Teenagers Are Easily Bypassing Apple's Parental Controls (msn.com) 100
"Kids are outsmarting an army of engineers from Cupertino, California," reports the Washington Post:
And Apple, which introduced "Screen Time" a year ago in response to pressure to address phone overuse by kids, has been slow to make fixes to its software that would close these loopholes. It's causing some parents to raise questions about Apple's commitment to safeguarding children from harmful content and smartphone addiction.
When Screen Time blocks an app from working, it becomes grayed out, and clicking on it does nothing unless parents approve a request for more time. Or, at least, it's supposed to work that way. On Reddit and YouTube, kids are sharing tips and tricks that allow them to circumvent Screen Time. They download special software that can exploit Apple security flaws, disabling Screen Time or cracking their parents' passwords. They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, such as changing the time to trick the system or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos.
"These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark Web sort of hacks," said Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. "It blows me away that Apple hasn't thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them."
When Screen Time blocks an app from working, it becomes grayed out, and clicking on it does nothing unless parents approve a request for more time. Or, at least, it's supposed to work that way. On Reddit and YouTube, kids are sharing tips and tricks that allow them to circumvent Screen Time. They download special software that can exploit Apple security flaws, disabling Screen Time or cracking their parents' passwords. They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, such as changing the time to trick the system or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos.
"These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark Web sort of hacks," said Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. "It blows me away that Apple hasn't thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them."
this has been done for years (Score:3)
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Unfortunately, no way has been found to expel teenager creimer from Slashdot for bypassing controls in place here.
Thank you for testifying to my street cred. You're jelly.
Re:this has been done for years (Score:5, Insightful)
Some kids have been expelled for it. I expect most of them get away with it unsaved.
In terms of technological parental controls, kids always have the advantage.
1. Kids are normally not bogged down with real life problems, like earning enough money to pay the bills and buy food. This gives them plenty of time to focus on kids big problems, such as their parents being overly restrictive on the phone usage.
2. Kids are not afraid to break things. For the most part if they break something it is a sign of pride, meaning they are now strong enough to effect something. Also kids tend not to have a good handle on value of things, even kids who are good with money, for the most part still see buying things as short term purchases. So after the novelty wears off a device becomes far more disposable and more prone to breaking. So as an adult we will normally play nice with our devices, a kid will not be afraid to root, or jailbreak their phone risking bricking it, or exposing it to viruses, just to get their way.
3. Kids lives revolves around the technology. Just like now a lot of us old guys when we were kid were able to set the clock on the VCR while our parents couldn't figure it out. Kids today are centered around mobile phone and internet devices, so they will cross communicate to get workarounds with their peers, they will spend more time in the deep settings, and general know how things are working.
Kids are not smarter than the adults, or even better at technology. But they have time and resources that adults don't have to focus on working around the adults half tried solution to regain some sort of control. Because we really cannot dedicate 8-16 hours a day making sure our kids limit their phone usage to 4 hours a day.
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Not just Apple, but any software. Kids have been experts are working around their parents for practically forever.
Climbing out windows, watching TV shows in the middle of the night, it is impossible for a parent to truly stop a child from doing something they don't want them to do.
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A large element you left out is that the population of "student" greatly outnumbers the population of one parent.
Bypassing parental controls goes back to the days of home computers and AOL.
Kids are a natural social network. What a kid discovers in California, she shares with another kid in Texas.
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Expectations vs. reality (Score:3, Interesting)
"It blows me away that Apple hasn't thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them."
It blows me away that you think they would.
(or even could...)
Kids *WILL* find a way. (Score:5, Informative)
Kids will find a way.
- At best, they'll *find (their own) way* to circumvent the limitation, perhaps bootstrapping an interest in technology that might eventually evolve into working in a STEM carrier.
