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?"

Comments

Re:Pictures

[ultranova]

Why the parents need to be kept out, and why the AC thinks that any password will keep out parents who presumably have physical access to the system.

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.