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How Laptops in Education Can Help Dictators, Hurt Learning
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on worries that the OLPC's BitFrost security protocols could hand a ready-made surveillance system to controlling 3rd world governments. The laptops identify themselves regularly to a server that can disable individual machines reported stolen — a system that hands a government a kill switch for every unit. BitFrost also has the potential to have machines attach a unique ID to every internet transaction, helping out anyone wanting to track net internet use. A freely available paper from a recent USENIX conference spells out the concerns."
Relatedly, an anonymous reader points out a story at Slate about a study which examined the impact that free PCs had on poor students in Romania, writing that "giving the kids machines without a corresponding level of parental supervision just resulted in distractions which ultimately damaged academic performance. By contrast, allowing children access to machines in a supervised setting, say an after school program via school labs, might mitigate some of the negative effects."
Dictators use whatever means at their disposal to control their people.
Details at 11.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
3rd-world dictators? Shyeah. Try "all governments everywhere."
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
True, this all is quite a problem, but for every problem, there's a solution. For every surveillance method, there's some talented kid out there figuring a way to circumvent it.
One of the geekier recipients of these laptops will engineer a way around this BS...and then he'll share that info with his less-geeky friends. The government will have considerably less control than it thinks it does.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The Internet is like New York City. You can find anything you want there. From great art and science to the worst filth.
The same basic rule should apply. Don't let your kids run around unattended.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
First of all, I am a CS bachelor from Romania, and I'd like to state some facts about the study that's referenced here:
1) The Euro 200 program was just a PR stunt of our goverment to get more votes, it was never ment as an educational program.
2) This program consisted just in giving a 200 euro reduction to children from relatively poor households if they bought a computer. It was never associated with an educational program, or any educational software(as in programs, ebooks, or anything at all).
3) The children who benifited from this program being mainly poor children, so even if they wanted to learn something, most of them didn't have the money to buy software, or to pay for an internet connection.
Adding to this most of the computers you could buy in Romania would come readily installed with a pirated version of Windows and full of pirated games and other pirate booty.
So let me explain it clearly:
The study is absolute *insert word here* because:
Even if those kids wanted to do something else but play pirated games on a pirated version of windows, they couldn't have done it, they didn't have any learning material or an internet connection.
On top of which there was no educational program that would allow the schools to help the children use the computers for educational purposes.
(OK, in order to avoid comments, there was and is a computerized educational program in Romania called AEL [advanced e-learning or something like that], which consists in a crappy CMS that's practically unusable, and has such a restrictive licence that you're not even allowed to look at it, not to speak of taking it home, at least this was the case 3 years ago)
The Euro200 program is totally oposed to the OLPC initiative wich consists in giving children small low-performance linux laptops(at least that was the idea not to long ago) full with educational software and an educational program that makes full use of those notebooks as an educational tool.
The idea is not in giving children computers, it's in giving them the oportunity to use them as educational tools.
If you give kids a relatively powerfull desktop with windows and full of games do you really expect them to study all day or to play games all day.
On The other hand, if you give them low-performance laptops, full with educational software and help them and require them to use these laptops for educational purposes, then you really can expect results.