Ask OLPC a Question about Social Issues

Physical Security

We passed out bracelets in Rio Branco Brazil and there was a mini-riot. How do you expect people to secury these laptops, especially children, when they usually don't have locks, doors, and in some cases houses?

This is really a question for the Brazilian government ministry of education who are the ones handing them out. Since these people have lived in Brazil all of their lives and are intimately familiar with Brazilian culture and Brazilian problems, one can expect that they have some sort of plan to deal with this issue. One solution would be to start with projects in small isolated towns where you can easily give 100% of children a 2B1. Then there is little incentive to steal them within the town since there is no scarcity. As for grey market sales, perhaps this cannot be prevented, but if they are government property, then Brazil has laws and enforcement aparatus that can be applied to the problem. The OLPC project really hasn't got much to do with this.

Marketing & Child Development

What access will third parties (corporations) have to the mesh network, more specifically will direct marketing be permitted to children via this computer?

The intention is for the mesh network to be secure. Since it is a mesh, there is no central point at which communications can be tapped even if we wanted to do it. For instance, imagine a long narrow valley with a town at one end, and two kids living 100 km away but on opposite slopes with 5 km between the houses. The two kids will be able to communicate directly with the mesh network capability, but no-one in town will even detect their wifi signal.

Or to answer more directly, no, direct marketing to children will not be permitted over the mesh.

Gender and Long-Term Development Objectives:

Many studies over the years have shown that the only proven, effective, long-term development strategies in developing countries are those which take into account and improve the lives, skillsets, health, or educational opportunities/access of women and girls. Yet in many developing countries, boys continue to be disproportionately represented in the classroom, particularly in countries where tuition must be paid, and in the realm of technology.

Will OLPC be taking any steps to assure either the gender-neutrality of its laptops, software, distribution and marketing, or better yet, to include positive female models in its software or marketing from which both genders can learn?

By this I emphatically do not mean something as superficial as pink laptops, but rather encourage your development teams and marketing/distribution teams to consider and at all stages keep in mind the issue of gender and the proven effectiveness of development strategies which pay special attention to the educational needs of women and girls. MKW, New York

In many cultures, even western countries, there is no blue/pink gender distinction. In such countries boys have no problem with pink things and children wear a wider variety of colours than in North America or England.

The OLPC does not distribute computers to kids. They design computers, arrange for them to be built and arrange for them to be shipped to national governments. If you want national governments to pay attention to gender issues, then you must target them directly. The OLPC will not be a shortcut for dealing with such issues. Note that one way to address the issues is to develop educational content that will lead the target government to want to give more computers to girls. But again, that content development is YOUR responsibility, not that of OLPC.

It is well known in development circles that educating girls is the key element in population control, health, the education of the next generation, creating a fair system of laws, and the growth of the economy. None of us are stupid enough to ignore this. Anyway, it's an open system running Free Software. Write your own gender-neutral education materials, if that's what you think we need most. Show the rest of us how to do it, and we'll pitch in. --Mokurai 06:59, 21 November 2006 (EST)

Nigeria

What would be the possible social, technological and economic implications of the commitment to the initiative for Nigeria?

You mean like ending poverty, empowering the entire population politically, recording and saving all of Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and other Nigerian culture, and setting Nigeria on the path to full development? I have no idea what technology will come out of Nigeria after all that, but I'm sure that it will.--Mokurai 02:23, 13 October 2006 (EDT)

See Social Impact--Mokurai 18:17, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Government concerns

Also, I fear for the safety of the project, when you say the computers will be given to governments, who will distribute them to the people...We have all seen on TV the enormous amount of waste/inequality and abuse of power by governments of poor nations, that are given large handouts by outsiders. If food is wasted, and sold on the black market, you'd better be awfully careful with handing out computers! Even cheap ones! Why not get involved with teachers in schools in these poor nations, and head directly for the source instead of going through the middleman, and the buerocracy?.

Don't fear for the safety of OLPC. We don't have all our eggs in one basket; we are working with many different governments. If one government misbehaves, then they will be publicly embarassed because people can compare their behavior with other country governments. In particular, if Libya lives up to its promises then they will set a very high standard for other governments.

Also, the laptops will not be GIVEN to governments. The government must buy the laptops. And OLPC is not walking away from teachers and schools. On the contrary, we are developing working groups of teachers and school officials in the target countries to explain to them how the laptops can be used. We will provide ongoing support for these working groups and they, in turn, will support the teachers and schools in their country.