- Or, they could *download/fetch from forum/etc* a tool to circumvent the limitation (potentially also leaving their phone wide open to abuse. -- "They download special software that can exploit Apple security flaws": do you genuinely think that absolutely none of these tool will ever attempt to leave some backdoor open to monetize the shit out of the hacked phone)
- Or when push comes to shove, an old battered 2nd- (or 3rd-) -hand phone bought for $20 at some pawn shop will do just as nicely.
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that might eventually evolve into working in a STEM carrier.
Carry your own damn STEMs.
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that might eventually evolve into working in a STEM carrier.
Carry your own damn STEMs.
You are not taking this seriously. STEM is often propagated underground. These are insidious "sleepers" that do not actively engage in nefarious activity until those around them are comfortable.
We are actively trying to find these children through a program called, "STEM cell research."
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wheel geometries (Score:2)
You didn’t drive a motorcycle, scooter, moped, etc., with a lock turned around and affixed to the spokes.
I don't know specifically how houghi did it, but:
- some smaller/light/cheap/low-power vehicle have "fork" with only one tube on one side.
(i.e. a lock could be dangling out on one side, and still never hitting the fork).
nowadays it's more popular on bicycles (less wheight = more athlete performance) and e-bikes (lower battery requirement), but it used to be popular on motor scooters.
- some locks are extremely flat, with the lock part completely flush in-line with the rest of the cable.
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Or, they could *download/fetch from forum/etc* a tool to circumvent the limitation
Putting the kiddie in skript kiddie.
I took a flight once and wound up having to sit next to a teen girl who, when she found out I was in tech, told me how she was running some tool to get free AOL.
Kids have been smart enough to download circumvention tools for ages.
Kids vs adults (Score:2)
They ended up finding
Re:Expectations vs. reality (Score:4, Funny)
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Why not? (Score:2)
No removable drive to store it on?
Somebody constantly looking over your shoulder?
I used to have a floppy with an EXE that played 6 very well selected porn GIFs during my school time, when 14400baud modems and BBSes were still the norm. It was a big hit, as you can imagine.
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This reminds me of high school. They had the computers locked down so you couldn't install anything or access the C: drive through file manager/Computer, so we would simply create a link in Word pointing to the C drive and then copy over an SNES emulator and games. Good times. It was only about 15 years ago but if you tried something like that now and got caught you'd probably be expelled for "hacking".
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Campus kiosks. Locked down, but you could go to "upload" classwork then instead navigate your way to iexplore.exe for a nice open browser. Got told off eventually, I might have been leaving them up as a kindness to less curious minds, I forget.
Responsibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
raise questions about Apple's commitment to safeguarding children from harmful content and smartphone addiction.
That's the parents' job. Apple can help, but that only goes so far. Precisely because most of these are not "rocket science" hacks but relatively simple workarounds that can be hard to guard against.
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raise questions about Apple's commitment to safeguarding children from harmful content and smartphone addiction.
That's the parents' job. Apple can help, but that only goes so far. Precisely because most of these are not "rocket science" hacks but relatively simple workarounds that can be hard to guard against.
Not to mention that this is probably triage-d somewhere down the list. A brand new OS version just dropped, and I would imagine Apple's OS Devs. have their hands a bit full with what most people would consider somewhat more important issues at this time.
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I caused no small amount of drama one time by letting a couple of kids watch me circumvent a very badly designed filter by doing a google search and then checking out the cached content. They shared that trick with everyone, and the first couple of ham-fisted attempts to block that blocked google for everyone.
Aaah, the good old days.
Already expelled (Score:2)
Haven't they already been expelled from momma's womb?
Nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
This is kinda like when OTC medications started using adult proof caps. Of course, now packaging requires a chainsaw no matter how young you are.
Easiest way (Score:2)
They can annoy the heck out of the parents by repeatedly saying it is blocking them from doing schoolwork until they give them the password.
Parental controls = placebo for parents (Score:5, Insightful)
The role of parental controls has never been to restrict what kids could do, it's always been to give a false sense to the parents and allow them to think they've taken "reasonable steps".
