Ask HN: How do I protect my parents from the internet?

I've never seen someone screw up a Chromebook and it takes less than 120 seconds to reset it to scratch and reload your profile.

Your not being dumb, but....

Locking down the machines is fine if you don't get any privilege exploits that take over the machine. Plus, this puts the machine in a known, good state every time we reboot or have a new user.

Cannot use Linux (I would use PC-BSD given our BSD infrastructure).

I think all the people recommending Chromebooks or Linux are entirely missing the point. Those are only viable alternatives within small niche uses for people who literally only use email and facebook. It's the 80/20 fallacy. 80% of the people only use 20% of the features, but for each person in that 80% they use a slightly different 20% subset. It's the same here. Most people only use a very small subset of the internet, and most things they do would work fine on a Chromebook, but each of them has that one thing they just can't live without that only works on Windows.

I have this exact problem with several family members PCs who come to me regularly with messed up machines.

It's not just old people either. One problem person for me is a 10 year old who always insists that all he downloaded was just that one minecraft mod and it was definitely a safe mod, honest, because he downloaded found it on google, or he saw stampy using it on youtube, oh and a java update because the mod says it needed it, oh and forge, and optifine, and, and, and... He's loosely tech savvy, but in a way that doesn't make him any safer, he still gets his computer into a mess. He's not going to switch to a Chromebook. No minecraft, and none of the other games his peers are into. (On a related note, the minecraft modding community is one of the most vile den of scam-mongery I've ever had the misfortune to stumble into)

The older people all require MS Word/Excel (And don't tell me LibreOffice is a replacement, it's not even close if you expect file compatibility with other people who use MS products).

Windows only plugins for specific websites, that's another one that is hopefully getting much rarer, but I still do see from time to time.

I've tried setting up restricted accounts and keeping the admin account password secret, but it always eventually has to get given out. Last time it was because their son needed to do submit his homework on the schools website, but the submission processes required a Windows only plugin which needed admin access to install. They were all panicked because I hadn't been answering my phone and his homework was due the next day. After that I gave up and stopped using restricted accounts.

I've tried disk imaging software, but it's typically a lot more work than it's worth with the images quickly getting out of date and needing redoing with new versions constantly.

This is a big big problem that I just don't have a good solution for.

I had a set up of my old computer with xubuntu for my mum for 1.5 years and had to learn that Linux is just not stable enough in the long run if installed for a novice user or as a "parent PC". Don't be naive here; even automatic updates will too often either break something or confuse users unfamiliar with computers. And you will need to be around to fix it or they won't be able to use that computer anymore.

I ended up buying her a second-hand MacMini for 110€ more than 2 years ago. Old enough that it still was a PowerPC version. It still works very well, never needed to fix something, it is fast enough for her use cases (e-mail, digital camera, some internet surfing), and she loves it. If things get messed up on OS X they do that in a "user friendly" way, and she (before being mostly annoyed by computers) has started to become quite proud if she can fix such minor issues by herself, or with only little guidance. I'd say she acquired some general computer literacy through using OS X, but not through using either Linux or Windows. She now likes Steve Jobs.

Huh.

I never really thought of the practical ramifications of a fully open-source browser...

Although now I'm wondering what API keys they compiled Chromium with. :v