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

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 10:34:04AM -0700, Frederick Grose wrote:
> We simply have no way of knowing who the other users are with whom a
> child can "make friends."

How is this different from the lack of knowledge one has about the
people one's children could meet at a city park?

> All it would take is for one bad thing to happen for the Sugar
> project to suffer.

This is an unsubstantiated and dangerous assumption to make, and as a
parent I would not support such a change to the default.

From a learning environment wher "collaboration is first class" to
cripple it for the average downloader by default is silly.  We must
resist this "only one bad thing" line of reasoning, which reducto ad
absurdum leads to paralysing madness (shall we change the branding in
case "one bad thing" happens like a child misinterpreting "Sugar is
good" and gorging themselves on sugar?).


> 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.

Parents and teachers giving their child a computer with a learning
environment that "promotes collaborative learning" (first sentence of
the first text on www.sugarlabs.org) have chosen to take
responsibility for the nature of their child's learning, including the
collaborative part that is so promoted (rightly so).

Please don't try to convince me that someone who's downloaded an .iso,
installed it on a usb stick, and handed it, or a computer with it, to
a child hasn't assumed that responsibility.

> pragmatic concerns about the security of all children

We need to not assume responsibility for "the security of all
children".

> [...] at the very least [the default collaboration setting should be
> effectively "off for the individual SoaS user"]

I cannot imagine what might be meant by "the very least" here.

Martin
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