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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?"
I guess picking the right pictures in a list in the proper order would be a good idea....I think I saw something like that posted on slashdot in the last year.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
I would say the majority of non-computer users have trouble remembering really strong passwords (ones that make use of a mixture of letters and numbers and punctuation marks). I find the solution is to rely on muscle memory.
Pick a column on the keyboard and press every key along that line. For example 4rfv. Now hold down the shift key and repeat it. $RFV. So the password is 4rfv$RFV which is relatively strong for most uses but is a snap and simple to remember.
The only caveat is that it's not a password that you can type while someone is watching but then...really nobody should be watching when you type any password. Although, pressing the shift key can be pretty subtle.
Other patterns like squares or crosses work as well.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Of course, I ran into the main problem with this the day my keyboard broke; I went and got a cheap replacement, plugged it in, and couldn't "play" my password properly.
Launchy.net changed my world.
And after they're 18, you don't get regular phone calls or visits, nor talks about their lives. You'll have denied them privacy for as long as it was legally possible for you to force that upon them, and the pendulum will swing back in full force, reacting to your actions with equal force in the opposite direction.
Maybe...until they have their own kids. But mostly that's crap. Children expect boundries...and they will keep pushing you until you establish some. Because, when there's no barriers, there's also nothing protecting you either. They may grouse at the time, but they will respect reasonable restrictions.
Boundries are the foundation that allows the now 16 year-old daughter to tell her boyfriend, "We can go in my room, but mom/dad will freak if I close the door."
I've got to wonder what this precocious 7 year-old wants to look at or do that she thinks is going to be foiled by her parents!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Bull shit. Children don't posses the ability to accurately reason. This is one reason why the age of consent is 18 in most places. Sure, some children mature faster then others and some think they have but it doesn't apply universally to them.
If you ask people 20 years after their teens, they will most likely say they didn't know as much as they thought they knew at that time. Most kids find a point in their teens when they think they know it all. Later they realize that if they knew what they know now, back then, they would have done quite a few things different.
It sounds like you can't make a definitive statement on your parents snooping either. IF you as you claim, didn't do anything wrong, how would you know that Dad was looking at your browsing history or cookies? He wouldn't tell you because you did nothing he objected to. He could have been reading your email and all and you just turned out to be a good kid regardless. Again, you wouldn't know unless you did something wrong that he felt like dealing with. And even then, he might have dealt with it in an unrelated way so you wouldn't put two and two together. After all, why expose the ways he found out about what you were doing that was "bad" and lose that ability in the future?
The primary role of a parent is to make you into the best person you can be and give you the opportunity to do this within their means. This might be subject to interpretation but it would require them to know something about you. Just because you couldn't catch them checking up on you doesn't mean they didn't from time to time.