Kids hack their Dad's computer on her Raspberry Pi [video] | Hacker News Reader

Kids hack their Dad's computer on her Raspberry Pi [video]

youtube.com

93 pointslukashed36 comments

Not sure I'd consider randomly shutting down Sublime Text a good prank - Sublime Text seems quite capable of doing that all on its own. Making the computer speak was way better.

Oh, man, this is so wonderful and adorable. Makes me very excited about the world, and puts a smile on my face =)

I wish I had that kind of childhood. It's not just that she used shell, but that they shot a great video, and put it on youtube and all. A kid learned so much in this fun and exciting little project.

Something's just.... very good about that.

This is amazing on so many levels including the presentation.

Which is a clear indicator that it is staged or at least heavily supported by an adult. The fact that it serves as advertisement for the company should do the rest. Cute and funny video but the bitter taste puts me off.

Oh come on. Of course someone helped her a little.

That is not the point.

Look at her confidence. Look at how she REALLY understands what she is doing and looking up the PID, that is not just memorization.

There are probably a million people twice or even three times her age with their own webserver who have to use things like cpanel, etc. because they don't know how to use a command prompt like she does in that demo.

Even if she doesn't go into computers in the future, what she has learned has taught her to look "behind the curtain" to how things work.

Instead of just using an app on a phone like millions of kids, she may write one someday.

I still feel lied to and manipulated.

My wife and I are expecting our first child any day now (a girl). As someone who spends most of their time in a shell, I'm excited to teach her things like this. I don't know if I'd give her my actual SSH password though.

Are you going to put her in a shell instead of a crib?

I wonder how much involvement her dad had in in this video. A lot of it did seem like she genuinely knew what she was doing. In any case, she is a natural communicator!

Dangerous knowledge. Best put these kids on a watch list.

if your kids understand ssh, you better avoid sharing ssh pwd..

If your kids understand ssh, you've probably done something right.

They seem kind of crafty, her and her brother, and I could see them using a little social engineering or shoulder surfing to get the password.

that girl just taught me the "say" command in terminal... i never knew you could do that on a mac.

winning.

For those like me living in linux, there is espeak

I've heard it's Stephen Hawking voice --cant confirm-- but sounds really really similar.

http://man.cx/espeak

EDIT: Thanks lucb1e! I do also use espeak, the other gave me same weird error.

All I can find about the other one is this project: https://github.com/williamh/espeakup

Never heard of espeakup, I use espeak. In fact, apt-getting espeakup I get some error when running it whereas espeak seems to work out of the box:

    $ echo test | espeak # works
    $ echo test | espeakup # Unable to open the softsynth device

Does your espeak version not allow "espeak <words>" ? I don't totally understand the need or use of piping here when not necessary, and when it requires additional keystrokes.

Now try it with -v cello

I couldn't help but notice that Chrome was `stuck` in the `top` page. Happens to me too. Maybe after shutting down Sublime, the girl could also kill the hanging Chrome processes.

Not quite as cute as throwing up Xeyes on someone's machine when they hadn't locked down their X client's remote port, but funny.

Xroach was way more fun.

This should also be used as a cautionary tale of what happens when you allow password based authentication on your ssh service.

I do not understand the their "hack" when she already had her father password... Nice achievement but this is not hacking at all.

I think your second sentence explains it. It's a kid, we should encourage her to do this more, and whether or not it's a "hack" is insignificant.

Cute. Hack is a gross overstatement.

oh my god dude

Prank is actually the word

Still a better hacking story than Scorpion...

At this point the word "hack" has changed completely. With hackathons people use "hack" to mean "build quickly", and for the general population "hack" is just "my friend left their Facebook open so I posted a status". I think fighting against that is a lost cause.

It has changed in the UK especially because of the phone "hacking" scandal. Scandal should have changed meaning too come to think of it.

But that involved unauthorised access by guessing (mostly default) passwords; that's a pretty standard definition of hacking.

It has changed many times, today it is closer to the 1970's definition, in the 80's and 90's the news media picked up "hacking" to described "breaking computer security" which is what most people think when you say "hacking" but that was NOT the original definition.

I hack things all the time when I have the login and password: the planet, the internet, the website. There is literally no limit.

I was expecting them to maybe mount the hard drive on the Pi and add an ssh key (I couldn't hear it very well so I though that up to where they had a password prompt).

It annoys me that "hack" has so many meanings. We had enough to start with[0]; we don't need more.

[0]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack.html

I think this is a good example of a hack. She used the say command as a practical joke. That's pretty good to me.

I don't like when people start trying to pick when this word is appropriate to use. The word is really old and has been used for a lot of different things. And besides, I think it was a pretty good hack.[0]

[0] - https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

She used social engineering to get her father's password and then suborned his machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com