Student Gets Detention For "Using Firefox" (mouthing off)

I'm sure you've heard about it. Google desktop had a link to it. But guess what? According to the school -- it never happened!

That's right, it's a scam. A fake. A hoax. A fraudulent attempt to get back at the school for detention.

While on the website it says they can't discuss the exact reasons for the detention, they can say that the student getting detention over using Firefox a hoax. Now I know what all you conspiracy people would say, that the school's just covering their butts and the teacher really did give the detention over using Firefox. Now I can't say for certain, but another website said they called the principal and he stated that the student was supposed to be doing a resume in word (you know, schoolwork), but he decided to browse the internet instead -- and he'd be warned about this before.

But let's, for argument's sake, say the school district is lying. If the student was using Firefox, and it wasn't installed on the computer by the IT staff, I'd of warned him and given him detention as well. And I use Firefox almost exclusively. I design websites, sometimes you have to use IE to see how the standards break it once the site's developed. Why would I? The same reason they should. Schools are meant to teach students about subjects, and real life experiences. There are few workplaces that say "install whatever you want, we don't care!" Most would be likely to fire, discipline, suspend, or just give a warning if you were to install software without their permission.

I worked at such a place once. I had to request permission to have software installed -- that I myself developed for the company. Think about that for a minute. It was my job to develop the software, to create the instructions for use, to write the installation package, to test the installation (which mean I had to install it on my pc). BUT I had to uninstall it, and then request permission for it to be installed. Now for you non-programmers out there you might not realize this: you can run a program from the source code when you have the developer program on a computer (i.e. you open the source in Visual Studio, and you can run the program from the source - no install needed). What would happen if the program was installed on my computer without permission? I could've been fired. Yep. Stupid isn't it? And while in reality, they'd of just written up the "permission to have on computer" and backdated it or such, there would've been a slight problem from me having the software installed.

So why should a student be allowed to run a program not approved by the school, on the school computers, without getting into trouble? Even if he had been warned about it -- he disregarded the warnings! Don't get me wrong here, I do believe that Firefox is better than IE in more ways than I even directly know. But I also believe that if you're told "do not use this product" no matter how much better it is, you don't use the thing. You do, however, convince the school board administrators, IT departments, teachers, etc that it's better so you can use it. Same for a workplace, you show that it's better.

But let's look at the bigger picture here. Imagine if you, the reader, were to find online some site saying you were cheating on your partner (or were homosexual, robbed a place, whatever) and it wasn't true. Within minutes, thousands of people would find out these false facts and condemn you because of them. They'd make your life hell, just as the probably thousands of phone calls and e-mails sent to the school most likely causing havoc with their network. But then you managed to get the truth out. Who's going to read it? Do you really think people are going to blog about the truth, that's far less interesting than the lie? The damage's has been done, and now your life could be over. All because someone spread a lie online. It's happened before. It'll happen again.

Yeah, they might seem important at first, but try to remember rules of reporters -- get the facts first, then publish the story. Blogs don't get the facts first (generally); they post, then let the accusations fly. There's no retractions because they themselves never look into it in the future. I'd bet right now that hundreds of blogs out there will keep the story about the student getting detention by using Firefox for years to come, completely untouched. Then some person will come across it years from now, and be outraged about how "stupid" people could be back then to allow that to happen, followed up by others posting -- "it never did, you should've looked harder".

Signs of the end? Pretty much, just not on a worldwide level, but a personal one.

edit: Well this is a shock -- some bloggers have actually updated their posts to say it was a host! Well, at least that's somewhat of a good sign.