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."

In other news...

Dictators use whatever means at their disposal to control their people.

Details at 11.

Re:In other news...

I think the point of TFA is that the OLPC's security system can be mis-used as an assistive technology for those dictators in their efforts to control their people.

I wonder if you'd be equally glib in your dismissal if this article were about Google filtering content at the request of Chinese authorities [wikipedia.org], or Yahoo disclosing the identities [guardian.co.uk] of people advocating democratic reforms?

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Anything can be misused as an assistive technology for dictators in their efforts to control their people.

Pen(cil) and paper? Leaves written records. A certain Cardinal had a pertinent quote for that.

The kid sitting next to you? Would probably sell you out

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I'm not sure I understand your point. Or are you not making one?

This system provides a ready-made, wide-scale system for any government to track your internet usage, and then decide "you, right there, you've had enough internet exposure to progressive

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I understood his point just fine. The laptop's usefulness outweighs the near-zero access to information they had before. If a gov't shuts down the laptops (after it just paid for them?) then it's not like anything was lost.

As far as surveillance, that happ

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You're correct. But this isn't a special problem of OLPC and poor governments. It is merely the exact same problem that the wealthy world has with windows. Just look at the current round of copyright and internet policing legislation happening in Europe

Re:In other news...

Thank you.

This is a kind of report and study that I cannot stand. Laptops cause all these problems in the developed world for middle class kids as well. But nobody says suburban tweens shouldn't have the internet. I doubt very much that they are on the whole better supervised than Romanians or Africans, basing this on my own internet-connected undersupervsed childhood in the suburbs which I might add, turned out pretty much OK.

As for dictators? People in glass houses, come the hell on. Maybe not America too much, yet, but from every thing I seem to be reading about half of Europe, Big Brother has been on laptops in the developed world for quite some time.

There's such a tendency to hold the poor to standards we do not apply to ourselves. I find it kind of disgusting.

3rd World?

3rd-world dictators? Shyeah. Try "all governments everywhere."

Little Brother - Cory Doctorow

Anyone give this a read? A way to fight back... maybe?

Thought of posting this a few weeks ago re: the tracker tags a Texas school was using, but missed out on a near-top post.

Read it...

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/ [craphound.com]

Paranoid Linux

A group of users have decided to try to implement Paranoid Linux as described in the book. It's a Linux distribution meant for use under oppressive regimes. It assumes you are under surveillance and actively attempts to veil your communications by hiding it among automatically generated random activity. Reminds me of the scheme Randy uses in Cryptonomicon [wikipedia.org] to avoid eavesdropping on his laptop while trapped in his cell.

They appear to be in the very early stages only, but an interesting and potentially very worthy project.
paranoidlinux.org [paranoidlinux.org]

Just more practice for the budding hackers.

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.

Re:Just more practice for the budding hackers.

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.

And in the end, isn't that what OLPC is all about?

Supervision.

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.

Counterproductive

I've very rarely seen computers useful in courses where the coursework isn't actually computer-related. Programming, digital audio, typing, etc. are all places where computers belong. Anywhere else, I've found them counterproductive to learning. The distraction factor, plus the amount of time spent getting everything to work properly, not to mention having a machine doing something for you that you might otherwise learn to do yourself, make it a waste. This includes calculators in math classes, except when the class has algorithmic concepts that must be simulated.

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Your problem seems to be more with memorization, which I agree, in many situations, is a bass-ackwards way of learning things.

Perhaps I just had different types of math classes than you, but the ones where I learned the most were ones where there wasn't

What the hell ?

Alright, first of all I doubt a dictatorship like the one the poster is worried about is going to allow it's people these laptops in the first place.. and secondly the poster then wants to become a dictator their self in how the laptop is used...

It reminds me of well off people stressing over giving a pan handler a dollar.. how exactly will that dollar be used ? alchohol ?, lottery tickets ?. ciggarettes ? ... If it's going to stress you out so much then just don't give anything.

Limited Access may be a good thing

Back in my high school days (80s), we had limited access to the computers (the PETs were in the computer room which was usually open for lunch for free time),

When I was not in front of the keyboard I was reading about computers in magazines or planning what I wanted to do next with the computer, I wrote so much code and other ideas on notebook paper helped get my pre-planning skills developed.

I am not sure full 24/7 access is better or not for kids to appreciate computers. But I can think it can be a major distraction if it is connected to the net all the time (and not just for the nasty stuff).

Limiting network access would be a good thing. then they can think and plan on what to do while connected. And/or work on stuff while not connected without the distraction of all that stuff on-line.

Computers in schools...

When I was a kid, computers in schools meant punch cards at universities. By the time I was a teenager, it was an Apple II in the math lab and the only people interested were the real computer nerds. I was reading about things like PLATO and computer languages designed for teaching... languages better than Basic... but they were out of reach. I figured my kids would benefit.

Then the personal computer revolution hit its peak and we got an Atari and Logo and all that good stuff, and then my kids were born, but by the time they were old enough to be really interested in computers and what Daddy was doing what they mostly had in school were IBM PCs that were running Office and used to teach kids how to be secretaries and accountants.

Computers in schools seem to miss the point more often than not.

What's worse

What's worse is that with an electronic device like a laptop or a "Kindle like" device, information can be easily "updated" to read however the current power structure wants it to.
Is anyone else nervous that Rupert Murdoch's Corp has taken an interest in electronic textbooks?
When history gets in the way of some future political power they can simply "update" that e-book or laptop and then it will read as they want it to.

At least when you printed a book it stayed that way...now information is malleable it's going to become untrustworthy.

Forced "updates" for "security reasons" and no trustworthy source of information.

The Study is Absolutely Irrelevant

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.

Lets see if I get this right...

- Government gives out laptops to schoolchildren

- Laptops can be 'controlled' by government

- fear that bad behaviour (in the eyes of the government) will result in laptops being disabled, and schoolchildren punished.

Wow. Sounds a little like Maine's http://www.mainelearns.org/ [mainelearns.org] MLTI initiative...

- Hand out laptops

- Monitor them, after all even though they are inside a protictive proxy server, sometimes bad things get past that...

- Cut off the entire school system, if necessary, to protect the students.

- Fear among students that anything interesting will be blocked. taking the laptops home only requires their parents pay for insurance against damage/loss. At a very reasonable (for the insurer) cost.

- Effective control of the laptops, since they actually belong to the government.

Well, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Though I wonder how much OLPCs would cost v. iBooks, and how much more/less useful they would be. The OLPC could use a big Stateside order, eh?

Don't hold yer breath, chummy...

True cost of a Princeton education in the OLPC era

The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.

It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm [greenstar.org]

And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html [holtgws.com]
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt [newciv.org]
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651 [social-ecology.org]

Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html [pdfernhout.net]
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."

People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.

Another related essay:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html [pdfernhout.net]
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."

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You are talking about a 3rd world country who may not have been brought up on the amount of technology as many people in the west have been brought up on. You think parents of kids today are clueless of internet dangers. Think about the people in some 3rd

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You must have missed the part that said essentially none of the big brother security stuff was enabled on the laptops shipped with the G1G1 program. The only thing still there is the presence of a BIOS lock requiring a developer key (which you can easily g

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Then there is the argument that laptops are bad for a student's behavioral and academic outcomes. I'd have to strongly disagree.[...]

I swear this is not a troll. I am asking this question earnestly hoping for a real answer, so please, read it in that sp