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Re: [school-discuss] OLPC Trouble

Yabbut you're the parent and not likely to be the target of lawsuits, whereas schools have to adhere to the CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) regulations. I agree that there are lots of other risks, some of which are more dangerous, but in the case of porn there are laws that schools must obey.
When we were still fighting against the Linux antagonists in APS, one thing they tried to use against the system was that it was not safe. They even tried to access sites like whitehouse.com in our lab. Luckily, we not only had a filtering solution in place, but as I recently posted, it actually blocked bad sites that the district's proprietary solution allowed and also blocked attempts to use Google as a proxy (go to Google, ask it to translate a web page like playboy.com from english to english, and it comes back with a Google URL, not playboy.com). High school students across the US figured that one out pretty quickly as a way to bypass school URL blocking programs.
I recommend to all on this list that filtering solutions be included in any K12LTSP installations based on our experiences. We have enough trouble convincing schools to try the system out as it is. 

Daniel

Yishay Mor wrote:
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 <mailto: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




--
___________________________
  Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
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--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation