[Olpc-open] Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model

[Charbax]

Ivan Kristic seems to have replied in the lwn.net thread:

(...) it's factually inaccurate and thus
> easily debunked. As for the Patterson paper, I'll be posting my thoughts over the next few
> days, but generally find it uninteresting and academically sloppy flamebait.
>
>
I'm not an expert in Bitfrost at all, but in the event of a natural
catastrophy, I think the Bitfrost keys can be updated using one $5 USB stick
and distributing the keys to all the other laptops using Mesh networking.

Criticizing Libya, Nigeria and Thailand for being anti free-speech is
irrelevant. Just because China has some human rights abuse problems, and the
chinese firewall, blogger and yahoo mail dissidents in jail, does that mean
that the 200 million chinese people who have access to the Internet is a bad
thing? That's just wrong. OLPC is a trojan horse to bring knoledge and
democracy to those countries. It doesn't really matter what curriculum the
governments are going to pre-load on the laptops, or if they are going to
try and filter the Internet access, people always figure out to use the
Internet for what they want. And if a government wants to mass-disable
laptops using Bitfrost, just get  any amount of activating keys smuggled
into the country using a $5 USB key and those laptops are reactived.

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <
stephane at bortzmeyer.org> wrote:

> I did not read the paper yet, but it seems interesting:
>
> The paper:
> <http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-1042.pdf>
>
> A summary: In this paper, we discuss Bitfrost, the security model
> developed by the One Laptop Per Child project for its XO laptop
> computers. Bitfrost implements a number of security measures intended
> primarily to deter theft and malware, but which also introduce severe
> threats to data security and individual privacy. We describe several
> of the technical provisions in Bitfrost, outline the risks they
> enable, and consider their legal ramifications and the psychological
> impact posed for children and society.
>
> Some rebuttals: <http://lwn.net/Articles/277165/>
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>



-- 
Charbax,
Nicolas Charbonnier
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