In most cases, kids understand technology better than their parents and will find ways around whatever barriers are put in their way.
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Yep, It's a sales tool (and not much more).
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Yep, It's a sales tool (and not much more).
So, how slow do you want to make your iDevice?
Honestly, the only way to completely prevent a determined kid from blowing-past parental controls would be to intersperse Calls to a "Nanny" function.
Making such calls before and after every logic branch and OS Call should do the trick... Too bad that would make the Device totally unsuably slow!
How about: *Don't* do it! At all! (Score:4, Insightful)
You can leave that box with your thinking now.
How about actual parenting?
Aka raising your children well, instead of doing something else, and then trying to force it when it's too late.
How about not subscribing to religious fundamentalist Puritan/Victorian mindsets?
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And this works from a legal perspective to show intent, but kids arent going to understand this. If anything, kids will perceive doing something thats disallowed as being exciting.
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It's like a saying about locks.
“Locks don’t keep robbers from stealing. Locks keep honest men from making mistakes”
Sometimes security works like a chain link fence-easy to hop, but you know you're not supposed to. I use my kid's tablet password to teach him to spell. He's four, maybe I'll eventually use it for other reasons.
Sometimes, breaking security is exciting.
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Parental controls = placebo for kids (Score:3)
I thought a parental control was what a kid turns on when they buy their nursing home-aged parent a device, but they don't want the parent buying stuff on the kid's account accidentally.
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The role of parental controls has never been to restrict what kids could do, it's always been to give a false sense to the parents and allow them to think they've taken "reasonable steps".
In most cases, kids understand technology better than their parents and will find ways around whatever barriers are put in their way.
And there's a multiplier effect.
Kids quickly share their tricks in an environment where the parents are not present.
It's crowdsourcing the problems. Parents don't do that.
Irony (Score:5, Interesting)
The same parents who look back fondly on the shenanigans they got into as kids seem to think that proper parenting can and should be replaced by unavoidable lock-downs, forcing abstinence.
It's a very typically American concept. No other society props this psychological brainfart up to the same degree despite it having backfired so many, many times in the past and is still backfiring currently on every front.
Ironic that it would be the very same people who will rant and rave about socialism being the stepping stone to communism, which has failed many, many times in the past and is still failing currently.
If I could roll my eyes an appropriate amount, I'm sure I'd dislocate something I wouldn't want dislocated.
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Exactly this...
Everyone is going to encounter material at some point, wether it be terrorist propaganda, porn, alcohol or whatever else.
Anything that is forbidden is automatically more interesting for kids, so they are going to actively seek it out.
So when they inevitably encounter such material, would you rather they do so under supervision where the parents can explain what it is they're seeing, or on their own when they will draw their own unguided conclusions.
As an example, I like most people became int
Re:Irony (Score:4, Funny)
I recall a comedy scene in a movie where the TV show says, "This next subject is not appropriate for children, so you might want to get them out of the room", and one kid pricks up his ears. "No seriously. Get the kids out of the room!" And more kids come in. "FOR GOD'S SAKE GET ALL KIDS OUT OF THE ROOM!" And children are flooding in and plunking down.
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Reminds me of a puppet show at a festival. Some of it was mildly sexual. The performer naturally told children to get away, which the did... only to peek through every hole in the fence.
Obviously, everyone in the room was aware of it, and kids had great fun.
Sexual stuff is actually quite boring to young kids, they don't relate to it yet. Prohibition is what makes it interesting.
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That is precisely my sentiment as well.
You cannot control your kids 24/7. Even in today's world, it is not physically possible. They will encounter kids in school that have access to things and you just cannot control every single minute of your child's life.
Because if you manage it, I promise you, your child will not become a healthy, self-sufficient adult.
In Switzerland, we have these small motorbikes called Mofa which is more or less a bicycle with a two stroke engine (MOtorFAhrrad in German). Starting a
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What does communism have to do with lock-downs? (Score:3)
Let alone socialism.
