matter what. They don't need high tech gadgets to do that either.
But on to RFID. Our student ID cards at college/university here work by RFID. We use them to open doors, as copy cards, to pay for food in the cafeteria... . So you end up with a bunch of (electronic/electrical) engineering students with RFID cards that you actually get to store money on indirectly (its kept on the server how much money is on the card). So there are enough reasons to duplicate somebody else's card. Contrary to what you might be thinking, not a single person has even managed to do that successfully. The encoding is fairly tricky and just replicating it is extremely hard.
What we did try was to track each other using the RFID tags in these cards (as that's considerably easier than trying to reverse engineer them). The thing is, a tracking range of a whole 15cm isn't all that useful last time I checked. So claiming you can track people through these tags is foolish. Unless if they're passing through lets say a door frame.
So I seriously doubt that any high school kid will be able to figure it out that easily, all this does is save the school some time in the morning by being able to skip the daily roll call.
just put them in the microwave (Score:2)
that will kill them
Re:just put them in the microwave (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
TFA says the following:
The T-shirts, can be washed and ironed without damaging the chips, Moraes said adding that the chips have a "security system that makes tampering virtually impossible."
A microwave probably would destroy the chips, as would any strong enough EM source, but they're used to monitor whether a child is entering or leaving the school. So in other words, if the chip is dead, even if the child is in class, the system wouldn't have registered him because of lack of chip and the parents would get a snotty text message.
FWIW, I'd probably try and destroy it as well though. Just to show how much I loved it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Lo-tech hacking (Score:2)
No, you need your buddy to take your shirt to class with him. Is the GPS good enough to know "two people are in the same chair?"
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I'd guess that would be a huge load of work, and schools would be better off just making sure kids are in the school itself, and letting the teachers and staff ensure that students are in class once they're inside.
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Do you really think they're putting a GPS (plus some kind of GSM modem to keep track of the location ) in each uniform? And that whole setup fits "underneath each school's coat-of-arms"?
It's probably a basic RFID tag that gets logged by a reader by the door.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you really think they're putting a GPS (plus some kind of GSM modem to keep track of the location ) in each uniform? And that whole setup fits "underneath each school's coat-of-arms"?
It's probably a basic RFID tag that gets logged by a reader by the door.
They don't need GPS to track RFID chips on-campus, they just need RFID readers at every classroom and building exits.
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Which is not the plan. They'll only install a reader by the door, according to the news reports.
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And what purpose does this serve? have teachers completely forgotten how to take attendance? I know it's low tech, but it's a whole lot more accurate, cheaper, and much less orwellian.
Re:Lo-tech hacking (Score:5, Insightful)
And what purpose does this serve? have teachers completely forgotten how to take attendance? I know it's low tech, but it's a whole lot more accurate, cheaper, and much less orwellian.
Not to mention it puts the responsibility with an adult that should already be investing time, energy, and interest in the child's welfare. Not only will that always be better than an automated system, it's also the right thing a teacher should be doing anyways.
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Hello Brazil! (Score:2)
You're new to the news on Big Brother! Welcome to the Axis of Oppression!
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It's not a GPS, just RFID.
Re: (Score:3)
I sure hope pedophiles in Brazil can't hack or learn to hack. Holy crap this is bad on so many levels
I don't understand what kind of RFID hack will help a pedophile?
What good will it do to be able to scan the t-shirt of the kid walking by his van and know that it's child #1231812421?
It doesn't appear that the RFID chips will contain any identifying information, and why should they -- they just need a number to link the child to the database.
Besides, most kids (at least in the USA) these days are already broadcasting a unique ID through their phone's Wifi MAC address or unencrypted cell phone signalling.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh my god take off your tinfoil hat! This is a basic RFID asset tracking system. It identifies who is in a building at any given time and is no more intrusive than a roll call system.
So what if a pedophile gets access to the system. It's not like they can track the movements of the person anywhere they are with it.
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
People are not assets, and should not be tracked.
A perceived increase in security is never worth a tangible loss in freedoms.
The danger is the children growing up and thinking this is okay everywhere they go. It is most emphatically, not okay .
There can be exceptions, for adults only, in high security businesses. In those situations it will be a choice, and most likely well compensated. Tracking systems like this should never, ever, be acceptable in public and daily life, and certainly not for children. They should grow up thinking such systems are weird, intrusive, and only required in the most serious of circumstances.
