[Sugar-devel] Change default Neighborhood network settings for greater security

[Frederick Grose]

Posted on the Sugar Labs wiki,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Request_New_Features#Change_default_Mesh_settings_for_greater_security
,

Change default Mesh settings for greater security

We were very excited to try Sugar on a Stick (Mirabelle). However, I was
very surprised to find lots of users with whom I could "make friends," some
of whom seemed to have included their real names!

It took some digging in this Wiki to find out that I just had to delete the
Mesh entry (i.e., the reference to jabber.sugarlabs.org) so that only Sugar
users on our Wi-Fi would show up.

There may be a genuine security concern here. We simply have no way of
knowing who the other users are with whom a child can "make friends." All it
would take is for one bad thing to happen for the Sugar project to suffer.

While we love the idea of children from all over the world collaborating
on-line, perhaps pragmatic concerns about the security of all children
should lead us, at the very least, to have the default setting on the Mesh
entry as a blank. Parents and teachers will then be responsible for enabling
this feature, if they so wish.
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