Slashdot Mirror
Child-Suitable Alternatives To Passwords?
An anonymous reader writes "Two months ago I donated my old PC to my little sister, who is 7 — I had promised she would get her own computer as soon as she can read and write properly. I then proceeded to answer her questions about how it works, as far as she inquired, and tried to let her make some choices when installing Debian (she can already use GNOME). As I explained password protection and encryption to her, I was pleasantly surprised when she insisted on protection measures being as strong as possible, so that no one else can screw with her computer. She knows that my younger brother has to endure strict parental control software that was installed on his machine without his consent. The significant problem is that she cannot permanently memorize abstract passwords, even if they are her own creation. I talked with a teacher who assured me that this is common at her age. My parents would probably be able to guess non-abstract passwords. What mechanism of identifying herself does the Slashdot crowd suggest?"
Just tell the child to memorize a password already. Anyone capable of using a computer ought to be able to remember a password or two, and indulging anything less is just catering to intellectual sloppiness. I'm sorry to be harsh, but when we make things increasingly easy for kids, we end up increasingly incapable adults.
More importantly, they have physical access to her. There is no way to keep secrets from someone who can beat them out of you, except by not letting them know that there is a secret in the first place. Given this, I suggest rigging a system which, if a certain button is not pushed during system boot, the home directories will be quietly replaced by a decoy "harmless" directory. The actual home directory can be kept in a crypted loopback device file, preferably with a name which suggests it was a temporary swap space set up for a particularly memory intensive operation and simply never deleted.
As for why... Well, do you want anyone go snooping through your affairs ? Neither do chilren. Parents, of course, consider their concern for the safety or the purity of the religious or ideological views of their children to trump over said childrens desire for privacy and uncensored influx of information, and children disagree. The article poster apparently sides with the latter, at least in this case.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Are you a parent?
If not, then you don't know what the _____ you are talking about. The idea that you would let your kid have lock out from you in this day and age.... well I can't give it better treatment than South Park did.
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
As a computer repair person, I *INSIST* that parents should ALWAYS know their kids' passwords, even up to 18 year olds.
I hate to break it to you, but your little sister is under 18. Any property that she thinks of as "hers" is really your parents. (For that matter, if you're under 18, anything that is "yours" is really your parents.) I routinely remove passwords from "kids" computers because it is horrible security to let a kid have completely unfettered access to a computer with ZERO oversight. (I'm not saying that the parents MUST "check up", but that they should at least have the possibility.)
Heck, probably the mere fact that it's running Linux will be enough of a barrier to keep your parents out.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
You can't take the sky from me...