Honestly, people, some of these suggestions are like a parody of geek advice to civilians ;-)

The kid will soon hit upon the same practical solution that his or her peers all use: the smartphone (preferably with a VPN like Freedome), plus browsing at a friend's house. Wiping, Linuxing and LUKSing a family PC will escalate the real-life threat, and the kid's defenses will fall quickly to the parental equivalent of that XKCD password cartoon. 

If the kid has a need for full size keyboard and screen, and has a few more technical chops than most, there are some alternatives:

 * Boot up Tails in Windows camouflage mode. Choose More Options at boot. Shoulder surfing will probably bust him/her anyway, sooner or later. 

 * Make one of those WinPE Windows USB drives, if real Windows is required. Last time I looked this wasn't that easy. 

 * Get a small, fast external drive and install the OS of choice. If the host is a Mac, use Carbon Copy Cloner (or dd) to copy an existing machine to the external drive, or do a fresh installation there. For Linux, choose your flavor. 

  * Get a Raspberry Pi and hook it to the keyboard and screen, at times when you don't expect interruption. 

  * A virtual machine may be possible on the monitored host, if the required drivers are already present. Probably not. See  http://www.vbox.me/. If anyone knows a VM that works without admin rights, speak up. 

Bart

Barton Gellman

On May 31, 2015, at 12:00 PM, cypherpunks-request@cpunks.org wrote: