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.
A difference between the adult and minor groups is in the obligation of debt when asking their peers for assistance.
Adults asking for help from the one-eyed man will often "pay" in some way, cash or a bottle of wine, for example. If adults ask a professional friend for help, it's probably a straight up favour, who's going to charge a family member a three figured hourly rate? If that pro has said "I told them I wouldn't do it again"[1] then they're no longer going to be the one asked (which is how the one-eyed man supports his wine dependency!).
Minors will share the information just to circumvent the issue in-hand (eg. parental control apps) "that showed them!". It does not matter to this group if the info is incorrect. Eventually the correct approach will be hit by the social brute forcing of it.
Which brings me to the size of the knowledge pool available to these groups.
The "stereotype" that "kids are somehow inherently[2] better with technology than their parents" is founded, in part, in that the minors have 'no' limitation due to brute forcing a problem with their peers - they could well be in a school of 2000 students, a huge pool of resource. Adults are much more restricted in the size of resource pool, they've often become "set in their way" and are often limited for quid pro quo reasons.
So, I think I'm more with ThatOne on this.
[1] There's only on person I give Doze support to. It's shit, and I've told all of those people that used to ask me for assistance with it that they're making a rod for their own back. I will always assist them in moving away from it to something that doesn't bork itself on a given Tuesday.
[2] Anyone saying it's "inherent" is missing the mark by miles, it's learned knowledge.
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!
insecure environment
Security is proactive by necessity, for banks, homes and dev environments alike. You don't fit a lock to your house and walk away without actually locking-up. (Well, not in St Annes anyhow!)
If a programmer uses third party, unvetted code in any language, be it from PyPI or cut'n'paste from Stack Overflow, then they're as good a programmer as the parents are good parents in ThatOne's comment above ("Pointless").
Do we all write code from the ground up every time? Of course not. Do we ignore the ramifications of introducing third party source into our dev environment? If the answer is 'yes' stay away from my stack!
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 © 1998–2023