People need to fucking grow a pair and realize that life is dangerous. Have some courage and face life head on, and stop being such cowards trading away your freedoms at every corner for shiny trinkets and illusions of a safer world with a better informed authority.
Re: (Score:3)
s/ets/hats/
Re:Get used to it (Score:5, Insightful)
The actions those kids take when not in class could have a harmful and costly impact on others (vandalism, illegal drug use causing health problems that must then be paid for, a lack of education resulting in more stupid grown-ups that can't hold a job and drag on the economy, etc.). In addition, plenty of parents want their kids to go to school because it keeps them safe and is ultimately good for them.
I guess you didn't take into account the psychological harm from obsessive, oppressive, non-stop surveillance into every aspect of life.. your statement here is also quite black and white.. school is not pure 'good' or pure 'bad', nor does cutting a class equate to 'vandalism' or drug use (which is also not pure 'good' or pure 'bad.')
This doesn't just apply to kids, it applies to everyone. The actions any person takes impacts one's neighbors, and as such everyone has direct incentives to encircle everyone else in systems of control. This isn't a matter of "them" wanting to take "our" freedoms away. It is am matter of "us" wanting to make sure "they" don't do things that have a negative impact on "us." This principle is universal.
and this is the attitude that will ensure we do live out that dystopia of infinite control of others = infinite freedom for the individual. is that really what you want?
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Re: (Score:2)
Except that you couldn't fake attendence in the classroom (how long until the kids figure out where the chip is, how to remove it, and have their friends cover for them by carrying the chip to class?) and you couldn't be tracked by strangers. I love technology when it solves an existing problem, but when the existing solution is better than the technological replacement in almost every way, then it should be kept until the technology can catch up.
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actually, it's quite different. one is a local track driven by relationship between teacher and student, the other, part of a database that becomes a permanent record and sets misguided expectations of the future.. the real harm is that it teaches the kids...err politicians/economic leaders of tomorrow that computer programmed heuristic driven surveillance is acceptable, even for trivial things, and psychologically healthy. it sends a message that people are cattle or assets that need pervasive tracking.
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The actions those kids take when not in class could have a harmful and costly impact on others
Right. Just like you could be a murderer. But I'd prefer not to assume guilt or restrict actions based on what could happen.
They might want them to be in school, but I don't see that as a reason to be overly paranoia about it. It's not the end of the world if they skip class a few times.
and is ultimately good for them.
That would really depend on what you think of the current public educational system.
Yeah, this is a job for face recognition CCTV! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeah, this is a job for face recognition CCTV! (Score:5, Funny)
Doing this with chips is barbaric.
No, it's British. The American way would be doing it with fries.
Re: (Score:3)
Rag on America all you want, but we didn't invent the chip sandwich [wikipedia.org].
No, but you did invent cheese in a can [wikipedia.org], which is one of the main reasons I laugh myself silly when Americans mock British cuisine.
Re:Yeah, this is a job for face recognition CCTV! (Score:4, Funny)
Look.... as far as cuisine goes.... you both (America and British) are like two ugly fat chicks arguing about who is uglier.
Americans got Mac'N'Cheese, everything drowned in ketchup, and the nastiest processed food on Earth, .... and ... you Brits got spotted dick, the traditional breakfast with those charcoal briquettes of fried blood, and some of the most bland tasting food of all time. All the more hysterical since you practically invented the Spice trade.
Anything good in America was imported along with immigrants. Quite frankly, the only uglier chick in the room is Indian cuisine. Not hard to see why they are rail thin peoples.
Counter-intuitively, you would expect Chinese and Thai people to be fat as fuck, since that is some seriously, seriously tasty food.
When was the last time you were messed up on a couch with some people all craving British food?
Now I will give props to the British for their lecherous and lazy gambler that invented the sandwich. One of the best culinary inventions in the last thousand years. The best being, of course, the chocolate covered peanut.
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What ever happened to taking role? What kind of incompetent idiots are running schools when they need to chip the kids to keep up with them?
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the other guy got his learnin' from the Kaiser, I think.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly my spell checker had no problem with role since it is in fact a legitimate word. Unfortunately it has a different meaning from roll. This is what comes from quickly tapping out a reply when half asleep.
You bet they'll do it the Brazilian way (Score:3)
That means, they'll use whatever equipment an expensive contractor can sell. And it won't limit the liberty of the children, because it will work badly for 6 months and none at all after that.
That is, it will have a chance of working badly if some tribunal somewhere don't declare it illegal. Otherwise, it won't even be turned on.
