In 10 years, we'll read HN comments of how someone started to code after outsmarting Screen Time on their device. These are the type of experiences that give you that thrill of what else could be possible by understanding how technology works.
Totally agree. Additionally, I think that breaking some rule is an essential part of growing up and learning. So it's just much better if the rules that a kid aims to break are of this kind and make her/him learn in the process.
When I was young my parents installed a system-wide child filter for OS X called Safe Eyes that had tons of false positives (and more importantly, blocked online games). I didn't know much about computers but it drove me to learn how to install and configure Linux so that I could do what I wanted. Kids find a way.
My parents tried a similar thing on my system i had built in high school. I immediately reinstalled the os and secured root on all the networking hardware. We remained poised for mutually assured destruction until they dropped it.
Was this for content or time? As my kids approach HS age, I can't imagine trying to regulate what media they consume (though the quantity could indeed be a concern).
My dad installed a menu launcher with password-locked parental controls for MS DOS. Within a week, I discovered that the configuration file (which I could open with word perfect), while mostly binary contained the passwords in plain text.
As an example of how not-sneaky I was as a kid, I immediately ran to my dad and showed him how I got the password.
It's not Apple's job to parent your kids, and "smart phone addiction" is an over-hyped fad scare. If someone is super concerned about their teen watching minecraft videos at 2am on vacation, they should take their kid's phone away at night. But also, they're on vacation, and it's not like they're watching porn, so is it even that bad?
This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison, but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
The minute we can find a book that replicates a Skinner box, you may be onto something. I agree that yes, just being on your phone isn't a terrible thing, but it's not really comparable to books just because of its ability to provide more effective, immediate, and addictive feedback.
Smart phone addiction is absolutely real. My neck is sore everyday that I don't consciously make an effort to use my phone less. I hit my 1 hour limit on my reddit app by 9 or 10 every morning.
I do agree that it is absolutely not Apple's responsibility to do anything about this. People want to outsource their responsibility as parents and it's pathetic.
But Apple has taken some responsibility for this by knocking out third party MDM apps that served this purpose (like OurPact) and then replacing it with a half-finished piece of work that suffers from multiple usability problems.
As a parent, I'm taking responsibility for my kids' time and development by making sure the Skinner box is turned off until homework and chores are completed. I don't feel that's outsourcing my work as a parent - it's just one more tool in my toolbox among many.
You may disagree and you're raising your own kids differently, and that's just fine.
Parents can’t hover over their kids 24/7. Moreover, I’d question whether having your time micromanaged in such a way by a parent wouldn’t cause resentment and arguments.
A technological solution seems perfectly reasonable in that context - and Apple has blocked some third party apps from the store so putting more of an onus on them to fill in the missing capabilities seems reasonable.
The parents who don’t want to parent are probably perfectly happy handing youtube to their kids and not monitoring or managing the usage at all.
You glossed over the most legit complaint raised in the article:
> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, like 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,” says 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.”
And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.
The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its products less addictive.
> you have no actual evidence about why Apple implemented this feature
You mean, other than what is clearly explained in the article?
“In early 2018, a pair of major shareholders urged Apple’s board of directors to do something about youth screen addiction... Nine months later, Apple launched Screen Time”
> and also zero insight into what incentivizes Apple
Would you care to provide any counter evidence or insights of your own, or do you generally prefer defending your position via ad hominen attacks?
I can't weigh in on Apple's internal process, but that explanation you quoted from the article is far from convincing to me. In fact, having been in the industry for a very long time, it makes the whole article smell pretty naive.
It's _extremely_ unlikely that Screen Time went from nothing to launch in nine months. It's a deceptively complex feature that requires support throughout the OS as well its own foreground and background components. Between product design, prioritizing, development, and testing, they'd probably been exploring the idea for several _years_ before that shareholder pressure appeared.
Did they maybe rush the work out early because of the growing pressure? I'd buy that. To me, being pressured to rush it out would even explain some of the rough edges discussed in the article without having to assume Apple was reluctant.
