
Kids are swapping AirPods and using text-to-speech to talk secretly in class - bgrynol
https://www.imore.com/kids-are-swapping-airpods-and-using-text-speech-talk-class-without-being-caught
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casion
I'm confused as to why kids are allowed to have airpods in their ears in class
at all?

It's really not difficult to figure out when a kid is trying to hide it.
(source: I'm a teacher of adolescents)

I can only assume that this is either allowed (implicitly or explicitly) or
this is in schools where teachers are so overloaded that any sort of message
passing would probably go unpunished anyway.

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gowld
Some people have long hair

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Waterluvian
Wouldn't matter. Teens are just terrible at hiding anything in class. You can
even just tell when their focus is elsewhere.

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travmatt
Before we had cellphones, we used to use the windows terminal “net send”
command to send each other messages in classes we had computers.

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chrisMyzel
You can build pretty good "spam viruses" with that commans and a simple shell
script forcing someone to confirm thousands of messages or reboot the computer

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travmatt
It’s a good thing I never realized that, although at the time I was fascinated
with self-modifying code. I did figure out that our home economics budgeting
game stored it’s data as base64 encoded json - it was pretty funny watching my
teacher trying to understand how I suddenly became a millionaire.

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chrisMyzel
haha very nice - but some devs out there still believe today that base64 is
encrypted - think I've seen entire websites around it warning.that it is
not...think teachers should be trained to find people like you and me and
realize how much of worth is behind those early hacking skills

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matznerd
Someone should make an app for this and it could be done way better. Here are
is how I would do it so its better and fits in the use case.

1\. More realistic and even custom sounding text-to-voice API such as amazon
polly or - [https://aws.amazon.com/polly/](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/)
(this one uses polly
[https://www.text2voice.org/](https://www.text2voice.org/)) or google wave net
[https://cloud.google.com/text-to-
speech/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing)

2\. Then, and this is where you can get creative, is to mask the app so its UI
looks like something that is allowed in a classroom i.e. dictionary,
wikipedia, ebook reading, audible, spreadsheets etc. Also, make sure to name
your app something innocuous.

See these examples of Reddit masked as Microsoft Outlook:
[http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/](http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/)
Reddit as word ->
[http://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/](http://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/)
Reddit as code -> [http://codereddit.com/](http://codereddit.com/) Reddit as
unix shell -> [https://redditshell.com/](https://redditshell.com/)

Also, allowing the app to recognize which companion you are voice to texting
(with the earpods still paired with original phone), then the app can use
logic to know when one person is "speaking" and hold off on speaking a message
until your companions message is over, otherwise there is potential for
overlapping cross-talk (also have quick-cancel/pause speaking).

Other obvious features would be to clear spoken texts from the input box and
maybe even keep recently typed/spoken words as in a "recently used" area to
minimize new full-text input being required. And if partner's app is doing the
text-to-voice, it would already have the conversational nouns and details.
Anything to minimize typing input, etc.

If someone builds this lmk :)

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bgrynol
This is so thorough and so rad...thanks for sharing. Had no idea about those
masked reddit feeds...hilarious!

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whenlambo
Why not just use text messages?

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eindiran
A big reason is that parents read kids' text messages. If there is no text
message sent, there is nothing for your parents to find.

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weare138
I think it's also because of the teachers. This way if the teacher accuses
them of texting in class, the student can deny it and there's no evidence of
the message.

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aaron695
A good example of how describing something people don't use in their life
allows them to believe in magic.

The lack of cord changes the way people think and puts them in magic zone.

Without a cord everything you'd normally pick up on, like they have to type on
a phone in class, they have white things in their ears, is lost.

It just works because of the magic of a missing cord.

Advertisers use this all the time.

Works well with VC's

It's a good skill to know to get funding.

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roflchoppa2
When i go to dates with my girlfriend ill usually give her a (clean) earpod so
we can listen to music together. its pretty convenient.