Fuck yes! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
More like "Go over to your friend's house, change, then convince your friend to carry your uniform in his/her backpack."
Re:Fuck yes! (Score:5, Funny)
"Johnny, why are you wearing six shirts today?"
I will reiterate.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology CANNOT solve social problems. It can only hide symptoms.
Re:I will reiterate.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It can SHOW the symptoms. Seriously every school in the world already does this kind of checking. A roll call at the start of the class is the normal way.
Throughout all of my highschool I've been wondering why we don't do something more productive with technology to automate this waste of the first 5 minutes of every class and incorporate all other services as well such as library loans with technology such as RFID.
To be perfectly clear GPS tracking of students off school property is completely unacceptable, but this is not the case. This looks like a basic system to see who is in the class. An automated roll call. It's not solving anything, it's simply automating what we do already.
Re: (Score:2)
How is a situation in which you count uniforms instead of students an improvement in this area? do you really think the students are too dumb to figure out that they don't need to be present in class, they only have to make sure their chip is? Roll call is much more accurate, much harder to fake, and has the added benefit of being cheap. Not to mention the fact that after about day 5 of the semester it doesn't take any time as the teacher just does a cursory glance around to see which desks aren't occupied
Re: (Score:2)
Technology CANNOT solve social problems.
Why not?
Technology has solved lots of my social problems. I used to have trouble locating family and friends at the mall. Now we all have cellphones, so the problem is solved.
Technology cannot solve all social problems, but it can certainly solve some of them.
American parents will lap this up (Score:2)
It promises security and at the same time obviates the need for the parents to be responsible - the perfect American dream.
Re: (Score:2)
Just go the extra step and pay the Cool Kid to wear these, to make them The Thing to wear, so that anyone resisting gets socially outcast for a month.
(/Bitter)
will do wonders for education (Score:2)
Being monitored: restrict your behavior.
Absence of monitoring: you are free, do whatever you like.
Those will be good citizens, as long as you don't forget to keep them leashed all the time.
Error rate? (Score:3)
I'm assuming this is just an rfid system and not something more elaborate. The question becomes what happens to students who are reported absent by malfunctioning or poorly set up equipment and incorrect information in databases?. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a problem since the student would be able to verify their presence some other way, then the problem would be conscientiously addressed and corrected. This is the real world, however. In the real world, school administrators tend to be authoritarians and extremely blunt thinkers. The prevalence of ill-thought out "zero tolerance" policies in the area of education makes this perfectly clear. Students identified as absent by this system probably won't be given a chance to prove their innocence and may stand a good chance of being punished more harshly if they try.
miss reads (Score:2)
With a big clump of people moving thought the door at the same time may lead to missing a few reads and with a big load of people beeps may not help as much as they do with one person at a time with a turnstile.
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If it misses you on the way in, it will get you on the way out.
By creating a 'choke point' where only one student can go through at a time (turnstile?) the reader can be assumed accurate, but if you want a backup plan, video record the faces of students that pass through the door...
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With a big clump of people moving thought the door at the same time may lead to missing a few reads and with a big load of people beeps may not help as much as they do with one person at a time with a turnstile.
Many kids already enter their school single file through the metal detector, so they'll be able to get clean RFID reads.
I've run dozens of road races where literally hundreds of people were running across the RFID mats at the start, finish and random split locations, and I can only think of one instance where I didn't get a chip time (which is recorded separatly from clock time), and that was the time that someone stepped on my foot in a crowded start, flattening out the RFID tag (which put a kink in the an
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Zero tolerance means zero responsibility, and they are made by smart people to avoid these kinds of problems.
Any time an administrator has to make a decision that may affect a student, they open themselves up to all kinds of trouble. Even if you win, a parent filing a lawsuit is at best a distraction and at worst a money drain. And just having a parent waging war, making noise at PTA meetings, or whatever they can think of to harass the administrator, it can become quite the pain. Usually, some dispute w
Re: (Score:2)
If the teacher is still taking attendence, then what is gained from adding the RFID? This sounds like a really expensive, and not very accurate "fix" to a problem that was solved cheaply and more accurately centuries ago.
PoppyCock (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
Re:PoppyCock (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.
Hey buddy, that's as liberal as it comes (Score:2, Funny)
Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.
Conservatives are the ones for freedom and elimination of government oversight at all levels.
Liberals are the ones who do things "for your own good".
