Microsoft Seeks Patent On 'Quieting Mobile Devices' 71
theodp writes "GeekWire reports on a pending Microsoft patent that proposes to give parents a centralized dashboard on their phones for remotely monitoring and setting restrictions on other family members' mobile devices. The newly-published patent application for Automatically Quieting Mobile Devices explains how parents could use the dashboard to shut down family members' devices during certain time periods, at designated locations, during specified events, and in designated quiet zones. From the patent: 'Aspects that might be disabled include any type of interactive functions and/or features of a device (except, in some examples, initiating emergency telephone calls or emergency text messages and displaying the current time/date or information related to the quiet time may still be permitted), playing games, communicating (via phone, VOIP applications, text messaging, instant messaging, and/or email), using other applications (e.g., browsers, messaging applications, social networking applications, or consuming certain content (e.g., digital media content).' Microsoft also proposes equipping parents' phones with 'biometric detection' to thwart kids who try to circumvent 'Big Mother'."
MS's Quiet Mobile Devices (Score:0, Insightful)
The true "quiet" associated to Microsoft's mobile devices are the sales numbers and the "ooooh" associated to (the lack of) market penetration.
Instafail (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, the engineer who cooked this up has never had kids. Look, they're like prisoners -- they're bored, and have nothing better to do than spend hours trying to do what they're told they can't do, because doing what you can't do is really, really fun.
You could give it nine biometric sensors, make it out of solid neutronium, and mandate 40 character randomly generated passwords and an attachment to attach to your dick and take a urine sample... and kids will still giggle, smile, and then proceed to hack it, then destroy it, then flush the pieces down the toilet, then claim they don't know what happened.
Because that's how children roll.
There is no technology that can be a substitute for good parenting -- namely, you say "don't touch this" and if they touch it... you ground their bitch ass. Problem solved. And coincidentally... parental involvement is the only thing that DOES solve the problem.
Parenting much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, it can do ALL those things?
I guess parenting is overrated!
Joking aside, it's worrysome how more and more, even discussed in Slashdot ad nauseaum, there are people developing parenting-avoiding tools.
Every time I see someone asking for some software to monitor their kids and avoid them going to unwanted internet pages I'm amused how my parents monitored me when I was young.
The answer? Put the computer in the living room where every one walking about the house could take a peek at the monitor. Up until maybe 13-14 years old it was this way. Later they allowed me to have it in my room after they had some "certainty" that I knew how to surf safely. Sure, I watched porn and even once in a while things that my parent probably wouldn't have approved of (gore and stuff like that), but by that point I had a pretty firm grasp of what I was "allowed" to do. Read: Allowed as in I trusted my parents to do what it was good for me.
If they prefered I stayed away from certain pages I would most certainly stay away, maybe taking a quick peek but in general nothing to worry about.
I mean, if you are not going to be (and I hope most people won't) glued to the side of your child so you can monitor it 24/7, why would anyone expect some software to actually do that? I believe that children behave for the most part, according to how the parenting went. So if your kid can't stay away from the smartphone in important events, the the issue is not with the techology (as usual) but with the way those parents raised their children.
After so many patents and technology products and ideas going in this direction, I wonder if some sci-fi writer is ever going to write some stories about how the future of humanity will be determined by how parents *configured* their kid's robo-nannies and even sue the robo-nanny maker because their child grew up spoiled, even when they bought the enhanced DLC for super-behaved children!
Sadly this could sell (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many parents refuse to parent and let the media do their work for them. For those parents that have raised snowflakes this would be the perfect passive aggressive way to handle things.
Sorry snowflake, the phone says you can't send text messages at dinner time, don't be upset with me!
Good plan... (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I being overly concerned about building an access channel into the phone designed to yield aspects of phone control to another party. I can't imagine that hackers and cracker worldwide wouldn't hit this new feature like a schist-storm looking to use it as a pry tool to access control of people's Win-Phones. I guess MS is safe as long as the number of users is too small to justify the interest of the hackers.
Not new? (Score:5, Insightful)
But how can this be patentable?
The idea of having an Administrator set group policy, and being able to monitor both that policy and the use of devices on the network is nothing new.