Beyond cyberthreats, the XO laptop will have an anti-theft system designed to render stolen laptops useless. Each XO is assigned a "lease," secured by cryptography, that allows it to operate for a limited period of time. The laptop connects to the internet daily and checks in with a country-specific server to see if it's been reported stolen. If not, the lease is extended another few weeks.
If the lease expires, the XO's internet connectivity is turned off, and shortly thereafter the whole computer becomes a brick. In the case of an area without internet connectivity, a local school can extend the lease from its own server by Wi-Fi or with a USB dongle.
I've been hearing that they were going to do this for a while, and I think it's a terrible idea that will kill a lot of the potential of this wonderful project. What happens if these kids go to another area for a month or two and want to take the thing with them? Tough, it's a brick. Not to mention if they want to keep it and take it out of area after they graduate.
There's also this deeply worrying gem:
Users can manually assign more power to a particular program through the security control panel, but even there, they are limited.
"You cannot request a set of permissions that let you do bad things," Krstic said.
So much for a computer that students will have complete control over, can take everything apart and put it back together, etc. For a project so focussed on empowering kids as users, these two parts of an otherwise promising security plan sound an awful lot like the computer having control over the user, not the other way around.
I hope I've got this wrong, I hope that we aren't actually introducing third world kids to the world of DRM and Treacherous Computing, where "their" machines do things they can't control, where they "lease", not own. If so, it's really too bad. Yet another missed opportunity...
If you have a million authors, well, you get the mean of their million biases in the book.
I agree. The reality is that there is no way to completly avoid bias in any statement, as the US media demonsrates -- journalists, like Wikipedians, are extremely careful to limit their statements to "facts", and yet their statements still end up communicating a biased argument.
The difference with Wikipedia is that it reflects the bias of as many people as possible, instead of just one journalist. That's why it's probably a closer expression of the consensus of the human commons than anything else available.
As you say, it doesn't represent all of humanity because not all humans have access to computers, internet, etc. The way to improve that situation is to *increase* the number of people who can edit it, not decrease it. Hopefully, it will eventually become an even better record of the current state of human discourse, and continue to mirror the strengths and shortcomings of that discourse.
That is correct, and Wikipedia's solution to the problem of editor bias is the reason that it is so popular and robust. Every editor, unknown or otherwise, is fallable. Limiting publishing privileges to a few people means that there are fewer checks and balances on content. These checks and balances also keep Wikipedia's spam level improbably low for an open-content site of its size.
Wikipedia is successful because it is what Humanity Has to Say. Its problems resemble the problems of human discourse in general. Like other small problems that occur within human interactions, most of Wikipedia's minor hiccups are sorted out quickly through a sustained high level of that human interaction.
Who thinks that any service provider will allow an uncertified software stack onto any of their handsets, and/or onto their network?
The Neo1973, will be released with its own software, OpenMoko, but is designed to be completely open, so I assume you could strip OpenMoko off and put GPE/LiMO/Slackware/Whatever on there if you wanted to (well, maybe not Vista).
Also, as this comment points out, service providers can't control what people use to connect to their network -- if you've got a T-Mobile SIM card, you can pop it into any GSM phone and dial away.
Hopefully once the software is there, handset manufacturers will start realizing that this is a low-cost way to sell some powerful, hassle-free handsets and we'll start seeing more PC-style handsets on the market soon.
That's not a matter of not needing Windows, that's a matter of someone not needing a desktop PC at all.
I'm still curious why we are still years away from practical products like this.
Selling the same model would undermine the social-disapproval mechanism the project hopes will discourage a gray market in the OLPC machines
Yes, this is a good call. We need to make sure that any student who thinks about keeping one of these things after they graduate (and therefore have no use for a computer) is ostracized. Best to keep the community around these things down to a minimum.
No, no, this is great news! They were going to sell them on eBay for double price so that one would be donated to a student for each commercial purchase, but now developers and consumers will be able to buy stolen ones on eBay for *less* than double the price! See, that's a much better way to maximize distribution. Everyone wins!
Drat, Zoxed beat my post to the punch. If anybody's still reading this, mod parent up! This is a very important change which casts quite a different light on OLPC (and, now, the BBC) than the original piece did...
I'm probably too late to get noticed here, but does anybody know if the BBC softened their language on this a bit after the initial story went live? I could swear that yesterday their headline read "$100 laptop will be available to public" and that the lead was closer to "The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project will sell the machine to the public. But customers would have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world." than to the current wording.
I'm wondering if OLPC yelled at the Beeb and got them to backpedal, thus effectively nullifying any news here and making the submitter look kinda stupid.
Does anybody happen to have saved the text of the article from before about 17:00 GMT yesterday?
