« The Ultimate Toilet Throne!
3Com’s New Router Offering - It Comes with an Application Stack! »

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in Manila

I was fortunate enough to get a few hours of playtime with an OLPC prototype brought here by Sandeep here in Makati City, Metro Manila, Philippines. The unit is surprisingly good looking with a lot of new technological and pedagogical enablers.

The little OLPC device (called XO) looks pretty good on my office desk. To bad I was not able to see a mechanical charging mechanism. I plan to write more details about the system and its potential in some other venue. Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in Manila”

  1. wyuwp Says:
    February 8th, 2007 at 1:33 am

    Here is a scoop from Slashdot on the OLPC’s security architecture called BitFrost.

    Bitfrost is the OLPC security platform. A non-technical introduction to the security problems we’re attempting to solve, and our goals and principles in doing so, follow on this page. They’re taken from the complete Bitfrost specification, which we invite you to peruse and discuss on the public OLPC security mailing list.

    So this $100 OLPC laptop will be more secure than a $1000 Vista powered executive notebook? It will also have easy to use security too boot!

  2. wyuwp Says:
    February 8th, 2007 at 1:34 am

    Another interesting note is that the new Bitfrost Architecture is a significant evolution from the way we think of security today. It’s principles are pretty solution and looks like the objectives are really creative. Of course, there is not much on it yet but I will try to follow it very closely.

  3. wyuwp Says:
    February 8th, 2007 at 3:34 am

    Here are even more details from an article by Wired. Some more interesting details include a dedicated VM per applications and service.

    Instead, the XO will premiere a security system that takes a radical approach to computer protection. For starters, it does away with the ubiquitous security prompts so familiar to users of Windows and antivirus software, said Ivan Krstic, a young security guru on break from Harvard who’s in charge of security for the XO.

    Krstic’s system, known as the BitFrost platform, has only one user prompt (turning on the camera) and imposes limits on every program’s powers. Under BitFrost, every program runs in its own virtual machine with a limited set of permissions. Thus a picture viewer can’t access the web, so even if a hacker comes up with an exploit that lets him control the program, he couldn’t use it to grab all the photos on the laptop and upload them to the internet.

    Interesting … No prompts or anti-virus software. Instead, strict isolation and access control are key elements of this system. To make it very rigid virtual machine restrictions are placed in.

  4. It’s hip2b2 (Mobile, Security, Web 2.0, Pipe Dreams and More) » Blog Archive » One Laptop Per Child (OPLC): The New Pedagogy? Says:
    May 15th, 2007 at 12:30 am

    […] After I got my hands on an OLPC XO a few months back, I have been wondering in the Philippines government would enter such a program. I am still wondering now. For more discussions on the status of the OLPC in the Philippines, please visit this wiki. […]

Leave a Reply