alt Hacker News> but they are trivial to bypass.
That's assuming the parental controls allow the kid to create a virtual machine. And then that the kid knows how to create a virtual machine, which is already at the level of difficulty of getting the high school senior who is already 18 to loan you their ID.
None of this stuff is ever going to be Fort Knox. Locks are for keeping honest people honest.
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If the kid knows how to ask an llm, they can do whatever technical hacks are required
It might be Fort Knox just fine at some point, when computers will require a cryptographically signed government certificate that you're over 18, and you can't use the computer until you provide it.
And then that the kid knows how to create a virtual machine
It's just a bunch of clicks, even under linux.
Just install virtualbox. It literally walks you through a VM creation.
We could argue on the technical feasability all day, as non-kvm qemu does not need any special permission to run a VM (albeit dog slow).
I honestly don't really agree on the difficulty, as if this becomes a commonplace way to bypass such laws, you can expect tiktok to be full of videos about how to do it. People will provide already-installed VMs in a turnkey solution. It's not unlike how generations of kids playing minecraft learnt how to port forward and how to insatll VPNs for non-alleged-privacy reasons: something that was considered out of a kid's reach became a commodity.
> None of this stuff is ever going to be Fort Knox. Locks are for keeping honest people honest.
On that we agree, and it makes me sad. The gap between computer literate and illiterate will only widen a time passes. Non motivated kids will learn less, and motivated ones will get a kickstart by going around the locks.