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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

And also: no Windows. My kid somehow gets Admin access on his Windows laptop. He's 14 years old, from which I conclude that anyone with basic Google search skills can elevate their local privileges to Administrator and do whatever the hell they want, including VPN install, at which point your firewall and parental controls become useless.

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This is kind of a moot point. Unless the parents are security professionals it doesn't really matter what OS they use. A teenage boy will learn how to bruteforce /etc/shadow to bypass a porn filter if they're desperate.

Source: that's basically how I got into cybersecurity

Exactly, my parents put BIOS passwords to stop me from using the computer. Over the years I've cracked 4 through literal dictionary attacks (sitting at the computer with an encyclopedia and trying every word) and ~10 by looking when they were typing it. They've also tried unseating the graphical card so that it had to be reseated every time before starting the computer. That took me a bit longer to figure out

christ. how much free time did you have as a kid?

Single user mode on a Mac will let anyone with physical access to the machine create a new admin account.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201573

No Mac then, as well. I'm pretty sure I could lock down a Linux laptop to not be vulnerable to teenage shenanigans, though.

Watch out for the evil maid attack ;-)

Not if you use a firmware password. Which you can enable from recovery mode (accessible by pressing cmd-r at startup), you can find the option in one of the menu bar items. Remember that you’ll have a very hard time recovering your Mac if you lose your firmare and admin password.

The "also no windows" part is rather pointless. Will every kid manage to get admin privileges? No.

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