> in general, you are responsible for whatever is done with your account/machine, authorized or not. if you are doing even the bare minimum to secure the computer, you should not be vulnerable to these kind of pranks from siblings/classmates.
This makes sense in a corporate or military environment, but is simply not reasonable for home use. You're claiming that one can never allow anyone else to have unsupervised physical access to the machine (regardless of whether it's locked, powered off, etc)
I should have been more clear. I'm not talking about sophisticated adversaries performing hardware attacks on a middle school student's laptop. I'm talking about the very basic steps necessary to prevent your brother from googling for porn on your school computer. in the vast majority of cases, having a good password and logging out of the computer when you're finished will prevent these kinds of pranks. if the child can't handle this, they are not ready for their own computer.
I'm not criticizing the children. I am criticizing the people who are forcing computers on people who are (according to the responses) not ready to use them in an organizational setting.
This makes sense in a corporate or military environment, but is simply not reasonable for home use. You're claiming that one can never allow anyone else to have unsupervised physical access to the machine (regardless of whether it's locked, powered off, etc)