Get it straight man or you end up voting for exactly the opposite result as you desire. See: present.
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Conservatives are the ones for freedom and elimination of government oversight at all levels.
(new keyboard; please send me one.)
btw, thanks for the bellylaugh.
Re:Hey buddy, that's as liberal as it comes (Score:5, Informative)
Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.
Conservatives are the ones for freedom and elimination of government oversight at all levels.
Liberals are the ones who do things "for your own good".
Get it straight man or you end up voting for exactly the opposite result as you desire. See: present.
Actually conservatism is all about worship of the status quo. It is the belief that it should change very slowly if at all. It's misused all the time by people who don't understand it, and so has become one of those words that means whatever the speaker intends it to mean. But that's the actual definition; look it up if you doubt me.
Libertarians (similar to classical liberals, nothing like modern liberals) are the ones who want to maximize freedom. Libertarianism is the belief that consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want, no matter who disapproves, so long as they don't pose a threat to non-participants. Libertarianism would seriously take off as a political movement if it were possible to get candidates on the ballot for all major elections, which is why the two-party duopoly creates ridiculously elaborate, inconsistent, burdensome electoral rules and deeply entrenched funding mechanisms to prevent this from happening.
Of course, "convervative" has been co-opted as a term and now tends to mean someone who is prudish, religious in an institutional (not personal) way, and wishes their preferred lifestyle to have the force of law, combined with the celebration of corporate power over state power. Just like "liberal" has become co-opted to mean "we know what's good for you" social engineering as well as an obsession with group identity (black, white, female, etc) at the expense of dealing with people as individuals. In that sense conservatives tend to be materialistic while liberals tend to be utterly childish and unable to separate their emotions from reason. Both are the delight of power-hungry politicians everywhere because both can be pandered to.
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Libertarianism would seriously take off as a political movement if it were possible to get candidates on the ballot for all major elections, which is why the two-party duopoly creates ridiculously elaborate, inconsistent, burdensome electoral rules and deeply entrenched funding mechanisms to prevent this from happening.
By your argument, in countries where political systems do not have a two-party duopoly, and third parties can easily get on the ballot and garner votes, they should do really well. Why, then, it does not happen in practice?
E.g. in New Zealand, the parliament is elected using MMP, making it pretty easy for small parties to get at least one candidate in. Yet, their Libertarian party has never managed to get a single seat - they've tried five times under MMP, getting less than 1% of votes every time (in fact,
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. The problem is this - Most people aren't libertarians.
Everyone wants to be free, but few want everyone to be free.
Until this changes, none of us can be free.
CONSERVATIVES (Score:2)
Really, conservatives don't want to do things "for your own good" then why have they made an argument based on their greater moral superiority?
You are thinking of social conservatives, not the general conservative/libertarian.
Even most of the current social conservatives are all about limiting federal power, they can see which way the wind blows.
Why was....
Deleted pointless rants about people who will not be the next president no matter what.
Why does Mitt Romney....oh who am I kidding, Mr. Etch-A-Sketch doe
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And the liberal mentality is they are the wards of the state - the state will provide all their needs, in a manner the state finds appropriate.
Whee! It's fun to make up positions for other people, I can see why you do that trepidity...
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ahem.
pets are usually far better behaved.
Not sure why you want that (Score:2)
These are tags in the uniforms of CHILDREN
Early monitoring by the state is especially depressing.
I would love to know if my teens cut school.
It's too bad instead you'll only know if your kids clothes are at school.
I'd say the going rate per day to hold a jacket in my backpack going to class could easily exceed $1, even in Brazil.
So why is it valuable to train your kids to be sneaky bastards?
If the state is not monitoring them you can place much more sophisticated devices for spot checks without them even th
Re: (Score:2)
This is not more "monitoring the state" than a traditional roll call. It's just logging entrances and exits. Doing it automatically or by hand is irrelevant.
Re:PoppyCock (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
If you had always been tagged from the time you were a small child, and had all your life to get used to the idea, would you still think so?
That's the danger.
It's early conditioning (indoctrination) for a future time when it will be easier to justify (excuse) doing this to adults. Right now lots of adults feel the way you do about tagging or chipping adults. That makes it politically difficult or impossible to do that right now. That's about the only thing stopping it because politics is full of authoritarian types who would love to do it.
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Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
If you had always been tagged from the time you were a small child, and had all your life to get used to the idea, would you still think so?
That's the danger.
I spent 12 years of being forced to eat school cafeteria meals with no chance to go off-campus for lunch.
