In light of the current brouhaha in Maine over Governor King's plan to chuck $25 million at Apple in exchange for a couple of dozen dozen dozen dozen iBooks for that state's junior high school students, it's probably worth checking back in with good ol' Henrico County in Virginia, who attempted a similar educational initiative in its own high schools starting last year. You probably recall that the Henrico project hasn't been without its snags, both technical in nature ("chronic network problems and hardware flaws") and on the not-quite-so-technical side (students downloading so much porn the iBooks self-destruct in shame).

We strongly suspect that there's very little that can really be done about the porn thing; if history has shown us anything, it's that if you give a teenager any technology more advanced than a rubber band and one of those little plastic things that holds the bread bag closed, said teenager, regardless of IQ or innate technical ability, will suddenly turn into MacGyver and find some way to use that technology to look at pictures of naked people. But according to an article in Education Week, Henrico's had other problems-- people instant-messaging in class, bandwidth overload from students illegally trading digital songs and movies, and, of course, the perennial favorite: some kid hacking into his teachers' iBooks to change his grades (or maybe to find the really good porn).

As a result, starting tomorrow, all of the students in Henrico County will have to turn in their iBooks for "maintenance." Said maintenance includes doubling the RAM, running diagnostic checks, and performing a handful of... well, let's call them "performance-improving tasks." The Henrico techs will be disabling file-sharing, deleting IM applications, and preventing unauthorized software from being installed by locking the iBooks into "school," "home," and "testing" logins designed to prevent the machines from being used for, well, fun. So it's bye-bye to games, MP3-trading, and pretty much every other unsanctioned use of the iBooks-- other than the porn, of course, which will still find some way to survive.

Actually, it'll be interesting to hear how long it takes the students to circumvent these measures designed to "cut out the extraneous activity unrelated to the instructional program," as Henrico's director of technology puts it in a Wired article. Anyone care to start the pool? We'll take February 23rd-- we'd pick something earlier, but we hear tell that those gol-durned young 'uns are lazy these days, in addition to having no respect for their elders.