I can't know if I'm right, but neither can you or the article's authors. It turns out that there are quite a few ways to make sense of all the facts that are out there, and any final conclusions we draw probably just emerge from our own biases.
Let's just take a moment to consider the total fucking bullshit going on for a second.
One: It's called fucking "Screen Time" and that right there speaks volumes about how weak the entire premise really is. It's not about security. It's not about placing serious locks on the device. It's doesn't even stop financial transactions from taking place inside apps. It does no such thing. It just rings a little bell, and tut tut, hides the obvious icons.
Two: While I really would like some serious fucking security to lock the fucking device down, we know what the score was, when they stripped out the old "Restrictions" functionality, and buried it all deep inside the byzantine "Screen Time" interface. It was about retarded fucking soccer moms watching Katie Couric and Matt Lauer every fucking morning on the Today show, listening to Dr. Phil ramble on, while Oprah prattles about fucking dopamine hits. It's all a load of fucking shit, provoked by whining from the stupidest fucks on earth.
Three: Amid the crisis mode that slow news days unleashed, about whether or not Facebook is actually cigarettes, kids run fucking circles around parents that are essentially powerless to control rampaging teenagers. It's fucking over, before Apple even weighs in. Parents are fucking stupid, and have been for a long, long time. At least since December 31, 1959.
Four: Little, little kids. Like five, six, seven, eight. Listen. The internet is a dark, dark, fucking place. When your kids learn about bad words, and racism, and double standards like how you can't say "nigger" unless you're black, it's game over. But up until that point, just fucking keep them away from technology. It's nothing but downers, so shelter them until it's a lost cause. By the time they hit fifth grade, they'll be watching Sasha Grey take fifty dicks from a room full of scumbags on steroids, begging for more, while gagging on cum, and then accepting industry awards in gala ceremonies for it, while completely fucking high out of her mind. But, until then, just don't let them look at any of it.
The misses I’m referring to are fundamental product management blind spots. One doesn’t see this kind of thing when those designing the product have any familiarity with the use cases involved.
It’s as if they designed a food delivery app and forgot to let the user enter the delivery address.
The kind of changes that Screen Time requires spans the entire platform, which means that it can only be developed incrementally. It’s inevitably going to take years before all the “obvious” loopholes are closed, but it’s not because of some design flaw on Apple’s part.
Not true. The misses are due to the perverse incentives and myopia created by both companies’ monetization strategies. For instance, a child must have an iCloud or gmail account to use the parental control features of each platform, and iOS users can’t whitelist content for YouTube kids except by taking the kid’s device.
YouTube kids is a load of algorithmic content farm generated garbage. There is no trust based system for ranking content by quality (pagerank anyone?). Apple parental control is category specific, limits cannot be set for individual apps, nor can ad hoc categories be created.
Netflix has the same perverse incentives that default to the most addictive, garbage content and no whitelist option. Totally irresponsible and greed driven.
All three companies are dragging their feet, it is hard to tell if it’s due to greed, negligence or both.
Sadly, Amazon is the market leader in 2019 for kid friendly content and parental control options.
> No way it's that easy. These hacks span multiple apps, factory resets, etc.
You seem to have missed the first line of my comment about these not being hacks but straight up obvious bugs "like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos".
I’m not even sure these are bugs. For example, if you restrict movie viewing, but allow mail or iMessages, and a (mail) message contains a video, should the phone show it, or not?
There’s a fairly complex interaction between Screen Time (settings controlling how often various features can be used), Down Time (settings controlling when various features can be used), Restrictions (settings controlling which settings the user of the device can change), various convenience features that pierce holes in that (ability to make photographs/send messages from the home screen, for example), and various cross-app capabilities (it wouldn’t surprise me if iBooks could be made to play videos inside e-books, for example) that, IMO, make it non-trivial to implement this in a way that makes it work perfectly as Parental Controls without leading to “but why doesn’t this work? I told the phone that application X was permitted” surprises.
If I enabled Screen Time for myself, the best answer might be ‘yes’. If I enabled it for my kid, it might be ‘no’.
