XOs interacting with general computers (was: Devel Digest, Vol 17, Issue 52)

[elw at stderr.org]

>>     does anyone see danger in letting nonXOs talk to XOs, these are
>>     handled by 8 year olders
>>
>> Yes, we recognize there are very real dangers. Various security 
>> settings and UI elements will likely be used to make it clear to the 
>> user, and
>
> You must be kidding me. We are talking about very young kids, probably 
> without supervision from internet savvy adults. How do you expect them 
> to make good decisions on contact requests?

they probably can't, and won't, and at some point it seems likely that 
SOMEONE is eventually going to have to address this.

this is made much more complex by the fact that XOs will end up in 
countries with very different social taboos, different cultural 
assumptions, and very different legal systems.

hardwiring censorship/filtering/content-protection into the XO is probably 
antithetical to the educational goals of the project.

for people in the outside world to contact kids with XOs gatewayed behind 
a school jabber server could be obfuscated fairly trivially, i would 
think.  [maybe the addresses to contact from the outside should be... 
maybe an sha-1 of 'Username at schoolserver.xo.network' @ 
schoolserver.xo.network??  Something similarly trivial to generate.]

kids who are smart enough to hunt up the jabber addresses of people in the 
outside world.... well, you'd hope that they'd be able to be quickly 
educated about appropriate behavior.


I would hate to see a situation where kids got hurt or were punished 
because some nutjob in the outside world decided to send 
culturally-vastly-inappropriate content to some kid with an XO in a 
societal situation that had not yet evolved means for coping with highly 
offensive content delivered automagically by means of Internet.



> > protect them where appropriate, from random third-parties.
>
> Define "where appropriate"...

I think that this is a highly complex situation, and one that merits a 
whole lot of thought.

While it is very important to protect kids from some things that they are 
really not cognitively equipped to handle, it is also important to equip 
them with a toolbelt of educational possibilities that can be applied 
freely and without too many crazy restrictions.

Let's imagine that a kid decides he wants to interview some kind and 
willing person from the US, who is not very hard to track down contact 
info for.  Let's say... Jim Gettys.

Should the kid not be able to contact Jim and ask him interview questions, 
just because he's an "outside person", not necessarily running inside the 
XO network?

What if a (slightly older) kid wants to collaborate with an outsider on a 
school project, drawing on the outside person's life or career experience 
in order to enhance what they themselves are doing in the local school?

Imagine all of the positive things that can happen in a social interaction 
between kids and non-kids... and then weigh that against the need to 
'protect' kids from the real world.


I'll say it again.. I think that it is important to protect kids, but 
probably MORE important to make sure that 'protection' isn't cutting them 
off from flexibility and the opportunity to gain new educational 
experiences.

Any proposed solution really needs to do both.


--e