[GTALUG] Chromebook death dates

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

Thanks for all the legwork!  Interesting.

| On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 10:25 PM James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
| wrote:

|  In summary, for us, as Linux users,
| Chromebooks don't hard-"brick", as I suggested they might. But it seems
| that, in a school exam situation, Chromebooks without the latest security
| patches cannot access certain required examination sites used in some
| (many? all?) US states. A Chromebook that can't access these sites may as
| well be a brick for the school districts that bought them.

This seems to be self-inflicted, for some definition of self.  Perhaps
the state (requiring the testing).

I bet that these sites would not accept a Linux computer.

They might accept Windows 10 (until it expires).  Would they require
the Windows computer to do some attestation that it wasn't monkeyed
with?  My impression is that attestation is a theoretical capability
that is never used.  So Windows is not more secure than Linux (in
the testing facility's kind of security).

Similarly, they would probably allow a Mac.

My sympathies dissipate.

| The source of the article's claims are from a report by the Public Interest
| Research Group, "Chromebook Churn" (report link:
| https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PIRG-Chromebook-Churn-Full-Report-May-1.pdf
|   , intro blurb:
| https://pirg.org/colorado/foundation/resources/chromebook-churn-report-highlights-problems-of-short-lived-laptops-in-schools/
|   ). PIRG is deeply involved in the Right to Repair movement. The most
| direct citation to a "these Chromebooks won't work"-type statement is
| from “SKSD
| Needs $2.8 Million in 2026 to Replace Chromebooks,” Kitsap Daily News,
| January 25, 2023,
| https://www.kitsapdailynews.com/news/sksd-needs-2-8-million-in-2026-to-replace-chromebooks/
| 
| ... [director of information technology services] Lyons said the state
| schools chief office claims that unsupported Chromebooks will not work for
| tests such as the Smarter Balanced Assessments.

So fix the testing facilities requirements.

| That's not the strongest source one could have, but at least one could
| follow through a paper trail by querying the named parties. The other claim
| that the report makes ("Chromebooks can no longer access services which
| require the device to
| pass a security check") cites a WSJ article --- Nicole Nguyen, “Before You
| Buy a Chromebook, Check the Expiration Date,” Wall Street Journal, March 6,
| 2022, sec. Tech,
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-you-buy-a-chromebook-check-the-expiration-date-11646538322
| --- which doesn't seem to support PIRG's assertion.
| 
| The report also seems to claim that many school boards panicked into buying
| refurbished Chromebooks when lockdown hit. These devices may already have
| been 3-4 years old when they were bought in 2020, so might only have a
| short time left before they AUE.

That sounds like a fail.  An individual consumer making a bad choice
can easily be excused.  A school board ought to do due diligence for a
significant purchase -- that is surely someones job.

| Because they were bought with local tax
| money, this is a big fighty topic in much of the USA. Another point that
| the report makes, in line with PIRG's sustainability/right to repair goal,
| is that many Chromebooks are not designed for repairability, with the basic
| computing hardware staying much the same but spares changing with every
| year of release.

All notebooks these days have diminishing repairability on the
hardware side.  This is the push to thin and light.

Vendors are also reducing things like sockets for RAM.  It saves a few
cents and a few grams and it pushes the customer to overbuy RAM from
the vendor at the vendor's exorbitant price.  (I just bought 64 GiB of
DDR4 from amazon for something like $160; the Mac Mini M2 costs $400
more when you add 16GiB of RAM (you cannot add more)).

ChromeBooks are cheaper because ChromeOS needs fewer resources than
general purpose OSes.

I've bought ChromeBooks, new, for $150 to $200.  A notebook to run
Windows well is at least twice that (Macs: twice again).  Will it have
twice the productive lifetime?

I think schools need non-flashy hardware with long support cycles.
Like business-class computers (ThinkPad etc.).  Those seem to be
expensive for some reason.  Many ChromeBooks seem to have some of those
characteristics.

| The thing about networked computing devices in the K12 environment is that
| you have a huge cohort of (bored) students willing to try security exploits
| for fun and peer kudos. We* might've thought it pretty cool to get a copy
| of Drug Wars on our TI-83 calculators from a friend who got it from their
| older brother, but today's inventive high school student can offer a much
| larger threat with shared documents of attack/gaming scripts spread
| internationally. I wouldn't want to be the tech support on the end of that
| mess.

Yeah.

So about this right to repair.  Whose right to repair?  It is obvious
until you actually think about it.

In a school setting, the student / the teacher / school / school board / state /
testing facility / vendor / OS vendor want control.  They cannot all have it.

For my own machine, I want the right to repair.  And yet I want to use
objects with DRM.  That's pretty hard to make work.  (Attestation is a
part of a theoretical solution.)

There are a lot of intrusive techniques that are used in gaming to
prevent cheating too.  I don't know much about this but it is one
barrier to running games on Linux.

| ---
| *: I am too old for calculators that could play games. The most competitive
| thing we could do was racing to 100 against a friend: enter "1 ++" then hit
| the = key really fast until the display showed 100. The Casio FX-82 was the
| fastest at this, and a couple of friends had to beg their parents for new
| ones when they wrecked their calculators through over-zealous racing.

Computers were not in classrooms until long after my time.  A very few
school boards had a very few computers near the end.  I admired the
Curta Calculators advertised in Scientific American -- the only hand
held digital calculators at that time.  I carried a slide-rule in high
school but almost nobody else did.  I also carried a fat Swiss Army
Knife -- that would get you expelled now.  I didn't duel with either.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta>
This sentence is chilling:

	Herzstark, the son of a Catholic mother and Jewish father, was
	taken into custody in 1943 and eventually sent to Buchenwald
	concentration camp, where he was encouraged to continue his
	earlier research: