[OLPC Security] olpc security - wetware issues

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 2/7/07, alien <alien at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Having perused the Bitfrost paper and followed OLPC activity for some
> time, I'm concerned that some important security issues have been
> either written off as "out of scope" or are simply not being
> addressed. These issues include:
>
> 1) Child exploitation
> 2) Inappropriate web surfing/spam/etc
> 3) Security maintenence
> 4) Hacking ethics
>

I am not a member of OLPC, but just a concerned fellow.

In the end, wetware issues are usually out of scope from any technical
counter-measures. Putting technical counter-measures for general
purpose computing usually gets too burdensome for usage.

Most of these issues are items that need 'wet-ware' policies and
guidelines to be resolved properly... and while I could see some
general ones being written for the various governments to use as
reference.. every country will want to probably do what they think is
best for their children and may get  a little ticked if the system
comes very burdened down with outside policies.

In the cases of innappropriate surfing, exploitation.. it might be
useful for the server system to have such controls on them, as they
will be the 'end' points for the mesh network to communicate to the
Internet. Again, a guidelines, but some countries may want to have XYZ
blocked and vice versa.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"