Children Surfing Porn with OLPC
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 22 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: General
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program seems noble. Make a low cost laptop computer and give it to 3rd world children to help them in their studies. The mission statement of OLPC Foundation is
To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.
Instead, what’s happening is that the children who received these low cost computers are using it to surf pornography, and who knows what else a teenage mind is also interested in? I doubt they are spending large amounts of time on Wikipedia doing research for school projects. The News Agency of Nigeria reported that “efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials.”
The OLPC Foundation believes that giving a computer to the nearly 2 billion children in the developing world will help them complete their education, and ultimately, raise their country out of poverty. Will giving each child their own computer make the world a better place? I seriously doubt it. Third world countries are third world primarily because of corruption in their governments.
The OLPC Foundation is going to equip their computers with filters to block access to unauthorized web sites. <sarcasm>That should be enough to stop teenage hackers.</sarcasm>
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2 Comments »
on 22 Jul 2007 at 2:59 pm 1.Jonathan Aquino said …
This phenomenon reminds me of Clay Shirky’s article “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” – people inevitably use technology for purposes that its creators disapprove of.
on 22 Jul 2007 at 6:04 pm 2.Johan Cyprich said …
That’s true. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, one of the things he used it for was printing Catholic literature and the Gutenberg Bible. I don’t think he was too pleased when he saw his invention being used to publish pornography.