Parental control apps prove easy to beat by kids and crims Parental control apps may do more harm than good, according to researchers who found 18 bugs in eight Android apps with more than 20 million total downloads that could be exploited to, among many nefarious acts, control other devices on the parents' network. Fabian Densborn and Bernhard Gründling of the SEC Consult …
I'm not really sure it's an intelligence test as being intelligent doesn't imply you know lots of things about everything. There's still this old stereo type in peoples heads that kids are somehow inherently better with technology than their parents. In my experience that hasn't been true for some time, in fact I'm beginning to see more and more kids who don't care about the technology and how it works they just want the results.
> that kids are somehow inherently better with technology than their parents
They are just better at crowdsourcing: They will certainly find a friend who has a friend who has a big brother who has heard about how to bypass the obstacle. All they have to do is ask around, among their dozens of friends.
Whereas parents are stuck with the (usually unique) family hotline person, who might or might not know about those things (usually not, as in the country of the blind any one-eyed man is king).
I think parents have got friends too, so they'll also ask a friend who knows someone who works in IT...
In the case of my kids their friends only ended up bricking the phone so I had to do a complete re-install. The third time I told them I wouldn't do it again and they finally stopped listening to their friends... at leats on this subjects :-)
> I think parents have got friends too, so they'll also ask a friend who knows someone who works in IT...
Depends on age and profession of those parents I guess. For instance I don't have any close friends in IT. Acquaintances yes, but nobody I could bother with hacking some security device for me. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
As for getting stupid advice from your friends, well, that's youth... When you get older you pay good money for that.
This post has been deleted by its author
And yet, we are already at the stage where the parents of school age kids ALSO grew up with computers and technology. Maybe most of them are in the same boat as their kids. They don't really care how it works, just so long is it does, sorta, more or less, does what it's expected to do.
I remember working around my first one of these in about 1994 so that I could see some pixellated nipples and read banned pages about hardcore computer hardware and other scuntorpe-esque demonstrations of how well designed and, after 15 minutes, effective censorship can be.
Good times.
I didn't have much love for the industry then but I'm a parent now and so I'm glad to see the sport is still alive and well, training the youth.
The only point of these contraptions is so you can tell yourself you did everything you could, and if something happens it's not your fault, and definitely not that you failed your duties as a parent. No, no, you clearly were a good parent, you spent all of $20 on your kid's safety!
And besides, you'll have somebody to sue if something really bad happens: Profit!
This post has been deleted by its author
Going by the content of the article...
"Android parental control apps prove easy to beat by kids and crims" (TFTFY!)
Facetiousness aside, I'm curious to know how the equivalient iOS parental control systems stack up by comparison - my kids are hitting the age where they'll be wanting their own phones soon, so I'm on a bit of learning curve again...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