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FTFA:
Beyond cyberthreats, the XO laptop will have an anti-theft system designed to render stolen laptops useless. Each XO is assigned a "lease," secured by cryptography, that allows it to operate for a limited period of time. The laptop connects to the internet daily and checks in with a country-specific server to see if it's been reported stolen. If not, the lease is extended another few weeks.
If the lease expires, the XO's internet connectivity is turned off, and shortly thereafter the whole computer becomes a brick. In the case of an area without internet connectivity, a local school can extend the lease from its own server by Wi-Fi or with a USB dongle.
I've been hearing that they were going to do this for a while, and I think it's a terrible idea that will kill a lot of the potential of this wonderful project. What happens if these kids go to another area for a month or two and want to take the thing with them? Tough, it's a brick. Not to mention if they want to keep it and take it out of area after they graduate.
There's also this deeply worrying gem:
Users can manually assign more power to a particular program through the security control panel, but even there, they are limited.
"You cannot request a set of permissions that let you do bad things," Krstic said.
So much for a computer that students will have complete control over, can take everything apart and put it back together, etc. For a project so focussed on empowering kids as users, these two parts of an otherwise promising security plan sound an awful lot like the computer having control over the user, not the other way around.
I hope I've got this wrong, I hope that we aren't actually introducing third world kids to the world of DRM and Treacherous Computing, where "their" machines do things they can't control, where they "lease", not own. If so, it's really too bad. Yet another missed opportunity...
I agree. The reality is that there is no way to completly avoid bias in any statement, as the US media demonsrates -- journalists, like Wikipedians, are extremely careful to limit their statements to "facts", and yet their statements still end up communicating a biased argument.
The difference with Wikipedia is that it reflects the bias of as many people as possible, instead of just one journalist. That's why it's probably a closer expression of the consensus of the human commons than anything else available.
As you say, it doesn't represent all of humanity because not all humans have access to computers, internet, etc. The way to improve that situation is to *increase* the number of people who can edit it, not decrease it. Hopefully, it will eventually become an even better record of the current state of human discourse, and continue to mirror the strengths and shortcomings of that discourse.
One of us *did* think of that.
That is correct, and Wikipedia's solution to the problem of editor bias is the reason that it is so popular and robust. Every editor, unknown or otherwise, is fallable. Limiting publishing privileges to a few people means that there are fewer checks and balances on content. These checks and balances also keep Wikipedia's spam level improbably low for an open-content site of its size.
Wikipedia is successful because it is what Humanity Has to Say. Its problems resemble the problems of human discourse in general. Like other small problems that occur within human interactions, most of Wikipedia's minor hiccups are sorted out quickly through a sustained high level of that human interaction.
The Neo1973, will be released with its own software, OpenMoko, but is designed to be completely open, so I assume you could strip OpenMoko off and put GPE/LiMO/Slackware/Whatever on there if you wanted to (well, maybe not Vista).
Also, as this comment points out, service providers can't control what people use to connect to their network -- if you've got a T-Mobile SIM card, you can pop it into any GSM phone and dial away.
Hopefully once the software is there, handset manufacturers will start realizing that this is a low-cost way to sell some powerful, hassle-free handsets and we'll start seeing more PC-style handsets on the market soon.
I don't see what good a plain old iPod will do them. They won't even be able to connect to the spy satellites.
Well, Michael's key to success is going to be be to distance himself from Microsoft as much as possible. You know how Ballmer is with chairs.
Well, no big loss -- .sudo is a much better way of managing things anyway.
Oh, it's far worse than that. They're going to send the Baltimore School for the Arts.
We aren't.
Yes, this is a good call. We need to make sure that any student who thinks about keeping one of these things after they graduate (and therefore have no use for a computer) is ostracized. Best to keep the community around these things down to a minimum.
No, no, this is great news! They were going to sell them on eBay for double price so that one would be donated to a student for each commercial purchase, but now developers and consumers will be able to buy stolen ones on eBay for *less* than double the price! See, that's a much better way to maximize distribution. Everyone wins!
Drat, Zoxed beat my post to the punch. If anybody's still reading this, mod parent up! This is a very important change which casts quite a different light on OLPC (and, now, the BBC) than the original piece did...
I'm probably too late to get noticed here, but does anybody know if the BBC softened their language on this a bit after the initial story went live? I could swear that yesterday their headline read "$100 laptop will be available to public" and that the lead was closer to "The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project will sell the machine to the public. But customers would have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world." than to the current wording.
I'm wondering if OLPC yelled at the Beeb and got them to backpedal, thus effectively nullifying any news here and making the submitter look kinda stupid.
Does anybody happen to have saved the text of the article from before about 17:00 GMT yesterday?
Sincerely,
Grumpy Old Man