Privacy issues from microphone?

Can the microphone be enable/disabled by hardware (e.g., a switch), in a way that you can obviously see? I'm concerned that the microphone may be solely controlled by software. If it is, it could be used as a surreptitious "bug" (recording device). Since it's on a mesh, an attacker could remotely attack a machine, and if/when they break in, monitor the surroundings unknown to all. Malevolent governments could do the same.

AFAIK there is no button for the microphone, for cost reasons: a button adds extra plastic, one more wire, and is just one more mechanical thing that can break. You bring up a good point about enabling the microphone and software and listening-in remotely: this wiki needs to have a security considerations page... --SamatJain 14:13, 8 August 2006 (EDT)

This issue should be raised in the Discussion section of the Security page.

Privacy and Anonymity

What measures are being taken to insure that this device does not become the instrument of an international id program?

For all the reasons that people are concerned about national id cards, the danger of this platform becoming a unique identifier of virtual identities is present. Will the platform ship with tools which support anonymous network activity? Mrenoch 05:53, 9 August 2006 (EDT)

While the laptops will have serial numbers (of course), there are no plans to ship the laptops with any remotely accessible unique identifiers. For a variety of technical, social, and design related reasons, we are not pursuing such a solution. --Mako 13:53, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

I'm realy worried about the security of "eye witnesses" children. Since every laptop has a camera, every child with a OLPC-Laptop is a potential "eye witnesses" WITH foto evidences. Countless newsmen must die because of making fotos of occurrences powerfull parties won't to go public. I hope no foto of the build-in camera has any unique tag that can be traced to a Laptop/Child. And what's about the build-in wlan, it is virtual always on and broadcast a unique MAC-adress. Always, always the same, for ever ? Why not changing the last 4 MAC-digits from time to time randomly ? That will not hurt, because nobody realy trust in a pure MAC-adress access restriction system. -- Andi

So since every OLPC-Laptop has the

From what I remember of the chip used it can't be locked (turned off until power is interrupted) into microphone off mode, it would require atleast a GPIO pin and a "set" circuit being used and that still relies on the BIOS not being modified (which I guess would be possible if the BIOS is on a non-system flashable ROM and it's NVRAM is made inaccessible during the boot phase, requiring yet another pin), I'd suggest not to worry too much, yes, it is a risk, however arbitary listening might not be possible due to code signing and other methodes, just govermental (which to some might be just as scary to some, but imagine trying to filter usable data from the recordings of 10 000 microphones or more) --Ikarus 23:58, 15 November 2006 (EST)

1 - Speech recognition is highly investigated and used by many surveilance agencies in the world. It is known that echelon, the international domestic spying program uses them. 2 - Will it be possible, theoretically, to access the serial numbers through software only? What's preventing (technologically-wise) it be used for tracking kids and their families by governments/whomever? Am I excited about an international project which so easily could be used to track the on-line activites of children and their families in the developing world?

This story linked at slashdot exemplifies what I'm saying: [1]" Nike+ iPod Used For Surveillance [...] "Our research also shows that there exist simple cryptographic techniques that the Nike+iPod Sport Kit designers could have used to improve the privacy-preserving properties of the Nike+iPod kit,' the group reports. 'Our work underscores the need for a broad public discussion about and further research on the privacy-preserving properties of new wireless personal gadgets,' the group reports."

Child Safety Concerns

We are already seeing cases where social networking sites are being misused by criminals. Kids put a lot of trust on each other and will never doubt a message from someone who seems like a buddy to them. How can we warn the kids that in any network application, the person sitting on the other end need not be his/her friend? What about displaying some kind of a warning in chat and mail apps? I believe educating parents about potential dangers of misuse is also very important.

This is being taken seriously by the OLPC team. If you want to discuss this or other security issues, please do it in the Discussions section of the Security page.

Rights Abuse

You are going to be delivering millions of Internet connected laptops to youth in countries where Intellectual Properties Rights are not seriously enforced. They are going to be using pirated software, will be listening to and sharing pirated music, and watching and sharing pirated video. They will also be running P2P hosts to enable piracy by others. Do you see OLPC having any responsibility to do something in this area, either in terms of technology, agreements or education?

Another poster mentioned scams, but I can see spam and virus generation as also a problem (there goes the Linux virus advantage).

I love the idea. In addition to the effect on the countries involved, I think that worldwide, lots of open source projects, including Wikipedia, are going to get a tremendous boost from this. I don't think the world has any idea what's going to hit it. But there's also a tremendous potential for abuse, and I think that OLPC (and your community, i.e. us) has a responsibility to be thinking about that also.