I mean, yeah, like anything there are a million weird edge cases that would take time to code around if you needed 100% coverage. But changing system time and trying to view a video in the core messaging app on the phone, which is marketed as being able to handle video, does not seem to qualify is next level hacking. These are obvious use cases.
I would argue that Apple is deliberately not fixing these holes because they prefer having people hooked on their devices. I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, merely that higher engagement is obviously good for business.
Apple seems to have found the balance it wants with its current solution - paying lip service to the vocal shareholders, while allowing its customers to easily work around the restrictions.
All those problems are solved by taking the phone away. We got a cordless phone when I was a kid (yeah I'm old), and it didn't take long before every night my mom or dad came around and made sure the phone was on the base.
I also played a lot of video games, and if I played more than a couple of hours in a row my dad would come and just unplug the Nintendo. Drove me nuts (saved games on those old cartridges were very finicky), but it made me go outside.
See, I agree with this mentality. I would actually respect Apple a lot if they had just come out and told parents to "just take the phone away" rather than launching a half implemented feature and then forgetting about it.
Unfortunately there's no way that would ever happen. Even if Apple PR would ever allow such a statement to be made, which it wouldn't, requiring parents to do some actual parenting might provoke major unrest.
>but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
Did it mess with your cognitive abilities? Your self-esteem? Your self-image? Your limbic system, in general? No? Your dopamine receptors, then? Did it fill every minute of your waking life with escapism? Would anyone read while driving? Or during class, meals, family gatherings, dates, meetings, at the movies? You get the point.
I think the unhealthy potential of smartphones differs tremendously from that of books, just because of their inherent physical qualities and limitations.
It’s not Apple’s job to parent my kids, but it is Apple’s job to provide access control features (screen time) to admins (parents) that work and can’t be circumvented.
Imagine how silly I would sound if I said “It’s not Apple’s job to sysadmin your users” in response to priceless not working properly on user accounts.
So while parenting support, or whatever, isn’t that important to me, functioning audit and access controls really is.
Brings back memories of getting around various iterations of useless parental control software on the family computer back in the day. And even before that, picking the lock on the TV cabinet to get to the Nintendo.
”Think of this as a nap for your screen time. When you schedule downtime in Settings, only phone calls and apps that you choose to allow are available. Downtime applies to all of your Screen Time-enabled devices, and you get a reminder five minutes before it starts.”
I don’t think you can restrict what numbers can be called.
Sometimes I feel like the process of growing up, and in particular of becoming a parent, is a process of learning my parents were mostly right all along.
Back in 2006 I cofounded a company called IMSafer. My co-founders went on to be S09 class with Y!Combinator.
We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them.
It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks. All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers).
Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing solves.
The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access, but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were trying to run applications.
"What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them."
this this this.
limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the limit set by the parent.
An essential truth of parenting is that much of the dynamic between parent and child actually involves the child incentivizing the parent, or at least trying to.
There's a great scene from the show Modern Family where one of the parents threatens to ground the kid by taking away their iPad. The child's response was perfect: "that's going to affect you way more than it affects me."
This is ultimately a futile effort. The only value in implementing content blockers or usage restrictions would be to encourage computer proficiency in circumventing and defeating them. You can't outwit a bored thirteen year-old over any appreciable time scale.
What’s peculiar about this is that parental restrictions itself on iOS has always been flawed, Apple knew about it, and it’s still an issue to this day. The sole purpose of parental restrictions on iPhone was to block adult websites... and that worked as well as you can imagine: https://www.jonbottarini.com/2017/03/09/bypassing-apples-ios...
Never underestimate the genius-level ability of children to get around restrictions imposed by parents, teachers, or anyone else.
Come to think of it, I have even played a video game about it, called "Mom hid my game!"
I salute their ingenuity as a triumph of the human spirit in its unstoppable quest for freedom, justice, and Minecraft for all. Though I suppose drug addicts are similarly clever...
It's just the hacker spirit. All kids have it, many people who muck about with computers a lot have it. Many people with little respect for "the system" have it too; that includes drug addicts, but also rednecks (redneck engineering) and so on.
