I'm not one to call parents who surveil children "Orwellian": a parent's job is to prepare a child for the world and protect them from the world. Some parent:child combos are trusting and the children are sane. Others, not; and it is *not* always the parent's fault if their kids aren't well-behaved human beings as teens.

That said, it's a teenager's prerogative to explore what it means to be an adult as they approach the day they take ownership of themselves, and to push boundaries and make mistakes. So, push-back and assertion of self and future rights is normal, too.

On 31 May 2015 09:51:02 GMT+01:00, nerv <nerv@fastmail.fm> wrote:
On Sun, 31 May 2015 01:48:10 -0600
Mirimir <mirimir@riseup.net> wrote:

On 05/31/2015 12:15 AM, Cathal (Phone) wrote:
Wipe the machine, install fresh and clean Linux, and then password
lock the BIOS.

That's excellent advice ... to someone who owns the machine. I'd say
also to use LUKS. But maybe here that would dramatically escalate the
confrontation. And there's also the lack of physical security.

Zenaan's advice is more appropriate in a child-parent context. If
that's impossible, the best option is probably doing private stuff
elsewhere.

I think trying to go against the parents themselves would be a bad idea
unless you know they can be reasoned with, but having a look seems only
fair, their children should know to what degree they should trust their
computer.

I would personally use software such as process explorer and tcpview to
get an idea of what is running (assuming they use windows here), but if
you think the parents may be using something stronger than your usual
parental control tool maybe booting the system from a live cd and
having a look at what may be hidden from regular process managers
(might be a bit extreme, I'm not sure any parent would go that far, but
it will be pretty effective, and maybe less of a chore. If they really
are monitoring all activity on the computer they might deduce that they
are "busted", it might even "incriminate" you once they realize that
their kids shouldn't know that much about computers.)

In any case, the most likely is that they use some basic software and
just "manually" check what was the machine used for, so a small
introduction (if needed) about using computers (and the right
tools) safely and cleanly might just be enough to stop Orwellian
parents.

I never contributed to a mailing list before, hope I didn't fucked it
up
Cheers


On 31 May 2015 03:24:45 GMT+01:00, Gadit Bielman
<thetransintransgenic@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi.

I'm trying to help (probably badly, but..) a friend deal with
parents that
they expect are spying on them.
I know that in general, it's impossible to secure a computer that
you can't
trust and don't necessarily have administrator privileges to.

But their parents are not exactly the NSA -- any spying that's
happening is
almost definitely some sort of product, plus basic things like
maybe looking through their history. (I don't know much about
they're situation
-- maybe they know more, so
well-if-you-know-they-do-this-then-you-could-do-this type advice
would still be helpful.)

Would antivirus be able to detect spy-on-your-kids products? Would
they be
able to scan their computer with like Immunet or something, even if
they
didn't have administrator privileges?

Tor would probably help -- unless the monitoring was looking at
the RAM or
something for website names, which would be way overkill on a
commercial
product, no? Or (more likely) if it was taking screenshots at
regular intervals, which would also break running a VM or
something. (Is there any
way to detect taking screenshots?)

I know probably the best thing would be running TAILS as a LiveCD
-- the
problem with that is that it's REALLY obvious over-the-shoulder.


Um, thoughts about any of those?
Any other things about parents as a threat model in general?

I know this is pretty far from what is usually discussed on here,
but I'm
really interested in what you think/it would potentially help a
lot of people.




--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.