Just in case you really didn't know: There has been no communist state on this planet. Nor a fully socialist one. Only dictators abusing the concepts and calling themselves that.
Communism has no such thing as a central authority. It's kinda in the name. It is merely like a extreme social counterpart to extreme anti-social libertarianism.
And socialism is merely a normal state of that very social type.
It's not like fascist "libertarian" capitalist societies had any shortage of that lock-do
It's the remains of Puritan origins. (Score:3)
This is the Victorian/Puritan mindset, that still leaves scars in our society. Like making nudity a taboo, or denying freedoms or natural instincts due to not being "pure" or "well-mannered", with no rational basis. Thumping a bible may go well with it, but it is not inherently only religious.
I hope, some day, society will recover from it.
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This is the Victorian/Puritan mindset, that still leaves scars in our society. Like making nudity a taboo, or denying freedoms or natural instincts due to not being "pure" or "well-mannered", with no rational basis. Thumping a bible may go well with it, but it is not inherently only religious.
I hope, some day, society will recover from it.
There's a theory floating around sociological circles that frustrated male sexuality resulted in the Industrial Revolution.
I guess we'll find out. China is conducting the biggest ever experiment on that front. If it doesn't explode into World War III because of their slave-trade in women out of neighboring countries, maybe China will crack room temperature superconductors, fusion, and flying cars.
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The same parents who look back fondly on the shenanigans they got into as kids seem to think that proper parenting can and should be replaced by unavoidable lock-downs, forcing abstinence.
Let's be honest here, the internet isn't for children. We have all kinds of censorship on TV and the radio, ostensibly because some kid might hear the "f-word", which you know they're already hearing at home or from friends, yet on the other end of the spectrum you've got parents who don't seem to see anything wrong with giving their kids access to go wherever they want, online. Give a kid full, unfiltered access to the internet and that kid could be looking at... Well, should I really try to list all the
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"I had these things when I was young (or have these things now), and I'll be damned if those Millenials get to enjoy them"
Get off your phone and engage with your kids. (Score:2)
Turn your phone off and set it down, and go spend time with your kids. Spend that time watching TV, or playing a video game, or playing a board game, or kicking around a soccer ball - whatever, I'm not your daddy. Or kick them out of the house and let them find some other kid's house to sit in, at least then they're getting a minimal amount of training in dealing with different situations and the idea that your goal is to eventually kick them out of the nest more-or-less permanently.
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Glad you've solved all the smartphone parenting challenges so easily. It's incredible that literally 90% of the parents out there are so much less intelligent than you are and that literally none of them have done any work engaging with their kids or finding non-smartphone alternative engagements for their kids.
I'll remember to repeat your wise and sage advice when I run into parents whose kids have drug or drinking problems or other behavior issues.
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Glad you've solved all the smartphone parenting challenges so easily. It's incredible that literally 90% of the parents out there are so much less intelligent than you are and that literally none of them have done any work engaging with their kids or finding non-smartphone alternative engagements for their kids.
I'll remember to repeat your wise and sage advice when I run into parents whose kids have drug or drinking problems or other behavior issues.
You know how I came up with this advice? I had kids, and lived my life with them, and started watching what other parents were doing. Things like parents handing their kids an iPad in a restaurant to keep them quiet, so now the entire family can sit and stare at a screen together. Things like travelling across the country for a wilderness adventure and then carrying solar panels so that the parent can recharge their phone. If parents are addicted to their screens, installing an app on their kids' screen
Re: Get off your phone and engage with your kids. (Score:1)
Have you ever tried simply pulling your kids aside, sitting down with them, and then beating them? -- Bender Rodriguez
On a more serious note, how do you change the time on your smartphone? Every phone I've seen sets the system time from the cell tower it's not something you can even set manually.
