[IAEP] Security and long life issues (Was Re: XO-2)

[Ivan Krstić]

Javier,

it would help if your messages were shorter and more to the point. I  
find it very difficult to follow your writing and reasoning especially  
with this many parenthetical remarks, and generally don't know how to  
respond even when you're discussing a topic that interests me (e.g.  
security).

To try and give a short answer to your previous e-mail: any XO owner  
can fully disarm that laptop's security system, as ffm and Martin have  
pointed out. The bet should not be on actual child ownership. To my  
knowledge, OLPC contractually neither mandates nor enforces a  
particular _legal_ model of laptop distribution, as long as the  
laptops are _used_ by one child each. In other words, if a government  
legally sets up an in-country OLPC program as a series of one-laptop  
loans to each child, and thus reserves fully the ability to take away  
a laptop for any reason, no one is going to stop them.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org