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Comment by blueskin_ | Hacker News Reader

Products like this are great, as they teach children how to get around stupid arbitrary restrictions from a young age, so are less likely to end up as drooling passive consumers poking at a tablet and more likely to become hackers.

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My mom installed a program on our computer when I was younger that only let you use it for a limited amount of time (my limit was usually 30 minutes a day).

We broke through that thing so many times that the company gave us a refund and hired me as a "security contractor" to find ways around it. I found a few that they never figured out how to beat - for example opening a document in Word, typing some stuff, and telling the computer to shut down. Windows would shut down all of the other programs (including the computer time monitoring one) before it shut down Word. Word would come up with it's "save/don't save/cancel" prompt and you could just click "cancel." That was arguably my first foray into "hacking."

can't help but smile at that story.

It's because companies that sell products like this sell what makes a good sales pitch; they don't understand that things need to actually work as advertised.

Well, they teach children to google for the answer - which is basically a top life skill at this point. Very few would need to understand the steps, the possible consequences etc so I'm not sure it'll lead to deeper interest or understanding

Exactly! I learned what a BIOS is and does the first time in my life the moment my parents put a BIOS password on the PC. My first rough workaround was to open the case, remove the CMOS battery and reset a pin. Then I found an easier workaround using the DOS debug tool to trigger a BIOS reset with the IO ports 70 and 71 :)

I used to write my BIOS password on a piece of paper and stick it inside the case. It was only there to prevent casual snooping.

danah boyd has a (free) book on the responses of teens to network parenting, http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/

Edit: corrected name capitalization

Huh, I have never seen this, thanks!

(OT nitpick: her name is actually 'danah boyd' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_Boyd#Early_life)

Thanks for pointing that out, fixed.

OT nitpick: It's not actually her name, it's the name she prefers for political and aesthetical reasons, and the most civil and polite thing to do is to accommodate that preference. But her actual name is Danah Boyd, just like Snoop Doggs actual name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.

from http://www.danah.org/name.html:

     in the summer of 2000, i finally had legal paperwork acknowledging my name as i saw fit: danah michele boyd

Sounds interesting. From the looks of it, it should probably be required to read for anyone in government or becoming a parent. The government here loves pandering to helicopter parents, unfortunately, and wasting huge amounts of taxpayer money on schemes with poor uptake and even worse effectiveness instead of spending less money on education that would actually prove effective with a sensible outcome.

Edit: Free on her site, taking a look now.

>more likely to become hackers //

Isn't it only the ones who are already likely to become hackers that will circumvent the devices in relatively complex ways? Curtailment of liberties is entirely normal for us as it's a simple aspect of our environment.

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