jason | One Laptop Per Child Security

Slashdot | One Laptop Per Child Security Spec Released

“The One Laptop Per Child project has released information about its advanced security platform called Bitfrost. Could children with a $100 laptop end up with a better security infrastructure than executives using $5000 laptops powered by Vista? ‘What’s deeply troubling — almost unbelievable — about [Unix style permissions] is that they’ve remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today…In 1971, this might have been acceptable…We have set out to create a system that is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market.’”

I teach about children and technology, so my statement is not strange, but I’ve always believed that young learners (if they’re going to use digital technology at all, which is a different issue) should have the best. In the old days, you’d see a child with a 256 colour display trying to do something using cassette tapes to load programs while we whizzed away with the best stuff. It seemed strange to provde the developing mind with the most limited set of tools when a business exec who never did much with it anyway and the brightest and shiniest. Of course the child is seen as less valuable. My attitude is, and was before I started teaching about childrean and tech., that you give the best [insert variable] to the children to get the best children, and that the best children lead to the best adults. But we give the worst to children. (I’ve used best and worst for their vague sense of value without specifics to keep with the notion of the article). I don’t know if the OLPC project is the best thing for children, though I’ve been following the topic for longer than this specific project’s been around, but they might as well have the best possible security, since the world does such a poor job of keeping them safe in most other categories.