8 year girl found a way to avoid online lesson by exploiting Zoom password block
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One day, my wife and I got to have a nice chat with the principal because he'd allegedly managed to hack all of the chromebooks and install games, and in doing so, broke all of the internet connections.
On the way home, I asked my son what he'd done. As it turns out, he discovered how to use the physical switch on the devices to disable WiFi, which causes Chrome to show the dinosaur game. He naturally shared that exciting discovery with his classmates. All it would have taken to fix things would be to just flip the switch back to enable Wi-Fi.
This was pre-COVID, but a great reminder of how creative, resourceful, and willing-to-experiment-by-pushing-all-the-buttons our kids are.
This is a great way of putting it and something I haven't thought of before. Mostly, I have been guarding my 2yo from pushing-all-the-buttons because I'm scared of her breaking something expensive (air purifier) or hurting herself (elevator). But I want to foster this sense of creative exploration.
She has taken a lot of interest in my Macbook (lots of keys to press, and she sees me using it) but zero interest in the cheapo tablet I bought her.
Any advice?
Give them video games. Problem solving, and creative button mashing as a must if you want to be good at a game. Then slowly extend to things like old laptops (get them to help you switch out the hard drive), etc.
I can tell you that getting an RGB keyboard is not a great idea. I learned that from experience.
In my own experience (of exactly 1 child), teaching him to understand what's ok and what's not ok to play with is important. We felt, from a distance, a hot stovetop well after the burner was off, touched the edge of a knife to see how sharp it was, etc. We lived in a city, so we got to see, in person, cars running lights and getting into an accident (look both ways, even with a walk signal!).
I also let him participate in the button pushing with guidance. Kids want to do what you're doing, so making that as real as possible is a good thing. In my case, I had an only laptop kicking around. It could do some web games and looked and felt similar to what Daddy was using.
- created a Gmail account w/o having to enter birthday;
- somehow goes around Windows Family Safety;
- when I pause his computers with Google Home, he just uses the data on his phone and re-enables it;
- when I restricted his sites via NextDNS.io, he started to use some VPN;
- he used sites that download YouTube videos (remotely) to go around the YouTube restrictions on the school network;
- he used OBS virtualcam with a recording on Zoom to pretend he's online when he was sleeping in this bed;
- he created an HTML page to mimic Windows Secure Desktop to steal my admin password (I didn't fall for it, of course);
and many others I can't quickly recall.
Restrictions create hackers.
That is why I never bothered with internet filters or domain blocking @ home except for pi-hole to get rid of the worst ad's.
> when you log in with an incorrect password, Zoom will lock your account for a set amount of time. The more times you do this, the longer the wait period for you to get back into Zoom. She also noticed that the error that is presented to a user when they are locked is “Incorrect password” and not “your account has been locked”