--192.118.34.228 07:31, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

We are talking licensing very seriously with the machine. We will be introducing "digital rights expression" as a core feature of the machine. --Walter 18:53, 17 October 2006 (EDT)

These sound like very hackable machines. Beyond expression, how do you do enforcement? --192.118.34.228 05:47, 18 October 2006 (EDT)

Theoretically, just because a person is poor or lives in a poor country does not mean that he should be treated as a criminal. If a Western government sees fit to permit computer exports to the wealthy elite of a poor nation with mild copyright laws, they should not bar the way of computers sent for humanitarian purposes to their common people. If a wealthy American or European is allowed to buy a computer that may permit him to pirate software or music if he chooses to, the same should be true for Bolivian schoolchildren. But I fear that it may take a great deal of advocacy to try to persuade many people of this basic principle. Yet consider the irony: the poor of the world spend little if anything on music or software, so the actual cost of their violations to authors is exceedingly low - while the software they learn to create and freely distribute on these open-access systems will be of great value to everyone in the world. Mike Serfas 22:32, 25 October 2006 (EDT)

Linux users do not pirate software, as a rule. This is because their software is Free. We will be promoting Creative Commons-Developing Countries licensing for other media, so that piracy will not be necessary. --Mokurai 18:45, 9 November 2006 (EST)

On potential child predators

What precautions is your organization taking against potential child predators due to increased internet activity in the countries receiving laptops?

First answer is that we are designing a laptop that functions without any Internet access whatsoever. In many of the areas it will be deployed, the Internet is either unavailable or too expensive for educational use.

Second answer is that the educators who will be teaching the kids are being made aware of this potential issue.

GOVERNMENT ABUSE

I am concerned about Government abuse with this program. How would you monitor the Government of the country in which these laptops are distributed, to be sure that they go directly to the needy children? Some of these government officials are corrupted and might distribute these laptops to their relatives and friends with just a few going to the needy. How will this program be monitored? I am very concerned about this.

The OLPC cannot solve all the ills of the world. However we have gone to some effort to design a laptop that is unlike any existing laptops. The OLPC laptops are smaller than normal, slower than normal with less storage than normal. They are ideal for kids to use in education but not very useful for running a business or playing video games. From a cost-benefit point of view it would seem that a corrupt government leader would do better to spend their $100 million on something other than OLPC laptops.

UI Security

How secure is the UI against virus, malware and other attacks? Because, it would seem that it wouldnt take long to infect all of Thailand's computers if they are all networked.

The OLPC doesn't run Windows. In fact it doesn't run standard Linux either. Virus writers would have to write something that specifically attacks the OLPC laptop. Also, since the OLPC's are not connected to the Internet but rely on wide-area WiFi, it is likely that any infection will be confined to a single town.

The OLPC is designed so that the software in ROM can be easily and quickly be upgraded in the field. If we discover that someone is exploiting a security weakness, we can and will quickly fix it.

Ownership and Selling of Laptops

If children are given the laptops, isn't it reasonable to assume that their families (most of which will assumingly be poor) might sell the laptops? I see the potential for a black market of these wonderful devices.

I think the participant countries can reduce the possibility of OLPC theft and illegal resale by:

(1) keeping the laptops at school and only allowing the kids to take them home if there are needs like homework and exams. (2) Making parents to sign a promissory note at the initial issue agreeing that they will do their best to take care of it when the child brings it to home. (3) The wifi adapter can be used to track stolen OLPCs. (4) In the countries with high OLPC theft incidents the government in the country can launch public awareness media campaign to educate the public that stealing an OLPC = robbing a child's future. (5) With cooperation from online auctions like Ebay they can ban/restrict the unauthorized resale of OLPCs. (6) Buy 2 give one free" program will reduce the demand for the OLPC in the developed world. Like rich first worlders willing to pay unreasonably high prices for the OLPC for novelty purposes. (7) As a more objective solution to the issue in your question, the UN child labor laws should be slightly altered to adapt the needs of the children today. What I mean by that is although it is wrong to exploit children by forcing them to work in dangerous manual labor jobs, if the IT companies want to provide them will opportunities to earn some money in exchange for doing some light programming or data entry jobs for limited periods it should be allowed. That way the OLPC will become a tool that they can use to earn money too and hence they wont need to sell it for food money :-)