OLPC = Often Looking at Porn by Children ?
Most people have heard of the OLPC project which aims to change the world by providing kids with a laptop computer that can also serve as a textbook-on-everything. It's a neat idea - kind of.
What just occurred to me is that nobody seems to have thought of the full implications of giving every child a device that can access the closest Internet connection. Giving kids great technology is one thing - being able to educate them how to make wise decisions with it is another thing. And from what I can tell, the OLPC units have no technical mechanisms in place to help parents educate & direct children when it comes to morally questionable content such as pornography. Nigeria & Libya are both pilot countries - how do you think people in Nigeria (50% Muslim) or Libya (97% Muslim) are going to react when all their children start exploring (like kids do) and stumble across objectionable content online or in the built-in Wikipedia? You're going to be reading about a fatwa for Mr. Negroponte's death before you can say "terrorist threat".
Yes, we all know that filtering mechanisms are very imperfect, but there should be a mechanism in place to let parents use a password to (a) control a whitelist & blacklist of sites (b) subscribe to filter updates published over the mesh or on the Internet. It's a good way to make life easier for the educators (who really will need all the help they can get).
There are existing open source filtering mechanisms (e.g. dansguardian.org) that should provide a good framework for this. And simply saying "have the ISP do the filtering" isn't going to make parents support this initiative.
Hopefully someone within the project can shed more light on this topic - the project's wiki sure doesn't seem to do this.
