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Comment by 67726e | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this will inspire a few kids to become a bit more tech savvy in order to bypass restrictions. That is quite literally why I am where I am today. Nine year old me wanted to play RuneScape, so I cracked open the computer user manual and found a backdoor. This started a lifelong trend of exploring systems and eventually lead to software engineering.

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Yes. My 9 year old daughter just figured out a pretty impressive workaround for Kindle FreeTime. If there's a parent account that is logged out you can click to reset password - opens a browser window to a page on Amazon. No browser bar but has Amazon search. Search Amazon for a product related to where you want to go, follow links until you get to what you want. Or just find a google link and get anywhere.

Hardly. Back then we had an atmosphere of freedom and parents didn't understand things properly. We had root access. Now children are put under surveillance and can't leave the walled gardens set up by corporations.

Yeah right, like computers are locked down that tight.

It still takes my 13 year old brother just a few hours to figure out he has to put the Mac in recovery mode to allow the changing of system files (forgot what that security theater was called). Most parents haven't suddenly learned to set BIOS passwords or to protect the admin passwords, and even then, it's not too hard to burn and boot a disk that removes password checks from an unencrypted system.

That's why Google is handling this on the kid's Android device (possibly the main computing device for many) now.

Parents don't need to know about root passwords if even they don't have root access in the first place... (At least that seems to be the strategy on mobile)

There's always some article or post on a forum with instructions on how to circumvent. Kids just need to Google it.

I never had root access, my parents always had locked down accounts and parental software. I'm not saying it might not be more of a slog to get around things on an Android phone, but it's not mission impossible. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a kid who wants to play video games.

Back we didn't have Pornhub.

Same here - I got into Commodore 64 game cracking and thus assembly language around that age so I could copy my friends' games.

Same here. The parental control apps of the 90s were weak.

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