Re: [school-discuss] OLPC Trouble

["Yishay Mor" <yishaym@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have two young kids at home. They both use both our computers independently, mostly for internet access. I would never consider installing any filter on any system I own or manage. In fact, the off-handed discussion of filters on this list surprises me. For me, any case of person A deciding what person B should or should not browse is a violation of human rights. 

The other aspect which surprises me is the ease in which we get carried along with the 'porn threat' discourse. I can easily name quite a few more serious internet 'risks', such as racial bullying, homophobic hate, sexist comments on Digg, Fox news, big brother, and Mac (not to mention McDonnalds) ads.

- Yishay

On 21/07/07, Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Another important clip about this story:

"Luckily for the porn-addicted youngsters, administrators of the pilot
program are aware of this snowballing crisis, and will soon be
installing filters that will very likely block out a slew of legitimate
pages while still allowing curious students to see all the flesh they
want on Myspace."

On my recommendation, and since their solution relies more heavily on
URL blocking than filtering, APS now blocks the following sites which
turn out to have porn in them: MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, and even
Craig's List.  Too bad about YouTube, there's lots of great old video
clips of historic value there, but if you can't block the bad stuff via
filtering, better to block the whole site.

Daniel

Joel Kahn wrote:
> For those who may have missed it: below the dotted line
> is a story from Reuters, Friday, July 20th, 10:31 AM ET.
> Food for thought here in connection with the Malawi
> project. I can't help wondering why they didn't have
> filters on the laptops in the first place. . . .
>
> ........................................................
>
> Pupils browse porn on donated laptops
>
> Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from
> a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore
> pornographic sites on the Internet, the official
> News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.
>
> NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images
> stored on several of the children's laptops.
>
> "Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a
> primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the
> pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit
> sexual materials," NAN said.
>
> A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group
> was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a
> pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.
>
>
>
>
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--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation

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  Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
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