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On a more serious note, how do you change the time on your smartphone? Every phone I've seen sets the system time from the cell tower it's not something you can even set manually.
Are you fucking serious?
Please delete your slashdot account and use CNET for your tech news from now on.
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On a more serious note, how do you change the time on your smartphone? Every phone I've seen sets the system time from the cell tower it's not something you can even set manually.
Are you fucking serious?
Please delete your slashdot account and use CNET for your tech news from now on.
You don't know how to change the time on your smartphone and you feel your inadequate skill sets is an embarrassment and is a direct assault on your self esteem.
Please delete your slashdot account and use CNET for your tech news from now on.
Didn't even read the article, but ... (Score:2)
isn't "safeguarding children from harmful content and smartphone addiction" something that the PARENTS should be doing instead of passing it off the phone manufacturer?
Kinda reminds me of that lawsuit in NY where some parents organization tried to shift blame for overweight kids to McDonalds...
Well, if you know anything about human psychology (Score:1)
... you know that there is no such thing as independent thought.
Neural nets work only by biasing new input based on the composite of all old input. You are what you've experienced.
And advertisement firms and sales psychology departments know that extremely well. Every ad, every logo, every product placement, every smell close to a a McDonalds is a very deliberate, minutely engineered little "brainwashing".
So McDonalds definitely is not free of blame here.
That would be like throwing rocks at a tiger, and the
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Basically, parents put locks on things expecting the locks to be reasonably tamper-proof, but parents didn't build the lock themselves: the locks were built by Apple, which did an half-assed job and delivered locks far too easy to circumvent.
Bizarre (Score:2)
I never understood why we try to add this kind of functionality, I guess it is a selling point to parents who don't have a clue.
I am heavily locked in the walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, and I enjoy it. I never enabled any blocking or restricting functionality because I believe that it is much more difficult to enforce the rules than it is to sit down with children and talk to them about how to use their phone/tablet/computer. It is much better to learn them about the dangers of use, and potential har
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Blacklists never work for complex systems. (Score:2)
As they require absolute completeness.
And whitelists, while working are even more dystopoan.
Nice going there though, training kids to accept totalitarian restriction of freedom as given and normal.
Hint: We all found our parents' porn stashes, back then. We all came home late and went to places we weren't supposed to.
And if anything, it has made us *better* humans. Or actual individuals, at the very least. Not the passive-thinking fad re-making meme parrots of today.
its what kids do (Score:1)
It's because Apple doesn't want this business (Score:4, Interesting)
The same way they really don't want corporate business.
They want the "Enthusiast" business. Where they sell to a fanboy and said fanboy is on their own.
Actual security?
Hahahaha!
We'll just make nods towards the appearances! That's enough! Right?
Don't want your kid to get addicted to smart phones?
DON'T GIVE THEM A FUCKING SMART PHONE!
Plain and simple.
naive clown (Score:3)
"These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark Web sort of hacks," said Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. "It blows me away that Apple hasn't thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them."
Except that.. they are rocket science, backdoor, dark Web sort of hacks. It's just that you only need one person to identify an exploit, write a program, post a how-to guide online.
How the fuck does he propose that Apple stop children from sharing knowledge of these techniques that the world's best hackers are devising, often for other purposes?
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The good old days (Score:1)
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Also, unlimited and unfiltered access to the internet did not, in any way, ever hurt me, at any age, so please stop justifying censorship and plain old hypocrisy with this bullshit.
For better or for worse, some parents want their kids to have a childhood. The the surest way to motivate people to push for censorship of the internet is by telling them they have no ability to keep their kids from the nasty shit that's on there, so they better just get used to it.
If you value a free internet for adults, you want parents to have the ability to set up filtering - and the filtering needs to work properly.
Apple knows (Score:2)
Apple knows and they don't want to do too much about it.
The kids is where the money is and will be for many years to come.
You don't want them to look at Apple as the lame product that wouldn't allow them to do anything.
