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VeriCool very creepy

 
 
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18:00 / 21.11.04
I've just had a friend tell me that this week her school installed a new system for registration which required all the kids (and teachers, for some reason) to line up and have both their fingerprints and photos taken so that the whole registration process (the bit where the teacher checks who is in the class) could be "streamlined". She refused to take part (correctly) and is now being treated like a bit of a freak for not just going along with it. Strangely, the only kids who rebelled had parents of Jewish/eastern european extraction (as does she). Funny, that!
Now, it is possible that this is some kind of sociological experiment to see who will go along with such measures or it could be (as I suspect it is) REAAAALLY scary. The system is called VeriCool, and while there seems to be nothing on the net about such a product, there is a VeriFinger from Neurologija which sounds similar. Has anyone else heard about this?
 
 
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18:16 / 21.11.04
Sorry for the DP, but apparently, there is a site: www.vericool.co.uk which is so badly and amateurishly written that you probably won't notice they are owned by multinational arms dealers Anteon. Oh, joy. I though Jarvis were bad.
 
 
Tom Morris
21:12 / 23.11.04
Shit, when I was at school (I'm at university now), they were giving everybody ConnexionsCards. It was a card which gave you loyalty points for going to school (learning is it's own reward?), and rewarded you with, oh, I don't know, cinema tickets or poxy Ibiza mix CD's. I think I managed to weasel my way out of it, but it struck me as a kind of "soften them up for Blunkett's ID card anal probe" exercise.
 
 
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22:21 / 09.09.05
Quick update from the revamped and Firefox-acceptable site (still got a nasty flash into, though):
Calling out names, marking a register, remembering to hand the register back to the administration office after every period. All very, very time consuming. What if a solution was available that reduced the burden of registration?. What if you could accurately run registration in an average class in under two minutes?
Am I wrong in thinking that registration never took more than about a minute, anyway? It was never "very, very time consuming", was it? Ah, find me a weapon and I'll give you an enemy to shoot it with says the warmonger.

and from Anteon's site:
VeriCool was launched at BETT show at Olympia in January 2005 and is already in use by schools in England and Wales.

January 2005? Pants. On. Fire. (see date of original post)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:28 / 09.09.05
Presumably that school was testing the system for them, the company is based in Cambridgeshire.
 
 
macrophage
00:25 / 10.09.05
This seems highly laughable if it weren't for real, the cyberpunks warned us these days would come. It's the sort of thing you could expect they would maybe try at airports for hosts of so called terrorists.

Hmmm, how far will they go to a full on totalitarian police zombie state if not already?

It does not surprise me at all, schools seem like the ideal grounds to bring in shite like this. Treat them like sheep they probablly think. Kids will accept anything from teachers and their peers, any old shite, it stinks of peer pressure.

It's like the the same old shite the school "shrinks" like to put miscreants and potential trouble makers on drugs like Ritalin to fuck them up. It's like Bladerunner only worse because it is your kids they are herding like sheep.

I would tell your friend to stick up for herself, no school can put down the law, and fuck em take the kids out of that school, it's a slave to High Tech Anti Civil Rights Experimentation and that is interfering with your kids rights as Humans under the Human Rights Laws as held down by the UN and the EEC.

Fuck em - who are they called (the company again) and where are their web-site??
 
 
bio k9
02:08 / 10.09.05
You can't be bothered to reread the first two posts of this thread to answer your own question? And you're worried about "sheep"?
 
 
diz
03:21 / 10.09.05
i worry about sheep. can't you hear them now? bleating their sinister bleats.

planning something, i tell you.
 
 
Rage
08:29 / 10.09.05
" Strangely, the only kids who rebelled had parents of Jewish/eastern european extraction."

Why is this strange?
 
 
tea and biscuits
09:06 / 10.09.05
When I was in secondary school I repeatedly led the class in challenging the view that I should hand over my email address, mobile number or consumer preferences to Connexions. There was never any acknowledgement that giving the information was optional or intrusive.

Several schools are now bringing in Connexions ID cards, attempting to tout them as The nationwide student savings card (when the majority of places will only accept the standard NUS cards) and claiming you can "earn" all sorts of wacky prizes by using them (by "earn" they mean waste on prize draws.) Some of the schools are also claiming that they will use the cards to mark registrations.

Fun times ahead.
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
10:16 / 10.09.05

Back in February an elementary school in California tried to do something similar.

Key boneheaded quote from the principal of the school, showing a truly stunning grasp of the civil liberties issues at hand: "You know what it comes down to? I believe junior high students want to be stylish. This is not stylish." Apparently the ACLU is extremely concerned about style... The school gave it up because- surprise!- some members of the public were not entirely happy that their children were being treated like livestock, but the company making the badges is still going. I'm not sure if any other schools have picked this up yet.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
13:33 / 10.09.05
I suspect that, as the Government has made it a criminal offense for parents not to stop their kids truanting, this advantages of this system are not so much for the teacher taking a few minutes to drop off registers every day, but the secretaries making lists of the kids away, for checking to see whether they are genuinely ill.

And as for macrophage's exciting rambling, I wasn't aware that a large part of Bladerunner was involved in sheep farming. Are you sure you didn't fall asleep and then wale up in the middle of One Man and his CyberDog?

Quiet and Relaxed: I would guess the use of 'funny that!' would imply that the 'strangely' was ironic.
 
 
macrophage
16:12 / 10.09.05
I was referring to Bladerunner when they are checking people's IDs by retinal eye scans, I was merely trying to make a sci-fi metaphor, I thought it was fitting.

As for "sheep," the obvious metaphor appears as the herding of people and kids. Which is not on.

Do you want your kids to get treated like animals or statistics just to justify a heinious experimental program, when the Schooling system seems like it is morphing into a by product of a corporate walkover, they are enough corporate placements that happen in schools all together.
 
 
A
02:56 / 11.09.05
Bladerunner was based on "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?". It's all coming together. We are through the looking glass.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
13:38 / 11.09.05
Gosh yes, and sheep also appear in a Monty Python sketch about sheep that are trying to learn to fly. So is this thread about kids learning to grow wings?

It would be nice to have a little more thought in this thread than 'Oooh big business, they must be evil then'.
 
 
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17:19 / 11.09.05
Yeah, sorry. I do have quite a bit to say that's more constructive but have been trying to find ways of phrasing it so that it's not about this specific situation. I haven't had an update for a while on what's going on so don't really want to risk a) getting her into trouble should I say something false and b) risking libel on the board. Since hastily bumping the thread after finding the site in a bookmarks clear-out, I've Googled the company and found this thread is actually directly below their site, so anything that's said here is quite prominent. Would anyone mind if we let this sink and I'll start a new, more general, thread later about why I think it's dodgy? In fact, I'd quite like to propose a lock, if that's OK.
 
  
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