School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override password on a student's device.
So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he has it too. Kids are sneaky!
62 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadAs an example of how not-sneaky I was as a kid, I immediately ran to my dad and showed him how I got the password.
http://archive.is/RlUdP
rules are meant to be broken
- every kid with enough determination in the history of mankind
This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison, but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
I do agree that it is absolutely not Apple's responsibility to do anything about this. People want to outsource their responsibility as parents and it's pathetic.
As a parent, I'm taking responsibility for my kids' time and development by making sure the Skinner box is turned off until homework and chores are completed. I don't feel that's outsourcing my work as a parent - it's just one more tool in my toolbox among many.
You may disagree and you're raising your own kids differently, and that's just fine.
A technological solution seems perfectly reasonable in that context - and Apple has blocked some third party apps from the store so putting more of an onus on them to fill in the missing capabilities seems reasonable.
The parents who don’t want to parent are probably perfectly happy handing youtube to their kids and not monitoring or managing the usage at all.
> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, like 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,” says 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.”
And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.
The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its products less addictive.
You mean, other than what is clearly explained in the article?
“In early 2018, a pair of major shareholders urged Apple’s board of directors to do something about youth screen addiction... Nine months later, Apple launched Screen Time”
> and also zero insight into what incentivizes Apple
Would you care to provide any counter evidence or insights of your own, or do you generally prefer defending your position via ad hominen attacks?
It's _extremely_ unlikely that Screen Time went from nothing to launch in nine months. It's a deceptively complex feature that requires support throughout the OS as well its own foreground and background components. Between product design, prioritizing, development, and testing, they'd probably been exploring the idea for several _years_ before that shareholder pressure appeared.
Did they maybe rush the work out early because of the growing pressure? I'd buy that. To me, being pressured to rush it out would even explain some of the rough edges discussed in the article without having to assume Apple was reluctant.
I can't know if I'm right, but neither can you or the article's authors. It turns out that there are quite a few ways to make sense of all the facts that are out there, and any final conclusions we draw probably just emerge from our own biases.
Let's just take a moment to consider the total fucking bullshit going on for a second.
One: It's called fucking "Screen Time" and that right there speaks volumes about how weak the entire premise really is. It's not about security. It's not about placing serious locks on the device. It's doesn't even stop financial transactions from taking place inside apps. It does no such thing. It just rings a little bell, and tut tut, hides the obvious icons.
Two: While I really would like some serious fucking security to lock the fucking device down, we know what the score was, when they stripped out the old "Restrictions" functionality, and buried it all deep inside the byzantine "Screen Time" interface. It was about retarded fucking soccer moms watching Katie Couric and Matt Lauer every fucking morning on the Today show, listening to Dr. Phil ramble on, while Oprah prattles about fucking dopamine hits. It's all a load of fucking shit, provoked by whining from the stupidest fucks on earth.
Three: Amid the crisis mode that slow news days unleashed, about whether or not Facebook is actually cigarettes, kids run fucking circles around parents that are essentially powerless to control rampaging teenagers. It's fucking over, before Apple even weighs in. Parents are fucking stupid, and have been for a long, long time. At least since December 31, 1959.
Four: Little, little kids. Like five, six, seven, eight. Listen. The internet is a dark, dark, fucking place. When your kids learn about bad words, and racism, and double standards like how you can't say "nigger" unless you're black, it's game over. But up until that point, just fucking keep them away from technology. It's nothing but downers, so shelter them until it's a lost cause. By the time they hit fifth grade, they'll be watching Sasha Grey take fifty dicks from a room full of scumbags on steroids, begging for more, while gagging on cum, and then accepting industry awards in gala ceremonies for it, while completely fucking high out of her mind. But, until then, just don't let them look at any of it.
That’s highly unlikely given the number of people working there.
Clearly you haven’t done professional software development before. There are so many big misses.
It’s as if they designed a food delivery app and forgot to let the user enter the delivery address.
