Comment by somethoughts
6 days ago
From a parent's perspective, that's the great part about bubbling it up to the OS user account level.
Its trivially easy to see if the user (child) has indeed created multiple OS level user accounts with different permission levels if you want to spot check the computer.
You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.
Its very much near impossible to verify that the child is not just going to Facebook etc. and using separate accounts and just logging out religiously.
That said I wish Apple/Microsoft/Google had more aggressively advertised their Parental Control features for Mac/Windows/ChromeOS as a key differentiator to avoid Ubuntu/Open Source distros from having to implement them.
> You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.
On what OS? Microslop Windows? On my computer no one is notified when an account is created. And the account list isn't visible when I log in. I log in to the TTY.
Now, granted, I am not the norm. But my OS falls under these regulations. So what is my OS vendor supposed to do? For that matter, who is the vendor? What if I were using LFS? Who even would be the vendor for LFS? It's not even a distro!
Yes it doesn't show up probably because you were able to pretty easily mindlessly click through the part where you were asked if this is being provisioned as a child's computer.
When you provision a Windows, Mac or Chromebook these days as a child's device using your parental account, it will require a parental account to enable new user accounts and/or re-enable guest user on the device.
Like I said - my preference would have been for Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta and TikTok to have made an industry effort to educate parents about the existence of such tools a priori of any legislation, we could have avoided Linux etc. getting sucked in.
It's pointless. Kids who want an uncensored internet will use a VPN or proxy the same way they've been getting around the restrictions and filers put on the computers and networks at schools. These laws will do nothing to protect children but will instead enable them to be targeted.
I don't think its quite so easy anymore that I can tell, with parental tools today - on a properly provisioned device you can require parental permission for app installs such as VPN, etc.