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Researchers Are Developing An Algorithm That Makes Smartphones Child-Proof (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Researchers at the University of South Carolina and China's Zhejiang University have created an algorithm that can spot whether your kid is accidentally trying to, say, order from Amazon without your knowing. There are already plenty of activity-monitoring apps that aim to control what kids do on phones, but parents need to add them and turn them on, and they could be disabled by tech-savvy children. The researchers figured that automated age-range detection would make it easier for parents to hand their phones over to curious children without worrying that the kids will stumble upon an inappropriate website or get into a work e-mail account.
The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it. The app had participants unlock an Android phone and then play a numbers-based game on it, so that the researchers could record a variety of taps and swipes. They also tracked things like the amount of pressure applied by a user's finger and the area it encompassed. The researchers used the resulting data to train an age-detecting algorithm that they say is 84 percent accurate with just one swipe on the screen -- a figure that goes up to 97 percent after eight swipes.
The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it. The app had participants unlock an Android phone and then play a numbers-based game on it, so that the researchers could record a variety of taps and swipes. They also tracked things like the amount of pressure applied by a user's finger and the area it encompassed. The researchers used the resulting data to train an age-detecting algorithm that they say is 84 percent accurate with just one swipe on the screen -- a figure that goes up to 97 percent after eight swipes.
So if someone called from even a high-end residence in DC and said, "I wanna big parade like the one I saw on TV!" or "I wanna send my green army men to North Korea!" the phone would know to ignore it?
And if they do that, they get told off.... everything gets reset back to the parent spec, which means possibly completely resetting the device back to factory defaultsa and then reinstalling all applicable parental controls, and if the kid is ever caught doing it again, they lose it.
Entirely.
Permanently.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Might as well accept this simple reality of our Universe. Whatever this "child proof" algorithm is, children will circumvent it in ten minutes and then go on about their business of emptying your credit card and ruining your life.
How about simply ask for a pin or password when trying to buy or order? And parents not tell it to the childeren. Lock the ordering feature for ten or twenty minutes after five failed attempts. no fancy age detection algorithm needed. Strong passwords keep out adults so they should keep out the childeren.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it.
Noting they skipped everyone age 12 - 21.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Except some of the children will be more than clever enough to re-flash the phones with their own preferred ROMs.
The headline of TFA made me chuckle.
"Child proof."
Yeah, right. Hell, I remember *myself* as a kid...I'd have toys and stuff taken apart before we even got the stuff home, as I wanted to see what made it work, and could I make it do something other/cool? My father (a grizzled ww2 combat vet infantry sergeant) used to swear up and down that if the Second Coming arrived, "..that damned boy would have Jesus apart in 5 minutes!"
Kids these days with tech? Forget about *that* noise! Many adults I know have their kids setting the parent's devices up and configuring stuff for them, instead of the reverse! You'll have the adults locked out long before you reach a level (if it even exists) that would prevent kids from getting in.
If the US TLAs were smart, they'd simply employ roomfuls of 6 to 12 year old kids as their elite "cyber-warrior hackers". There would be no system safe from them anywhere.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"Except some of the children will be more than clever enough to re-flash the phones with their own preferred ROMs."
A yes, if some gifted young prodigy can defeat it then its totally worthless even f it works really in practice against the overwhelming majority of toddlers to pre-teens.
"Teaching children expectations and consequences is a basic parental responsibility..."
So is keeping the power tools and razer blades out of reach of toddlers.
Parenting is this whole range of things, where you combine teaching, while controlling the environment, while letting them explore, while monitoring the situation, while letting them get hurt, while protecting them from getting hurt too badly. And yes, those goals can directly conflict with each other. That's the point.