YouTube kids is a load of algorithmic content farm generated garbage. There is no trust based system for ranking content by quality (pagerank anyone?). Apple parental control is category specific, limits cannot be set for individual apps, nor can ad hoc categories be created.
Netflix has the same perverse incentives that default to the most addictive, garbage content and no whitelist option. Totally irresponsible and greed driven.
All three companies are dragging their feet, it is hard to tell if it’s due to greed, negligence or both.
Sadly, Amazon is the market leader in 2019 for kid friendly content and parental control options.
From your comment: "fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix"
No way it's that easy. These hacks span multiple apps, factory resets, etc.
Also, this is all expected - just like all other parts of internet security, it's going to be a cycle of hacks and patches.
You seem to have missed the first line of my comment about these not being hacks but straight up obvious bugs "like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos".
There’s a fairly complex interaction between Screen Time (settings controlling how often various features can be used), Down Time (settings controlling when various features can be used), Restrictions (settings controlling which settings the user of the device can change), various convenience features that pierce holes in that (ability to make photographs/send messages from the home screen, for example), and various cross-app capabilities (it wouldn’t surprise me if iBooks could be made to play videos inside e-books, for example) that, IMO, make it non-trivial to implement this in a way that makes it work perfectly as Parental Controls without leading to “but why doesn’t this work? I told the phone that application X was permitted” surprises.
If I enabled Screen Time for myself, the best answer might be ‘yes’. If I enabled it for my kid, it might be ‘no’.
I would argue that Apple is deliberately not fixing these holes because they prefer having people hooked on their devices. I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, merely that higher engagement is obviously good for business.
Apple seems to have found the balance it wants with its current solution - paying lip service to the vocal shareholders, while allowing its customers to easily work around the restrictions.
I also played a lot of video games, and if I played more than a couple of hours in a row my dad would come and just unplug the Nintendo. Drove me nuts (saved games on those old cartridges were very finicky), but it made me go outside.
Unfortunately there's no way that would ever happen. Even if Apple PR would ever allow such a statement to be made, which it wouldn't, requiring parents to do some actual parenting might provoke major unrest.
Fair enough, you admitted it at least.
>but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
Did it mess with your cognitive abilities? Your self-esteem? Your self-image? Your limbic system, in general? No? Your dopamine receptors, then? Did it fill every minute of your waking life with escapism? Would anyone read while driving? Or during class, meals, family gatherings, dates, meetings, at the movies? You get the point.
I think the unhealthy potential of smartphones differs tremendously from that of books, just because of their inherent physical qualities and limitations.
Unpopular opinion: I would be less preoccupied of a teen watching porn at 2am than on watching clips of videogames
Imagine how silly I would sound if I said “It’s not Apple’s job to sysadmin your users” in response to priceless not working properly on user accounts.
So while parenting support, or whatever, isn’t that important to me, functioning audit and access controls really is.
Technology changes, kids don't.
EG: At 11PM, the phone goes into basic mode. It can only call the list of pre-defined numbers (parents/family) and emergency services.
Maybe give a 30 15 and 5 minute count-down warning that way the user can gracefully finish their activities currently at hand.
”Think of this as a nap for your screen time. When you schedule downtime in Settings, only phone calls and apps that you choose to allow are available. Downtime applies to all of your Screen Time-enabled devices, and you get a reminder five minutes before it starts.”
I don’t think you can restrict what numbers can be called.
Funny, I told myself I'd be more open when I was an adult and here we all are, doing the same thing.
We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them.
It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks. All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers).
Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing solves.
The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access, but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were trying to run applications.
this this this.
limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the limit set by the parent.
Interestingly, corporations have more ways to restrict device usage than parents, by adding a profile and changing the device to 'supervised'.
Now there's an incentive for them to learn electrical engineering.
Come to think of it, I have even played a video game about it, called "Mom hid my game!"
I salute their ingenuity as a triumph of the human spirit in its unstoppable quest for freedom, justice, and Minecraft for all. Though I suppose drug addicts are similarly clever...
School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override password on a student's device.
So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he has it too. Kids are sneaky!