I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around… even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.
I’d much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don’t properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don’t want, it’s their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don’t mess up the internet for the rest of us.
If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults.
That’s my point of Internet Archive software and emulation section : no need to be smart, open a Web page that provides a VM and voila. You don’t have to do anything hard, only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.
Also if it’s properly all in the browser (no backend setup, no tailscale, which I’m not sure it can be done due to networking, but maybe) then any static host can have it, heck even download a .html and open it would do. In such a situation I can’t imagine it can be blocked/limited at all.
Yes I also would much prefer everything to be done locally and have no 3rd party that ultimately I won’t trust (one just has to look at leaks from large companies to understand why) still “it’s their responsibility” when I tried to demonstrate it’s fundamentally impossible when emulation exists is a fundamental problem.
only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.
That’s already smarter than most of my relatives.
I’d argue that controlling / monitoring where a kid goes should already be responsibility of the parent.
If it’s all in the browser then the unprivileged user is at the mercy of whatever rules the installed browser establishes for allowing them access to. So it’s a battle between the parent (helped by the OS) being smarter at setting up local restrictions / monitoring history and the kid being smart enough to break them / act undetected.
I think the idea here would be that the OS would be able to tell the browser (or any app) that the user is only allowed content of a particular target age group, and then the browser (or whichever app) would apply any appropriate restrictions (which could include restricting virtualization primitives like WebVM, other js APIs or even network-level filtering if that’s what it takes).
You can also advocate for making use of the “guest wifi AP” many routers already provide to ensure the access to the internet for their kids is done in an allowlist basis. To the point that the kid would have to be “smart enough” to break through the WPA encryption of the main wifi access point (or find out some other social engineering way to get access to that wifi) in order to have fully free access to the internet and visit websites that allow them to circumvent age restrictions.
I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around… even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.
I’d much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don’t properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don’t want, it’s their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don’t mess up the internet for the rest of us.
That’s my point of Internet Archive software and emulation section : no need to be smart, open a Web page that provides a VM and voila. You don’t have to do anything hard, only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.
Also if it’s properly all in the browser (no backend setup, no tailscale, which I’m not sure it can be done due to networking, but maybe) then any static host can have it, heck even download a .html and open it would do. In such a situation I can’t imagine it can be blocked/limited at all.
Yes I also would much prefer everything to be done locally and have no 3rd party that ultimately I won’t trust (one just has to look at leaks from large companies to understand why) still “it’s their responsibility” when I tried to demonstrate it’s fundamentally impossible when emulation exists is a fundamental problem.
PS: FWIW https://ktock.github.io/qemu-demo/
That’s already smarter than most of my relatives.
I’d argue that controlling / monitoring where a kid goes should already be responsibility of the parent.
If it’s all in the browser then the unprivileged user is at the mercy of whatever rules the installed browser establishes for allowing them access to. So it’s a battle between the parent (helped by the OS) being smarter at setting up local restrictions / monitoring history and the kid being smart enough to break them / act undetected.
I think the idea here would be that the OS would be able to tell the browser (or any app) that the user is only allowed content of a particular target age group, and then the browser (or whichever app) would apply any appropriate restrictions (which could include restricting virtualization primitives like WebVM, other js APIs or even network-level filtering if that’s what it takes).
You can also advocate for making use of the “guest wifi AP” many routers already provide to ensure the access to the internet for their kids is done in an allowlist basis. To the point that the kid would have to be “smart enough” to break through the WPA encryption of the main wifi access point (or find out some other social engineering way to get access to that wifi) in order to have fully free access to the internet and visit websites that allow them to circumvent age restrictions.