OLPC United States/CIPA
Children's Internet Protection Act
For laptops deployed in USA, the laptop must integrate child-safe web filtering on the XO (not merely in the school server). Suppose the kid goes home and uses an alternate Internet gateway. If the XO is to be connected at home and comply with CIPA, it needs to have its own filtering.
On 6 May 2008, Scott Ananian wrote: This was a heavily requested G1G1 feature. New York City specifically requested that we disable all networking when not connected to a school server, in order to comply with CIPA. We'd like a better way.
Joshua replied: I believe we can add an iptables rule to pass all port 80 traffic through a public IP address (either a school server or something like proxy.laptop.org w/ DansGuardian) regardless of how the child is connected to the Internet. This should be sufficient protection to comply with CIPA. Does anybody see a problem with this?
Javier Rodriguez reported that Peru requires that the filter be installed on the device.
This is not Censorship
On May 07, 2008, Eben wrote: We don't want to invite attacks on OLPC by those who think that we're limiting freedom by censorship.
Joshua replied: That accusation is easily addressed by adding a wiki page describing how to turn off the filter. There should not be a GUI control panel switch (which could be flipped by accident), but it will not be more difficult than becoming root and editing a text file. The question we are discussing is what we can do by default for kids who are too young to take responsibility. I believe we MUST error on the conservative side, especially for American deployments. I don't want my four year old daughter exposed to all the crap on the Internet. Kids need a walled garden until they are old enough to easily escape it.