When they're older, they might flock to a competing product.
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This is the obvious answer. If Apple was serious about parental controls they would have created a parental control feature that allowed registering a child's phone with a parent's iTunes account and an app/website for remotely managing parental controls.
The reality is that they don't want these controls because it turns kids off to their brand and statistically reduces the volume of purchasing revenue for Apple and its media and app ecosystem.
Big fan (Score:2)
I am a big fan of these kinds of systems.
Until recently I worked in a high school. Circumventing the school network filtering systems taught the kids more about networking than the final year IT course.
It's like hiding vegetables in meatloaf, this is how you build the next generation of IT professionals.
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I am a big fan of these kinds of systems.
Until recently I worked in a high school. Circumventing the school network filtering systems taught the kids more about networking than the final year IT course.
It's like hiding vegetables in meatloaf, this is how you build the next generation of IT professionals.
I think a smart parent would teach their kids how to establish parental controls, how the kids can bypass them, and then supervise the kid to help patch those bypasses.
I'd want my kid to be much more savvy than lazy-brained ones.
This is new? (Score:2)
Maybe the "new" part is that it doesn't happen on the schoolyard anymore and that you don't need to pretend you like that geeky kid who can break parental locks, but kids sharing information on how to circumvent parental restrictions is about as old as there have been kids around with parents setting limits. I bet there are cave paintings somewhere showing other kids how to sneak out of the cave.
It ain't even news that parental locks don't work. Maybe it's news to parents that their kids have way more time
Chain them up in the Basement (Score:2)
If you want controls on your kids that cannot be bypassed, then perhaps you should tie them up and lock them in the basement. Contraception and abortions also work, but it seems it is too late for that.
All of them are just as bad (Score:2)
Parental controls are obviously not a priority for any of the big tech companies. I've got kids at home and they have readily bypassed parental controls for all of them. Apple's parental controls are completely broken. Googles are completely broken. Amazon has the only parental controls that aren't completely broken and their ecosystem is so limited as to only be useful for little kids. The only explanation I can come up with is that the parental controls are an afterthought, a sop to avoid legislation. The
Alternative means (Score:1)
I've tried to set a fixed screen limit, across devices, but the service does not work as well as it should. Apple seems to uninstall the app on occassion, supposedly when the device (iPhone) is full. The browser restriction is pretty poor as well, as it only seems to kick in, if the user opens the browser (chrome) after the timelimit has been exceeded.
I would prefer one service across all devices, that I could use for both kids.
I've
Hey. I did the same day. (Score:2)
SCHOOL WIDE LAN PARTYS!
Priorities (Score:2)
I know, right?
They need to check their priorities and move some of those people they have protecting against people trying to hack bank account information so that I can continue to ignore my child.
Use physical means not virtual locks (Score:2)
such as changing the time to trick the system or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos.
How about instead of locking devices down with limits... start by laying down rules and other things the kids will be required do.
For example... specific chores they have to get done. Additional books you assign the kid to read and give you a report on above and beyond their school work if necessary --- or time that is to be spent in a setting, such as social, etc, where phones are required to be put away and not
impossible (Score:1)
It's very difficult to lock down a general purpose OS designed to be as easy and useful as possible.
The Old "Roll Back The Clock" Workaround Lives! (Score:2)
Good grief, Apple!
This old hack has been around for a Long Time, and used in many ways for as long as I have been using computers.
A simple Google search shows "About 20,700,000 results".
Well, I guess it's back to the drawing board for the engineers, then.
Computers and cell phones seem a bit too advanced for them right now.
Here's hoping the marker fumes don't overwhelm them, and they can actually come up with something.
Pay a teenager to do it. (Score:1)
Maybe pay a teenager to design something. It would probably be more effective.
Otherwise, The engineers may want to consider spending time around kids or have some of their own to understand how they think. When I was younger I was all about circumventing restrictions and monitoring.