How Laptops in Education Can Help Dictators, Hurt Learning 122
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
Details at 11.
3rd World? (Score:5, Insightful)
3rd-world dictators? Shyeah. Try "all governments everywhere."
You know how it is. (Score:1, Insightful)
Then again, it might not.
Just more practice for the budding hackers. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Supervision. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same basic rule should apply. Don't let your kids run around unattended.
This really frosts my bits (Score:2, Insightful)
Such a shady system doesn't exist to help prevent theft of $3,000 laptops, and you're going to put a system in place to protect $100 laptops that are given out for free?
What a scam, and a shame, this is.
Re:Just more practice for the budding hackers. (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 so he could get a bag of rice for his family that is starving.
Who do you think would employ the teachers if the dictator is that paranoid or controlling? Commit a thoughtcrime against The Most Benevolent Leader and you and your family go off on a permanent vacation.
Computers in schools... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as surveillance, that happens on any network, all the time. We're only quibbling about the degree, not if.
Re:3rd World? (Score:0, Insightful)
What's worse (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
This report phrases the problem as if it were specific to societies that are somehow undersophisticated.
Criticism of the report aside. The OLPC should get rid of that anti-user bull shit pronto. Thieves are going to know about it and circumvent it. As usual it makes the criminal's life only a little bit more complicated and greatly impacts the real owner.
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, bit frost is a flawed solution.
No, there isn't a perfect solution nor will there ever be a perfect solution.
Do we sit around and wait for the perfect solution or do we try to make due with what we have available?
Anyways, a repressive regime most likely wouldn't even allow the project (which is paid for at the government level) into the country. Go find some other near dead horse to beat.
Re:Counterproductive (Score:3, Insightful)
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 a piece of electronic equipment in the room, save for pagers (late 90s), digital watches and perhaps the computer the teacher used solely to enter grades.
Heck, the history class that undid all the cute quasi-legend Americana for me and gave insight as to what really happened and likely why it happened didn't use so much as an overhead projector (OK, she did once, and almost broke it). Teacher. Pen. Paper. Of course, that assumes that you have a teacher that knows the material well enough to explain it thoroughly and effectively.
I think my problem may be with people having computers at their desk while in class. Available at the side? Sure. Your own usable during independent study time? Cool. Typing away while the teacher is talking and/or you might otherwise be interacting with the teacher and/or other students? That's where I have a problem. Granted, a lot of the time the situation is greatly compounded by ineffective teaching, but that's another topic.
Or maybe my problem is with shoddy teaching, and trying to apply computers to the problem, which, more often than not, makes things worse.
Lets see if I get this right... (Score:3, Insightful)
- 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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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)."
I tagged it fud (Score:3, Insightful)