Children in the under developed countries will soon have access to the USD 100 laptop. The plan to develop a 100-dollar laptop for distribution to millions of schoolchildren in developing countries has caught the interest of many governments and the attention of computer-industry heavyweights. The USD 100 laptops planned for children around the world might turn out to be as revolutionary for their security measures as for their low-cost economics.
The One Laptop Per Child project, a non-profit begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to improve education by giving children bright-coloured, hand-cranked, wireless-enabled portable computers. The 100-dollar laptop will include a 7.5-inch screen, a 500-megahertz processor, 500 megabytes of Flash memory, and wireless broadband for forming impromptu networks with other laptops. It will also be a multimedia workstation, supporting the playing and composing of music.
Power for the new systems will be provided through either conventional electric current, batteries, or by a windup crank attached to the side of the notebooks, since many countries targeted by the plan do not have power in remote areas, says Professor Negroponte. For connectivity, the systems will be Wi-Fi- and cell phone-enabled, and will include four USB ports, along with built-in 'mesh networking', a peer-to-peer concept that allows machines to share a single Internet connection. The laptop features a new generator that is quiet, one of the key design requirements. Typical generators work best at high revolutions per minute, requiring noisy gears to step up the speed. The developers have done away with gears by custom-designing a generator that runs efficiently at lower RPMs, a move that also makes possible a smaller device.
Programmers have been taking advantage of the start-from-scratch nature of the project to design security protocols that they hope will surpass those found in mass-market computers today.
The designers are still testing their approach with outside security experts, which is widely considered wiser than keeping such matters secret. But already they believe the security set-up could make it unnecessary for the laptops to have anti-virus software.
The USD 100 laptops will force any application to run in 'a walled garden' and limit the files it can access, said Ivan Krstic, a software architect at One Laptop Per Child focused on security.
Even if the security were to fail, Krstic believes the encryption technology will prevent the BIOS, the software that runs a computer when it is initially turned on, from being overwritten. That means the PC could not be rendered unable to boot up.
The foldable lime green laptop made its debut at the World Summit on the Information Society, which is looking at ways of narrowing the technology gap between rich and poor. "The idea is that it fulfils many roles. It is the whole theory that learning is seamless," said Negroponte. "Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education," said Professor Negroponte. "So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide; digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it."
"On the technology I think the project is amazing and wonderful," said Wayan Vota, whose blog monitors the project. "What gives me pause is the social implications, the economic implications" of how they plan to implement it.
"Essentially they want developing countries—or countries that already have a significant amount of debt or other commitments—to borrow even more, or to use even more of their limited resources, to buy the laptops and to implement them in a way that is untried and untested on a large scale."
"If you look at the cost of doing one laptop per every Nigerian child it actually turns out to be 73 per cent of the entire Nigerian budget—that's not the educational part but the entire national budget of Nigeria," he said.
"You'll find some classrooms where the teachers are excited about letting the students experiment and explore but you'll also find a lot based on rote and repetition," he said.
Most insightful however is the observation that not one industrial country has so far implemented a similar program for its children, which casts doubt as to what the pedagogical use for notebooks in class really is.
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