When I started college, I took full advantage of the freedom to eat fast food of my own choosing whenver I could afford it despite the fact that I had a "free" on-campus meal plan.
Just because someone accepts something in grade school doesn't mean that they won't appreciate giving it up after they are out of school.
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Just because someone accepts something in grade school doesn't mean that they won't appreciate giving it up after they are out of school.
Likewise, just because you can break free from your early influence and training, and question it, and ultimately reject it, does not mean that the average person has enough individuality to do so.
That's a very sad and tragic thing to say. I wish it weren't so. But in this way, you are somewhat exceptional.
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I think it's more likely they'll see that as being treated like a child the same way adults view curfews.
That sounds at first glance like a good point so I'll explain why it won't be that way.
Curfews can't so easily be excused by saying "well if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about from all this monitoring and tracking". Curfews can't so easily be used to track down and catch a murderer or rapist or other violent criminal, which really appeals to cowards who surrender their liberty and privacy for a promise of security.
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These are tags in the uniforms of CHILDREN. It is as orwellian as putting RFID in my dogs.
I think the fine point here is, it's as Orwellian as who putting RFID in your dogs?
The police? Animal Control? A neighbor? The Chinese restaurant down the street?
They're your dogs, and legally children (in the U.S., anyway) are considered the property of parents until the age of majority. But these are mandated uniforms. Other parents may not want their children tagged, and their choice doesn't seem to matter quite so much. I would think this would be opt-in so that it would. Either way, the child's
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Should I get to choose whether my child can reply to a roll call or not? If not, how is this different?
For fucks sake, people, it's a damn RFID tag, not a GPS embedded under their skin.
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Should I get to choose whether my child can reply to a roll call or not?
I love that question! If the State is going to make public education mandatory, perhaps there should be a better assurance that the schools haven't become repurposed to merely desensitize them to being oppressed and intimately micromanaged, in preparation for their adult years as citizens. So they will tolerate anything as voters, consumers and employees.
And this seems like a good issue to raise the question. Just as the introduction of backscatter scanners would have been the obvious point at which to r
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In this instance, how is it any different?
Uh, one thing is tracking them everywhere they go, another is just logging the timestamps of when they go through the entrace door. There's a big difference.
The same goes for mandatory drug-tests at work when they get older. Perhaps the employer would also like to get some bloodwork done, to make sure you're not going to keel over from something you're genetically-predisposed to in a few years.
Sorry, but I don't see how is mandatory drug-tests - an obvious and disgusting privacy violation - in any way similar to this.
Our society - I don't know about Brazil's - has been getting increasingly more one-sided in disfavor of the individual. The approach in TFA doesn't seem like another likely maneuver towards that to you?
Well, I'm not part of "your society" either, but no, I don't see how is this a maneuver towards that, and apparently no one here has been able to explain it either.
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I'm pretty sure they don't have the right of skipping classes. I don't see what rights does this violate that a guy manually logging their names to paper wouldn't.
This thread seems filled by Luddites, "uh, it's dangerous because it's a CHIP!!1!".
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luddites, huh?
maybe us 'luddites' can see the creeping anti-freedom that you seem so smugly unaware of.
sure, embrace any new idea and don't question where it will go. sure! what harm could it do?
don't bother to think too long. your favorite tv show is on!!
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Until you can explain exactly how is this "anti-freedom", you're nothing but Luddites.
Slippery slope is a fallacy. Accepting something harmless like this doesn't force you to accept actual rights-violating systems.
Oh, and I don't watch TV.
You say fallacy, I say heuristic (Score:2)
Slippery slope is a fallacy.
A lot of heuristics are considered informal fallacies when applied to the absolutely known premises of the artificial world of pure mathematics. But in the real world, premises are not known to absolute certainty. Human minds don't necessarily follow the rules of pure mathematics; they make decisions based on emotion, and they gain bargaining positions from hiding their true premises. The slippery slope, the proverbial boiling frog, political momentum, the Overton window [wikipedia.org], and the like are ways of modeling t
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How is this any more intrusive other than it is about parents tracking their underage kids?
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It's and RFID tag, it doesn't "track them everywhere they go", it just records the timestamp of when they go through the reader.
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Treat children like subhumans and that's exactly what you'll get. I have no doubt that accepting this type of thing will just instill a belief in them that surveillance is okay.
I believe that's what it is intended to do. For just that reason they're keeping it fairly tame and benign.
