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Forum Discussion
Smart kids bypass my security
My foster son (10 yr old) has just come up with a way to stay up all night, thwarting my efforts to impose bedtime shut-off of all devices. Would appreciate knowing if my suspicions are correct. Bo...
vtdave wrote:On the ORBI app, if he has turned off the phone, I can't see it and turn off wi-fi access. And even if I see his phone and shut wi-fi off to him, he has a work-around.
If he pops the battery out of the phone and does a factory reset, he returns as an online device, and unless I stay up all night, he is then free to game his sleep time away.
Does anyone know if this would be a workaround as described? The cheap phones would probably not be able to withstand repeated openings and resets as described, but I am not sure?
Looking back through the messages, I see we never answered the question (underlined above). And, I had not taken into account that you use the Orbi "app" to manage it.
- I believe if you "Pause" a device using the Orbi app, it remains "paused" until you "unpause" it, even if it is not connected. So, turning the phone off and then back on again is not a workaround. This is because the WiFi MAC address of the phone does not change when it is restarted.
- How expensive the phone is has nothing to do with how many times it can be restarted.
- There IS a workaround that was described in this forum several months ago, only it was being used by a teenager, not a 10 year old. It is technically possible to make some devices report a different MAC address. This enterprising teen would make the phone appear to be "completely different" every time. If your 10 year old can already do that, it's time to enroll him in Computer Science classes. However, turning on "Access Control" would stop even that workaround because the administrator (you) has to approve a new MAC address. (To be honest, I seldom use the Orbi app, so my knowledge of Access Control on the app is limited.)
- So, of your choices, it's either use the app to "pause" and "unpause" his phone twice a day or to change the primary WiFi password on every device you have (ugh) and tell him only the Guest password, which you turn on and off twice a day.
- Of course, if one of your neighbors has an open WiF, then you can't control access to that.
Raising children these days entails challenges many of us are ill-equipped to deal with.