Anyone who thinks it will stay that way is a fool. It would be like expecting a business not to look for new markets when it is in their nature to do so.
Good ol' fashioned attendance (Score:2)
Don't get me started on taking attendance in college courses, though...
Re: (Score:2)
My school didn't even go that for technologically. Roll was called, teacher checked the correct box. Slip was filled out and in between classes that teacher would deliver the results to the office to be dealt with.
Dad, these wafers taste like crap... (Score:2)
Why put them in their uniform? The kid gets naked and your tracking goes in a messy pile of laundry next to the bed he's cavorting in. Or they ditch the uniforms are go for a ride while the uniform is still reporting them as school.
Make the kids eat the chips every few days. This way you'll be able to identify their mangled remains after their car goes off the road or after they get kidnapped, murdered, their bodies set on fire after the parents cant pay the ransom....
Shhh (Score:4, Informative)
Don't tell the kids there are 'magic transmitters' in their school uniforms - they'll just take off the RFID tag-laden article of clothing and put it in a friends backpack...
And the teachers will wonder how her computer says every student is in the class when half the seats are empty?
low tech solution (Score:2)
Need to force them to learn science (Score:2)
If not, they'll become fundamentalists or Muslim terrorists. Or racists.
Normally I'm against Orwellian schemes, but this one is for a good cause.
how does this solve anything? (Score:2, Funny)
How long until little Suzie is carrying around 4 shirts/skirts in her bag for $10 each for her friends?
Complement: Little Brother as a reading assignment (Score:2)
At least unlike British politicians the authories of Brazil do not seem to have proposed that kids be implanted with radio IDs (just yet).
Orwellian fears are killing people..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I get a SMS if my car moves 2ft when I'm not in it. My 3 yellow labs all have id chips as well as GPS trackers. My laptop and phone have "find me" features so I don't loose my precious terminal.
However your kids, your husband, wife, parents run around in complete secrecy under the guise of "privacy"
When people aren't looking, people do HORRIBLE THINGS. When teachers aren't looking kids do screwed up things, uncles "touch" and ask to not "tell", priests take advantage, people have strokes on hiking trips, pass out in bars.
I should not only know where my most precious humans are, but I should know they are safe, conscious and alive.
Sex trafficking, kidnapping, dump luck kill, wounds and mentally damages the brother and sisters and wives and husbands of all of us, and we sit around saying " oh it's totally worth it, because "privacy" is so critical.
I grew up in a town with a secret gov facility. We were all under constant surveillance We all knew it.
If sunlight or starlight can touch you, so can anyone who wants to. Anyone who thinks differently is kidding themselves.
It's time we get over that book and start taking care of our loved ones.
It MUST be transparent. It MUST have watchers watching watchers watching watchers. It MUST be optional.
and we MUST stop losing humans like car keys.
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That's a terrible system, then. Here the teacher always marks the absence, regardless of the reasons, and then the parent/legal guardian can justify it later.
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Explain exactly how is this "evil" (and remember this is a simple RFID tag, not a GPS locator).
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Depends on your goal. For those that have a goal of total control of their population, its a good thing. AND they have support of parents, so the children will grow up thinking this is normal.
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I knew this would happen - and more worse to come (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the 1980's when they started tagging dogs and cats, - by inserting a chip into the neck of the animal, - in the name of "identify owners of lost pets", I already wondered aloud when will they start doing the same thing to human beings
This Brazilian example only tag students via chips embedded in their school uniform
Wait till someone come up with similar scheme with what they did to dogs and cats - insert chips into the body of human beings - and I am sure they can come up with whatever grandiose reason to justify what they do
It would be not that dis-similar to the tattooing of Jews by the German Nazis
Those who do not learn from history will find ways to repeat it
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I agree 100%. Being made to go to class is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to being put in an oven.
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I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find someone to double up on uniforms... or you know, find the chip, take it out, stick it in some else's pocket, which is what I would have done in school.
But now I'd probably just start collecting uniforms and microwaving them in the cafeteria... "I paid for the uniform, the uniform is fine, too bad about your chip"
So tired of hearing about Orwell (Score:3)
Do you think that gesticulating wildly in the direction of 1984 makes you look smart? It's a children's book.
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It was also a blatant rip-off of "Darkness at Noon", a thinly-veiled fictionalization of the Moscow Trials. But Koestler was a rapist as well as a genius, so his books haven't really done as well as they should (except the one about rape ... go figure).
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